Yet another Hacker News

DoorDash Spent $1.4M Trying to Stop Mamdani from Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why

225 points vrganj 2 hours ago 85 comments

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

More evidence Big Tech valuations are driven primarily by worker exploitation. Keep 'em coming.

Ekaros 1 hour ago | parent

It is not like they aren't exploiting businesses either... Looking at Amazon(retail) and almost all SaaS services...

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

You eat an elephant one bite at a time. This bite was good, lots more bites to go.

I realized what most of sibling comments refer to as soon as Mamdani quoted DoorDash's CEO on the "Greedy Algorithm," which I had not heard of before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm

https://x.com/FortuneMagazine/status/2084806653472358752

> “I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. “You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.”

"Ahh, they're all paperclip maximizers building the torment nexus for valuations and shareholder returns at the cost of everyone else." This is the lens through which I see these enterprises now until proven otherwise. I wish it wasn't so, but we must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. It's such a shame most of this is turning out to be equal parts capital market grift and worker exploitation in some fashion. The tech and code is just the cover as progress and innovation, "ignore the man behind the curtain."

ausbah 1 hour ago | parent

the common unifying theme of most tech companies over the past 15 years has been rent extraction. whether posing as middlemen who VC’d their way to monopoly power ruining both sides of their target market, or taking a common good without attribution (attention, knowledge) tech hasn’t been much a game changer beyond digitizing something and charging everyone more for it

shadowgovt 1 hour ago | parent

And they mostly keep getting away with it because digital makes things preposterously more convenient.

I missed the bus by 1 minute today, putting me in a place to wait 30 minutes for the next one.

Lyfted to the office in 10 minutes. Cost $10. That $10 was worth 30 minutes of my day.

krispyfi 55 minutes ago | parent

It's surprising to me that you would need to wait 30 minutes for a bus. Are you in a very rural area? Was it outside of normal commute hours? Or is your city's public transportation network wildly underfunded?

saturn8601 39 minutes ago | parent

Are you European or American? To a lot of America, that is considered a good numbers. Its worse in many parts of this vastly large country. The country has chosen to invest heavily in road networks. It appears that you can have one or the other but not both without great expense and reform.

I like to remind my European friends that this is what the US looks like placed on top of Europe: https://i.imgur.com/HkRZfKd.png

Its not a perfect illustration but it drives home the point.

shadowgovt 27 minutes ago | parent

Wildly underfunded? I don't think so.

America underfunded? Yes.

There are three buses that go from the main depot to my office. They all arrived in a line back to back to back, picked up zero passengers, and went their merry way.

I watched this happen from one block over, waiting for the stoplight to change so I could cross the street and catch any of them. Unfortunately, since they were all moving in a blob, the next blob was going to be around in 30 minutes instead of the average 10 minutes one might expect from a non-blob arrangement.

But that part of the story was anecdote. The more relevant part was that in the event of disruption of the infrastructure solution, modern cellular radio and digital technology let us ad hoc book a one-off service solution on the fly, and that is so convenient that the people who facilitate it can get away with some massive wealth extraction as a result.

throwaway27448 1 hour ago | parent

Of course! that's always what "disruption" referred to.

usaar333 57 minutes ago | parent

Since when did doordash count as big tech?

toomuchtodo 55 minutes ago | parent

They're not FAANG or MANGA, but they're certainly at the top of https://www.ycombinator.com/companies with 8600 employees and an $82B market cap (as of this comment, ticker DASH). Is "Big Tech" reserved only for the "FAANG MANGA"? If so, my apologies.

saturn8601 45 minutes ago | parent

Valuation yes, but if we take a step back, there must be value there. The idea of Uber really provided benefits to many groups. Example: minorities who were discriminated against by regular taxis, declining service level due to Taxi monopolies, etc. (Similar issues that Doordash solved as well.)

How can we separate the valuation from the real value generated by the tech? Would it be possible to allow Uber/Doordash to go bankrupt and instead a smaller worker owned or nonprofit cooperative take its place, replicate the tech stack and then allow the value to then be maximized to the employees + users with little middleman in between?

Obviously this idea has lots of issues to be resolved:

1. How do you you deal with government or other middlemen that wish to insert themselves?

2. Can we really copy Uber/Doordash or are those engineers/managers/middlemen really providing so much additional differentiating value that justifies the cost and thus the required valuation?

3. Worker cooperatives seem to move slower than their SV cohorts. For a company selling groceries, or door Windows (as a famous Bernie Sanders example talks about) its not an issue. But in the fast moving world of tech would it eventually kill the cooperative due to the inability to move as fast as the SV competitors?

I dont know the answers but I do think about it more and more as I traverse the world and see so much poor quality(enshittification) and expense. All of that is stolen value that is extracted from workers + customers to line the pockets of the owner class.

time4tea 1 hour ago | parent

What does "this is not a pay wall" mean - if I have to give personal information over, that is a price.

Didn't read - too expensive.

cgio 1 hour ago | parent

I am so trained now, that I didn’t even read what they were asking for. Just closed the tab and came here to see if there was anything of value. Too expensive to even read their wall.

qurren 1 hour ago | parent

Yep this is what I did as well. I also just close tabs if it ever pops up a "sign up for our newsletter" thing.

marricks 1 hour ago | parent

I mean, test@example.com worked so info doesn't have to be that personal...

rsingel 1 hour ago | parent

Journalism is labor

jgalt212 1 hour ago | parent

Information wants to be free. But other than AI slop (where the tokens have become too cheap to meter), information costs money to produce. Pay with you info or your money. It's amazing how many people just cannot come to grips with that concept.

glitchcrab 1 hour ago | parent

https://archive.is/RWt8f

rurp 1 hour ago | parent

Disabling javascript let me read the whole article without any account nonsense.

hapax_legomena 1 hour ago | parent

I just reload the page and hit 'esc' a bunch of times right after it loads but before the paywall pops up. Works on 3/4 of these soft paywalled sites.

andrewflnr 56 minutes ago | parent

Firefox reader mode also did it.

pluc 1 hour ago | parent

Your identity isn't considered of value to you, you can't monetize it. We can, but since it has no value to you, give it to us for free.

thehamkercat 1 hour ago | parent

Works with any random email, kinda fine tbh

nemomarx 1 hour ago | parent

Seems like they spent more on campaigning than they did on the extra pay and fines here though. Who's making these financial calculations?

bootlooped 1 hour ago | parent

They just agreed to a $131 million settlement. The article says this is a hundred times what they spent to prevent Mamdani from getting elected.

bee_rider 1 hour ago | parent

Presumably somebody who thinks the Mamdani’s policies will be popular and spread to other jurisdictions. After all, why campaign against an idea that you think will fail? It’d exist as a prominent warning flag for the next group that considers it.

xboxnolifes 4 minutes ago | parent

How did you come to that conclusion? The very first sentence explicitly explains that to be false.

dzonga 1 hour ago | parent

services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more. you order a meal that costs $10. total charge comes to $25. then delivery worker made $5 on that order. + the delivery worker expects a tip.

which means the company sees both the delivery worker and the person who ordered as suckers. no wonder ride-share companies jumped onto food-delivery.

ehe78qhe 1 hour ago | parent

I thought they were built on "time is money". If you make the equivalent of $70 an hour, do you care about spending $15 for someone to bring you lunch and save you 15-30 minutes of your workday?

dieselgate 41 minutes ago | parent

The gig workers are still suckers because gig work sucks. But yes the service is most sensible for higher paid consumers.

moate 8 minutes ago | parent

...only because the company is committing wage theft to subsidize costs. I don't think it feels reasonable to say "Your employer has to meet certain wages, but they didn't so you're a sucker".

If you can't pay the wage you're required to then the whole house of cards starts coming down because now you can't create a large enough network to meet demand, which shrinks demand, which increases costs, which makes it accessible to fewer and fewer high paid consumers.

Like a lot of capitalism "it's better than starving to death in the streets" is the appeal of the job and nothing more. Anything else is a paid message brought to you by UberDoorHub.

odyssey7 33 minutes ago | parent

It was kind of fun doing this math back when I was a freelancer. An hour saved would literally produce more money than the order cost. But really, it would have been better to save the money by making food ahead of time.

drop_star 28 minutes ago | parent

Ya I dont get this argument. Takes me all of 2 mins to grab my lunch in the morning. It's also not a greasy burger that shortens my lifespan and physically disable's me.

drdaeman 14 minutes ago | parent

The whole point of food delivery is for the occasions you can’t (e.g. sudden illness, or time management mishaps) or don’t want to (laziness/tiredness) cook or drive to grab a takeout. You pay a premium for the convenience, someone else takes care of it. Nothing wrong with that, no “suckers” in the general scheme.

WesleyJohnson 21 minutes ago | parent

I've always struggled with this thinking. Yes, you have finite hours in a day and if you spend an hour going to get food then you can't necessarily also be doing freelance work. But if you planned on working 8 hours to earn X dollars, you can still work 8 hours after spending an hour going to get food and still make X dollars. Sure, that hour has to come from somewhere so maybe it's lost leisure time or an hour of sleep. I guess it makes sense if you're trying to work every waking moment; and I can appreciate that some choose to and some have to.

Joker_vD 6 minutes ago | parent

> Sure, that hour has to come from somewhere so maybe it's lost leisure time or an hour of sleep.

Well, if you value an hour of your sleep or entertainment less than $15 dollars (if, for instance, you like to cook), then sure, spend it on cooking instead. Many of people would rather not, and their revealed preferences show it pretty clearly.

someonebaggy 31 minutes ago | parent

Tony Xu spent three times as much time as the driver did, did he?

gennarro 16 minutes ago | parent

Except they increase the charges of the food also, so you are getting taken advantage of there as well.

sokoloff 1 hour ago | parent

I don’t think paying someone to perform a service for you makes you a sucker.

I’ve never used DoorDash (and am pretty unlikely to), but if I did, I would look at as paying someone for a service they provided rather than simply “paying more for the item” (and expecting someone to wait on me personally for free?).

wat10000 51 minutes ago | parent

It’s not like they hide anything about what they’re offering. They advertise service X for price Y and that’s what they deliver. Seems fine. If you don’t think Y is worth it for X then don’t use it.

Now, the part where they use tips to offset driver pay is evil and people should be in prison for it.

Joker_vD 8 minutes ago | parent

Oh come on, all of the service personnel survive on the tips alone just fine, like the cashiers, and the nurses, and the receptionists do. Right?

handfuloflight 1 hour ago | parent

This just translates to "anyone paying a margin on anything anywhere is a sucker."

You're definitely a sucker too, probably multiple times over.

askafriend 57 minutes ago | parent

My time is more expensive than the $15 extra I pay for the food...who's the sucker.

I'm not paying for the food. I'm paying for them to bring me the food. Those are two different products.

Aboutplants 56 minutes ago | parent

Eh, the difference is that DoorDash is a logistics company performing a service that restaurants do not like running (delivery). It’s not a middleman providing no value

mschuster91 21 minutes ago | parent

The problem is they use exploitative labor practices (as we're seeing here) and price-dumping funded by infinite amounts of venture capital. It sets customer expectations to unsustainably low pricing and it forces restaurants to either heavily subsidise their own delivery drivers to keep customer prices low or, because barely anyone can sustain that, to shut down their own delivery service and use <gig company> instead.

And that in turn gives doordash, uber eats and whatnot access to a lot of data - who orders what and lives where or which restaurant is doing good and which is struggling - that can be sold to third parties. Governments (ICE and other agencies have been caught to just buy data from aggregators), advertisers, credit reporting agencies, political parties, you name it.

Sure. As a customer the value that doordash et al provide is hard to understate. A single point of contact, a single set of credentials, a unified UI compared to what used to be a ton of never-updated garbage wordpress installs, reliable tracking... but as a whole, we all lose.

malfist 56 minutes ago | parent

> literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more

Or they're built on the idea that they can sell convenience to people and make a lot of money doing so.

It's not so different from a lot of other businesses. First class and main cabin in a flight gets you the same airplane, the same destination the same travel, but slightly different chairs and some food. Is anyone paying for first class suckers? What about if I buy a skip the line pass at a theme park? Am I a sucker because I paid more than the base admission price? Or is it a trade that I'm willing to make because I have excess income and want to actually ride the rides instead of standing in line all day in the heat?

Why do executives have executive assistants? Are businesses all suckers?

I know I'm getting ripped off by doordash, but I'm hungry and I'm busy and the harm of getting ripped off just a bit is way lesser than the time it'd take me to get or prepare food myself. That $10 hamburger that I just paid $25 for is outrageous, but the 30 minutes I saved is worth the $15. If you make mid-six figure income like most of big tech, that's a small small price to pay for time.

ndriscoll 34 minutes ago | parent

Skip the line passes are an obvious sucker play; they oversell tickets to the park so that people can go on like 1 ride every 4 hours, then charge again to actually be able to use the ticket you already bought (and simply don't deliver service to the others). Do you think they are unaware of the capacity at which reasonable latencies can be maintained?

jayrot 26 minutes ago | parent

In case you, or anyone else, actually care or are interested, there's a great deep dive video on the history of "FASTPASS" by the youtube channel Defunctland.

tstrimple 54 minutes ago | parent

Doordash and grubhub are insane for single food purchases. But the fees are barely noticed when feeding my family of 5. We use it every other week or so just because of how chaotic school activity schedules can be. When we order sushi/chinese for the kids the bill before any delivery services is around $200 for enough food for dinner and another meal with leftovers. The service charge is like $7 and I make sure the driver gets at least $10 regardless of the distance. Cheaper than if we ate in the restaurant and were expected to give a 15-20% tip.

robomartin 47 minutes ago | parent

> services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more

Strongly disagree with your entire narrative, one that it demonstrably disconnected from reality.

Nobody is forcing anyone --at all-- to use these services. Not one person. Not one company. Not a single law or mandate. If I want to use it and you don't, that's perfectly fine. If I, for whatever reason, want to pay a premium and you think it's stupid, that's fine too. Don't use it. I will. Simple as that.

What's the opposite of that? Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to (and we could not, because Obamacare killed those plans). Etc.

See the difference there?

someonebaggy 30 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like you agree that suckers pay more.

mandeepj 3 minutes ago | parent

> Mandated and forced on everyone.

Nope. It's a marketplace. Your above argument is perfectly applicable to it as well.

peezd 12 minutes ago | parent

It's just a standard reintermediation play, inject yourself in the middle of a supply chain, and then once established squeeze the living shit out of both sides.

Also use exploitation of regulation (e.g. leveraging contractors via 1099s to access cheap labor and indemnification from liability) to your advantage .

this was the model of like 2/3 of the 'startups' in the 2010s.

xyst 1 hour ago | parent

only $1.4M? DD was not confident in their efforts to stop Mamdani. This is like a couple weeks of work from high priced political consultants in NYC.

probably_wrong 1 hour ago | parent

The article disagrees:

> At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race

sharkjacobs 1 hour ago | parent

If they were honest about it and said something like "we believe our actions were fair and legal and disagree with this decision" it would at least be ideologically consistent.

> In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)

This is villain shit.

InsideOutSanta 51 minutes ago | parent

"Simply put, we screwed up. We should have given Cuomo two million so we can keep underpaying Dashers."

Aunche 1 hour ago | parent

Even though the press likes to give Mamdani all the credit for these types of things, this started with a law passed under DeBlasio, and most of the investigation was done under Adams.

xrd 1 hour ago | parent

Mamdani deserves credit for taking this all the way.

Adams was "indicted in September 2024 on federal charges including bribery and wire fraud, accused of accepting over $100,000" from Turkey. He's now an Albanian citizen, because "he loves travel."

I don't really agree that this judgement would have happened with anyone as mayor. That road is long and paved with gold distractions.

giancarlostoro 1 hour ago | parent

> taking this all the way.

How did you arrive to this conclusion?

iaw 40 minutes ago | parent

I think they just explained how corrupt the prior mayor was, this coupled with the disclosure by Mamdani about every prior mayor hiding air safety data after 9/11 paint a damning picture of the priorities of prior NYC mayors in recent memory.

tclancy 1 hour ago | parent

>most of the investigation was done under Adams.

Better than about him like the rest of it, I suppose.

consumer451 1 hour ago | parent

Josh Johnson has a great bit about Mamdani:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SCKj7gwbYrc

exabrial 1 hour ago | parent

I'm not so sure this is a victory lol

mkagenius 1 hour ago | parent

> Founders: Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore (Stanford students at the time)

Guess never got a chance to learn empathy.

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

Is a drEAk meme appropriate here?

(⌐_⌐)ノ Empathy

(•ᴗ•)つ Apathy

ok_dad 57 minutes ago | parent

Too bad having their names associated with this immoral politicking won’t cause them problems. An employee stealing a few hundred bucks would get a felony and probably never work a good job again. Founders stealing hundreds of millions from workers get to say whoopsie.

sassbadger 33 minutes ago | parent

Not even a whoopsie. Look how many responders here defend this exploitative behavior that is only enabled through monopolization as "the market regulates this", or "nobody forces them to buy/work there". Pure libertarian brain rot, no better than the communists they always cry about.

lern_too_spel 51 minutes ago | parent

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760317/how-to-rule-... is eye opening. When many of us were in college, there was still some idealism about using technology to make the world a better place. Maybe that still exists at some universities, but Sand Hill Road wiped that out of Stanford.

thomasjeff1 24 minutes ago | parent

Uber wants DoorDash gone and DoorDash is just making it too easy.

cdrnsf 10 minutes ago | parent

DoorDash and gig companies generally are a play to destabilize employment and turn as many people as possible from employees entitled to benefits and legal protections into contractors that can be discarded at whim. How is ordering, say, a pizza via DoorDash in any way better for you, as a customer, than ordering from a pizza place that employs drivers?