Grubhub was a rational player in an irrational market

Postmates and DoorDash pursued this growth-at-all cost mindset so aggressively that they listed restaurants and stores that weren’t even signed up for either service. Doing so let both scale supply faster than a sales team would have been able to, but it obliterated the unit economics early on. Because neither were integrated on the backend of the ... See more

Grubhub’s original model was a marketplace for consumers to order food from independent restaurants that already had their own delivery fleets. Though this was a game-changer for consumers, it constrained supply to only listing restaurants that could perform their own deliveries. This was a mistake.