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Stanely Tang is a cofounder of DoorDash and an angel investor. He is head of DoorDash Labs and on the board of directors. In December 2020, DoorDash had its IPO, making Tang a billionaire. His net worth is estimated at $1.1 billion in 2022, and he was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2015. Tang is also an avid poker player and wrote the book eMillions: Behind-the-Scenes Stories of 14 Successful Internet Millionaires.
An interview with Stanley Tang
Tang cofounded DoorDash in January 2013 along with Evan Moore, Andy Fang, and Tony Xu. He was a junior at Stanford University when he helped found DoorDash.
In late 2012, Moore and Xu were students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. To find a startup idea, they went into the local community together to interview businesses about their pain points and needs. While interviewing a local macaroon shop, they heard the owner turn down a delivery. That was their lightbulb moment, and they decided to start a delivery service for local restaurants.
Moore and Xu reached out to Andy Fang for help with their idea. He was an undergraduate student in the computer science program at Stanford, and he in turn reached out to his fellow student Stanley Tang to join them. The four of them founded DoorDash, originally called Palo Alto Delivery, and started working out of a dorm on campus.
They launched the company website on January 12, 2013, and received the first order within hours—prawn pad thai and spring rolls—from a nearby Thai eatery. The founders made the first few hundred deliveries themselves, and that summer the company received $120,000 in seed money from Y Combinator for a 7 percent stake. The company changed its name to DoorDash in 2015.
Tang has served as head of DoorDash Labs, DoorDash's robotics and automation arm, since November 2017. He has also served on the board of directors since May 2013. From May 2013 to November 2017, he was the chief product officer.
In May 2010, Tang cofounded BuzzBlaze in Hong Kong with a high school friend. BuzzBlaze was a social news reader that allowed people to discover and share content online. Tang started BuzzBlaze in the summer between graduating from high school and starting Stanford University. BuzzBlaze only lasted a few weeks, and Tang, calling it a failure, also considered it a great experience with many lessons learned about working on a startup company.
Tang earned a BS in computer science with a concentration in human-computer interaction from Stanford University in 2014. While at Stanford, he was involved with the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) organization, and he was a software engineer at Facebook in the summer of 2012. Prior to starting at Stanford in 2010, Tang attended the King George V School in Hong Kong from 2003 to 2010.
