Building an Autonomous Delivery Experience with DoorDash Co-Founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

July 23, 2026

Duration

49m

Channel

No Priors

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

DoorDash is not just a delivery company. From its inception, co-founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang operated it as a robotics and autonomy company. Andy and Stanley join Sarah Guo to explain how autonomous tech and AI are reshaping consumer habits, commerce, and delivery. Andy and Stanley talk about the rollout of Ask DoorDash, a natural-language interface that’s driving both restaurant discovery and larger grocery orders. They also discuss Dot, their in-house autonomous delivery robot that has operated in Phoenix for over two years, and how it highlights the operational and hardware challenges they have faced and solved in autonomous tech. Andy and Stanley also speak about the “first and last 100 feet problem” in autonomous delivery, why multimodal strategies are the key to success, scaling autonomy and operations, and why they believe that more Dashers, not fewer, are the future of DoorDash. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @stanleytang | @andyfang | @DoorDash Chapters: 00:00 – Andy Fang and Stanley Tang Introduction 00:34 – Agentic Commerce and Behavioral Changes 03:52 – Next Steps for Ask DoorDash 06:54 – Investing in Robotics and Autonomy 16:31 – Building Autonomous Tech in the Physical World 21:20 – Dot: DoorDash’s Autonomous Delivery Robot 22:08 – Collecting Realistic Data 25:48 – Why Work at DoorDash 28:04 – Challenges in Scaling Up Autonomy 39:30 – Productivity Benchmarks 44:56 – Future of Agentic Commerce 49:10 – Conclusion

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Sarah Guo

  host

  Venture capitalist (Conviction) and co-host of the No Priors podcast.

• Andy Fang

  guest

  Co-founder of DoorDash.

• Stanley Tang

  guest

  Co-founder of DoorDash, involved in DoorDash’s autonomy/robotics initiatives.

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of No Priors, featuring Sarah Guo and Andy Fang, Building an Autonomous Delivery Experience with DoorDash Co-Founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang explores doorDash’s AI ordering and robots reshape local commerce delivery DoorDash’s “Ask DoorDash” natural-language interface is shifting restaurant discovery and grocery shopping behavior, including more first-time restaurant orders and significantly larger grocery baskets.

🔗 RELATED EPISODES

Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel

How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor

Pax Silica: Inside the Trump Administration’s Tech Strategy with Jacob Helberg

No Priors Ep 66 | With Y Combinator President and CEO Garry Tan

No Priors Ep. 103 | With Vevo Therapeutics and the Arc Institute

Really Big Test-Time Compute in AI Changes Benchmarks, Safety and Research with OpenAI's Noam Brown