Heard on the Street: Grubhub vs. DoorDash vs. Postmates: It’s mutually assured disruption in Silicon Valley
Illustration: Sam Island By Laura Forman and Justin Lahart Updated July 5, 2019 12:48 pm ET Disruption is Silicon Valley’s favorite buzzword. Investors are starting to realize that it cuts both ways.
But when disrupters fight, they can burn through a lot of investors’ cash while making limited progress toward becoming entrenched and profitable. Call it the dual disrupter dilemma. The food-delivery business risks traveling down a similar path. SeamlessWeb, which eventually merged with Grubhub in 2013, pioneered modern day online food delivery. Now imitators abound. They compete with one another for shared business as much as they do to popularize the online takeout market.
The heightened competition is reflective of an era where big investors, desperate to generate returns when interest rates are low, are plowing money into startups like never before. By The Wall Street Journal’s count, as of April there were 88 still-private U.S. startups valued at $1 billion or more, up from 43 just five years earlier.
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