Both WeWork and DoorDash proved their markets which is what is meant here. They found demand for something to fill a need irrespective of the services they offered to try and fill it.
There's a market for a great many things offered at below cost.
For example, there's probably a pretty robust market for a personal chef to come by your house and cook you a gourmet meal for $5. And private jets for the same price as commercial? Sign me up.
It's more nuanced than that. It's not really about cost so much as it is a new kind of thing people want and would be willing to pay for.
WeWork showed that individuals want and are willing to pay for communal office space and that small companies want and are willing to pay for "slices" of that space.
DoorDash (and the like) shows that people want and are willing to pay for more than just pizza and American-Chinese takeout and restaurants were willing to take a large percent cut for delivery-as-a-service.
Regus existed long before WeWork--as did many local spaces. I guess WeWork demonstrated that there was a market for "cooler" co-working spaces at scale.
As for DoorDash? People clearly want all sorts of rapid delivery and especially younger people who hate calling up a place really want to order through a consolidated web site. I'm not sure that's a revelation. The question is whether the economics broadly work out which is really not proven yet.
I mean Dropbox wasn't exactly revolutionary either, you could just always use curlftpfs but there's something to the execution that answers "why would anyone pay for DoorDash when they could just call the restaurant?"
That's the thing; calling for takeout is easy, the hard part is that most restaurants don't efficiently cook enough volume enough to justify the overhead of having dedicated delivery drivers.
The value proposition that has changed with the delivery apps is that lots of restaurants can share the cost of a large pool of drivers with an app that can sufficiently allocate routes. This isn't a proposition that has actually been profitable yet, though, and really the only thing that makes this situation unique is that we are now in an unprecedented situation where indoor dining is recommended against and in some cases heavily restricted or banned entirely. Presumably when restaurants are free to operate traditionally again they might not find having such a low-margin delivery arm so great, and they will leave. Anecdotally, some restaurants did this in my area when lockdowns were eased up.
That's fair enough. I guess my view is a bit colored by the fact that, heavy use of Amazon and other online shopping aside, I don't use any sort of food delivery services, am a very light Uber user even when traveling, don't use scooter or bike shares, etc. So I look at a lot of these VC-backed companies and go meh based on personal interest and experience.
