To determine whether a food delivery business has value, look at the data it collects. And DoorDash Inc. has data.

Order behavior by customers of the food delivery service, which now serves diners in 4,000 cities across the U.S. and Canada from over 340,000 merchants, gives it a pretty good idea of what diners like and don’t like. Customer ratings of food and restaurants allow it to track business popularity in real time.

This kind of information might have value to DoorDash, but it holds even more promise for the merchants that are a part of its service. This is the double-barreled impact that the six-year-old startup is beginning to demonstrate in a fiercely competitive field.

The ability to match real-time transactional data with specific, localized buying patterns right down to a particular neighborhood offers DoorDash the opportunity to help merchants build promotional campaigns they could previously have only dreamed about.

“Look at other local companies out there like Yelp and Google Maps,” said Andy Fang (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of DoorDash. “They don’t actually have verified transaction information, whereas we do. It’s really powerful for merchants to actually have that to make decisions.”

Fang spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Corey Quinn during the AWS Summit last week in New York City. They discussed the early days of the company, food delivery’s market potential, cloud-native services DoorDash uses to run its business and Fang’s perspective on his startup’s success (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features Andy Fang as its Guest of the Week.

Dorm room as headquarters

DoorDash got its start in 2013 when Fang and three of his fellow classmates at Stanford University interviewed a number of local restaurants and found that delivering food was a huge headache. The founders also had data that showed 85% of food establishments don’t deliver in a market where just about all the customers need to eat something 20 times a week.

The company was originally named Palo Alto Delivery, and after setting up the website and promoting its launch throughout the local market, it got off to a less-than-auspicious beginning. The fledgling venture had only one order on its first day.

“We started out of a dorm on the Stanford campus,” Fang recalled. “We were doing the first couple of hundred deliveries ourselves.”

Becomes market leader

DoorDash has since entered completely new territory. In May, the research firm Second Measure reported that DoorDash had surpassed competitor GrubHub Inc. in U.S. monthly sales and market share for the first time.

The company grew 325% year over year for 2019, according to Fang. This kind of rapid growth has raised an intriguing possibility that the food delivery category could ultimately eclipse the ride-sharing industry as a major economic force.

This possibility was acknowledged recently by Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive officer of Uber Technologies Inc., whose own company has embarked on an aggressive push to capture a major share of the food delivery market through Uber Eats.

“It’s a really fascinating industry that we’re in with the on-demand delivery space,” Fang said. “We’re obviously at a much different level of scale. We’ve been trying to keep pace as we more than double as a business every year.”

Migrates to AWS

As DoorDash’s business took off, the company made a key decision to migrate its information-technology infrastructure from Heroku to the cloud-native solution provided by Amazon Web Services Inc. The company has leveraged the Amazon Aurora Postgres offering to scale up databases and analytics. It has also become an Amazon CloudWatch user, employing the product to track the behavior of its servers.

“The AWS ecosystem is evolving,” Fang said. “We feel that we’ve grown with them and they’ve grown with us. It’s been a great synergy over the past couple of years.”

However, Fang is quick to point out it’s not a slam dunk that DoorDash will embrace every AWS product or service. The company has been examining ways to build and run applications using the open-source platform Apache Kafka to process streaming data.

In June, AWS announced general availability of Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, or MSK. At this point, Fang is weighing his options on which way to proceed.

“Do we adopt the AWS version, or do we do it in-house, or do we go with a third-party vendor?” Fang asked. “We’re looking for something that’s a lot more vetted. We want to make sure that we are building our infrastructure in a way that we feel confident it can scale.”

Expands into groceries

DoorDash is also heading toward a potential conflict with its growing business and the empire that is Amazon. In addition to food delivery, DoorDash has recently expanded into the grocery world, forming a partnership with Walmart Inc. for a national grocery delivery service covering 300 stores in 20 states.

This could put Fang’s company in direct competition with the retail side of Amazon, which owns Whole Foods and runs its own grocery delivery operation called AmazonFresh. Last month, Amazon announced expansion of its grocery delivery service to Las Vegas, a market DoorDash entered more than two years ago.

“We power a lot of grocery deliveries for Walmart today,” Fang said. “We’re going to see how far we can take our logistics capabilities from that standpoint.”

DoorDash currently holds a valuation of over $12 billion, having raised $2 billion in investment capital since its beginning. As one of the founders, Fang now finds himself in an envious position of not only starting a massively successful business, but leading one that could have a profound impact on both the restaurant and grocery industries.

That may entail some drama as things progress, yet it would not be unfamiliar territory for the DoorDash CTO. As a high school student in Silicon Valley, Fang acted in musical productions of “Music Man” and “Les Miserables.”

Fang is on a much bigger stage now, something he’s reminded of when his business gets referenced by the CEO of Uber or the delivery service hits a glitch.

“It’s awesome to see how this use case has flourished with all different kinds of people,” Fang said. “When we have issues, millions of people face issues. The stakes are a lot higher for us now.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit NYC event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Summit NYC. Neither Amazon Web Services, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE