DoorDash, Palo Alto

Start as a Stanford student. Get experience at Facebook, Square, and eBay. And then find work as a delivery driver. It's an uncommon career trajectory, but it worked for the four founders of DoorDash. After realizing that Palo Alto restaurants didn't have a good delivery network, the foursome coded the first prototype of a delivery app within hours. Thirty minutes later, their phone rang with an order, and they had no choice but to hop in the car and start making deliveries.

Within six months, they had a wildly successful app called DoorDash, which gives users access to restaurants such as SugarFish, Urth, Meet in Paris, Katsuya, and more around Santa Monica, Venice Beach, Marina Del Rey, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, and Culver City that didn't previously offer delivery. They built an efficient delivery network that both empowers local businesses and provides customers a convenient and reliable service so they don't have to wait in traffic or at the restaurant.