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    California Senate Passes Bill Reining In Amazon Labor Model

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    The bill would curb production quotas at Amazon and other companies that critics say are excessive and force workers to forgo bathroom breaks.In the latest sign of the growing scrutiny of Amazon’s labor practices, the California State Senate on Wednesday approved a bill that would place limits on production quotas for warehouse workers.The bill, which passed the Senate 26-to-11, was written partly in response to high rates of injuries at Amazon warehouses. The legislation prohibits companies from imposing production quotas that prevent workers from taking state-mandated breaks or using the bathroom when needed, or that keep employers from complying with health and safety laws.The Assembly, which passed an initial version in May, is expected to approve the Senate measure by the end of the state’s legislative session on Friday.“In the Amazon warehouse space, what we’re trying to take on is this increased use of quotas and discipline based on not meeting the quotas, without a human factor in dealing with a reason why a worker might not make a quota,” Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the bill’s author, said in an interview last week.Gov. Gavin Newsom had not indicated before the vote whether he would sign the bill, but his staff was involved in softening certain provisions that helped pave the way for its passage.Experts said the bill was novel in its attempts to regulate warehouse quotas that are tracked by algorithms, as at Amazon, and make them transparent.“I believe one of Amazon’s biggest competitive advantages over rivals is this ability to monitor their work force, prod workers to work faster and discipline workers when they fail to meet quotas,” said Beth Gutelius, research director at the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois Chicago.“It’s unprecedented for a bill to intervene like this in the ways that technology is used in the workplace,” added Dr. Gutelius, who focuses on warehousing and logistics.Business groups have strongly opposed the bill, complaining that it will lead to costly litigation and hamstring the entire industry even though it is primarily intended to address labor practices at a single company.Amazon has not commented on the bill but has said that it tailors performance targets to individual employees over time based on their experience level and that the targets take into account employee health and safety. The company has emphasized that fewer than 1 percent of terminations are related to underperformance.The bill would require Amazon and other warehouse employers to disclose productivity quotas to workers and regulators, and would allow workers to sue to eliminate quotas that prevent them from taking breaks and following safety protocols.While it is unclear how big an impact the bill would have on Amazon’s operations, limiting the company’s hourly productivity quotas would probably affect its costs more than its ability to continue next-day and same-day delivery.“I think it’s all about money, not about what the system is set up to handle,” said Marc Wulfraat, president of the supply-chain and logistics consulting firm MWPVL International. “If you said to me, ‘Bring the rate down from 350 to 300 per hour,’ I’d say, ‘OK, we need to add more people to the operation — maybe we need 120 people instead of 100.’”A report by the Strategic Organizing Center, a group backed by four labor unions, shows that Amazon’s serious-injury rate nationally was nearly double that of the rest of the warehousing industry last year.“They would say, ‘Always pivot, never twist,’ all this stuff you’re supposed to do,” said Nathan Morin, who worked in an Amazon warehouse in California for more than three years packing and picking items before leaving in December. “But it’s oftentimes impossible to follow the proper body movements while also making rate.”The company has vowed to improve worker safety and said it had spent more than $300 million this year on new safety measures.Amazon is under growing pressure from unions and other groups over its labor practices. A regional office of the National Labor Relations Board has indicated that it is likely to overturn a failed union election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama on the grounds that the company improperly interfered with the voting.The objections to the election were brought by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which spearheaded the organizing campaign.The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which backed the California bill and whose local officials have helped to derail a tax abatement for Amazon in Indiana and approval for an Amazon facility in Colorado, has committed to providing “all resources necessary” to unionize Amazon workers.“This is a historic victory for workers at Amazon and other major warehouse companies,” Ron Herrera, a Teamsters official who is president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, said in a statement. “These workers have been on the front lines throughout the pandemic, while suffering debilitating injuries from unsafe quotas.” More

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    Amazon’s Clashes With Labor: Days of Conflict and Control

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    Amazon was built on an underdog philosophy, but its workers are finding a voice. That presents a problem for the company that goes far beyond the union vote in Alabama.It has been Day 1 at Amazon ever since the company began more than a quarter-century ago. Day 1 is Amazon shorthand for staying hungry, making bold decisions and never forgetting about the customer. This start-up mentality — underdogs against the world — has been extremely good for Amazon’s shoppers and shareholders.Day 1 holds less appeal for some of Amazon’s employees, especially those doing the physical work in the warehouses. A growing number feel the company is pushing them past their limits and risking their health. They would like Amazon to usher in a more benign Day 2.The clash between the desire for Day 1 and Day 2 has been unfolding in Alabama, where Amazon warehouse workers in the community of Bessemer have voted on whether to form a union. Government labor regulators are getting ready to sort through the votes in the closely watched election. A result may come as soon as this week. If the union gains a foothold, it will be the first in the company’s history.Attention has been focused on Bessemer, but the struggle between Day 1 and Day 2 is increasingly playing out everywhere in Amazon’s world. At its heart, the conflict is about control. To maintain Day 1, the company needs to lower labor costs and increase productivity, which requires measuring and tweaking every moment of a worker’s existence.That kind of control is at the heart of the Amazon enterprise. The idea of surrendering it is the company’s greatest horror. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, wrote in his 2016 shareholder letter: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”For many years, Amazon has managed to maintain control and keep Day 1 going by dazzling with delivery and counted on the media, regulators and politicians to ignore everything unpleasant. The few stories about workers rarely got traction.But it is now the second-largest private employer in the country. There is widespread pro-worker sentiment in the United States and a pro-union president. In Bessemer, many of the pro-union workers are Black, which makes this a civil rights story as well.Amazon needs to measure and tweak every moment of a worker’s existence to maintain its edge, but it is facing more pushback against its control.Bob Miller for The New York TimesSo the costs associated with Day 1 are finally coming into view. And it is showing up not only in Alabama, but in the form of lawsuits, restive workers at other warehouses, Congressional oversight, scrutiny from labor regulators and, most noisily, on Twitter.In recent weeks, a heated discussion about whether Amazon’s workers must urinate in bottles because they have no time to go to the bathroom — a level of control that few modern corporations would dare exercise — has raged on Twitter.“Amazon is reorganizing the very nature of retail work — something that traditionally is physically undemanding and has a large amount of downtime — into something more akin to a factory, which never lets up,” said Spencer Cox, a former Amazon worker who is writing his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Minnesota about how the company is transforming labor. “For Amazon, this isn’t about money. This is about control of workers’ bodies and every possible moment of their time.”Amazon did not have a comment for this story.Signs that Amazon is facing more pushback against its control have started to pile up. In February, Lovenia Scott, a former warehouse worker for the company in Vacaville, Calif., accused Amazon in a lawsuit of having such an “immense volume of work to be completed” that she and her colleagues did not get any breaks. Ms. Scott is seeking class-action status. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on the suit.Last month, the California Labor Commissioner said 718 delivery drivers who worked for Green Messengers, a Southern California contractor for Amazon, were owed $5 million in wages that never made it to their wallets. The drivers were paid for 10-hour days, the labor commissioner said, but the volume of packages was so great that they often had to work 11 or more hours and through breaks.Amazon said it no longer worked with Green Messengers and would appeal the decision. Green Messengers could not be reached for comment.An Amazon warehouse in the Canadian province of Ontario showed rapid spread of Covid-19 in March. “Our investigation determined a closure was required to break the chain of transmission,” said Dr. Lawrence Loh, the regional medical officer. “We provided our recommendation to Amazon.” The company, he said, “did not answer.” The health officials ordered the workers to self-isolate, effectively shutting the facility for two weeks. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on the situation.And five U.S. senators wrote a letter to the company last month demanding more information about why it was equipping its delivery vans with surveillance cameras that constantly monitor the driver. The technology, the senators wrote, “raises important privacy and worker oversight questions Amazon must answer.”Amazon has presented a different opinion of what Day 1 means for workers. The first thing it mentions in its official statement on Bessemer is the starting pay of $15.30 per hour, double the federal minimum wage.Mr. Cox, who worked in an Amazon warehouse in Washington state, said the higher pay has paradoxically fueled the discontent. The pay “is better than working at a gas station, so people naturally want to keep these jobs,” he said. “That’s why they want them to be fair. I saw a lot of depression and anxiety when I worked for Amazon.”(Mr. Cox said he was fired by Amazon in 2018 for organizing. Amazon told him he had violated safety protocol).The confrontation between Day 1 and Day 2 has been sharpest over bladders.The topic erupted last month when Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, tweeted at the company, “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles.”Amazon’s social media account fired back: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.”This isn’t the way corporations usually talk to members of Congress, even on Twitter. On Friday, after days of being pummeled on the issue, Amazon apologized to Representative Pocan, saying: “The tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers.” Amazon blamed Covid and “traffic,” not its punishing schedules.Representative Pocan responded on Saturday with a sigh. “This is not about me, this is about your workers — who you don’t treat with enough respect or dignity,” he wrote.The bathroom question is one on which the company has long been vulnerable. Enforcement files from regulators in Amazon’s home state of Washington indicate that questions about whether the company had an appropriate number of bathrooms in its Seattle headquarters have arisen over the past dozen years.The company has “insufficient lavatory facilities for male employees” according to a 2012 complaint received by the state’s Department of Labor and Industries. “Employees routinely traverse multiple buildings in search of available facilities.”A 2014 complaint filed by an Amazon employee to the same department said employees got 12 minutes a day for “bathroom, getting water, personal calls, etc.” outside of normally scheduled breaks. Those who needed further toilet time had to provide a doctor’s note “explaining why the need to void more than usual.”The complaints went beyond Amazon’s white-collar offices. A warehouse worker told Labor and Industries in 2009 that a manager and a human resources representative had told her that “there would be disciplinary action against me if I continue to use the bathroom on company time” — she meant unscheduled breaks. The employee added that the H.R. representative told her that “it was not fair to the company that I was getting paid when I’m not working because I’m in the bathroom.”Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle. Some employees have filed bathroom-related complaints, including saying some of the offices have too few restrooms.Miles Fortune for The New York TimesAmazon did not respond to questions about the enforcement reports. A spokesman for the Department of Labor and Industries declined to comment, except to note that outside of Amazon, “We really don’t get a lot of bathroom-related complaints.”Other technology companies have prided themselves on overriding mere bodily needs. Marissa Mayer, an early Google employee, attributed the search company’s success to working 130 hours a week — entirely possible, she said in a 2016 interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”When Google was a start-up, the notion was that you gave up everything — family, sleep, diversion — so you might become successful and rich. But former workers at Amazon warehouses said that under the Day 1 philosophy, they suffered merely to stay employed.“I believe many employees have indirectly lost their job for going to the bathroom. You’re like, can I hold it to break time?” said John Burgett, who blogged for several years about working in an Amazon warehouse in Indiana.His conclusion on his last entry, in 2016: Amazon was “testing the limits of human beings as a technical tool.” More

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    Winter Storm Disrupts Automakers, Retailers and Delivery Services

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Winter StormsliveLatest UpdatesMapping the Storm’s ImpactMillions Without PowerDisruptions to BusinessesPhotosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWinter Storm Disrupts Wide Swath of American BusinessPower outages, natural gas shortages and icy conditions made it hard for automakers, retailers and delivery carriers to operate across much of the South and Midwest.A UPS worker made deliveries in Chicago on Tuesday after an overnight storm dumped more than a foot of snow on the area.Credit…Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressPeter Eavis and Feb. 16, 2021, 6:05 p.m. ETThe winter storm that barreled across much of the United States over the holiday weekend severely disrupted businesses including large car factories, retail chains and the delivery services that people are deeply reliant on for basic necessities.General Motors, Ford Motor, Toyota, Nissan and other automakers suspended or shut down production at plants from Texas to Indiana as rolling blackouts, natural gas shortages and icy conditions made it difficult to keep assembly lines running.Walmart was forced to close as many as 500 stores across the South and Midwest, according to a map that was being updated in real time on its website. Pharmacy chains also shut stores, potentially making it harder for customers to collect prescriptions and also delaying vaccinations against the coronavirus, which had begun at many pharmacies at the end of last week.Publix, a grocery and pharmacy chain that operates across the South, said on Tuesday that it had to delay vaccinations in Florida because vaccine shipments were delayed by the storm. CVS said it had closed about 775 stores. Walgreens said around 200 stores in Texas were closed because of power disruptions.The storm dealt a blow to huge economic hubs that are accustomed to hurricanes and tornadoes but not extreme winter weather that strains power grids and sends temperatures well below averages for this time of year.“I was born in Fort Worth in 1956, and I’ve never seen weather this bad for this long,” said George Westhoff, president of Midland Manufacturing, a Fort Worth company with 40 employees that makes well cylinders and other metal products. “I’m not sure how much of my equipment would start up under these cold conditions,” he said, noting that he was the only person at his plant on Tuesday.Because millions of people have been working from home during the coronavirus pandemic, winter storms may not have quite the economic cost they once did. But the loss of power can sever the internet connections that people need to do their jobs. PowerOutage.us, a site that tracks electricity disruptions, said that, of the 12.5 million customers it tracks in Texas, 3.2 million were without power on Tuesday.Managers of the electricity grid in Texas and elsewhere have had to order rolling blackouts after many power plants were forced offline because of icy conditions and some could not get sufficient supplies of natural gas. Some wind turbines also shut down. At the same time, demand for electricity and natural gas has shot up because of the cold weather.“What’s complicating things is that huge swaths of Texas have lost power,” said Michael Trevino, a vice president at the Dallas Regional Chamber.Group 1 Automotive, a big chain of car dealerships based in Houston, has closed many of its franchises in Texas and Oklahoma.“Our office doesn’t have power. Dallas is snowed in. Oklahoma is snowed in. Houston is icy,” said Pete Delongchamps, a senior vice president at the company. He is hunkering down at home, where both power and water are out. “It’s blankets and water jugs.”Some companies kept operating. Raytheon Technologies, a large aerospace and military contractor, said Tuesday that its facility in McKinney, Texas, was open. And Home Depot and Costco stores in Southlake, a suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth, were open Tuesday.Christina Cornell, a Home Depot spokeswoman, said over 100 stores in Texas and elsewhere were closed or operated with reduced hours on Monday but the majority of them reopened Tuesday. She added that all Home Depot stores in the United States have backup generators that allow them to operate basic services during blackouts.The storm has caused extensive delays across the vast package delivery networks that many people now rely on as shopping has shifted online.FedEx said winter weather had caused “substantial disruptions” at its Memphis hub, which is the company’s largest center, occupying 800 acres, and is normally capable of sorting nearly half a million documents and packages an hour. FedEx added that delays were possible across the United States for Tuesday deliveries.UPS said weather could cause delays in areas not directly hit by the storms. Packages may take longer to get from one place to another, and many delivery services move goods through big sorting hubs in the middle of the country to serve both the East and West Coasts. UPS’s main air hub is in Louisville, Ky., and it also has a hub in Dallas, for example.The winter storm prompted the United States Postal Service to close post offices, processing hubs and other facilities in Texas, Alabama and Mississippi, according to its website.The storm has also affected Amazon, which operates its own large logistics network that includes planes, hubs and delivery vans operated by contractors.“The health and safety of our employees, customers and the drivers who deliver packages is our top priority,” Maria Boschetti, a spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Out of an abundance of caution and to ensure everyone’s safety, we have closed some of our sites in Arkansas, Illinois, Oklahoma, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, Indiana and Kentucky.”Some automakers said they shut down operations in an effort to limit their energy use. Ford closed a plant in Claycomo, Mo., near Kansas City, Mo., this week “to ensure we minimize our use of natural gas that is critical to people’s homes,” a company spokeswoman said.The plant produces the F-150 pickup truck, one of the industry’s best-selling vehicles. Ford doesn’t plan to resume normal operations at its shuttered plant until Monday. The factory employs about 7,300 people. Union workers will be paid 75 percent of their gross pay for the week.Nissan closed its four U.S. plants on Monday and canceled the morning and afternoon shifts on Tuesday, a spokeswoman said. Two of the plants, in Canton, Miss., and Smyrna, Tenn., make cars and the other two, both in Decherd, Tenn., make engines. The company is monitoring the situation to see if it can resume production Tuesday night.General Motors said Tuesday that it was not affected by the natural gas shortage but that it was still suspending the first shift at four plants in Tennessee, Indiana, Kentucky and Texas because of “the significant winter weather conditions.”Trucks stuck in traffic on Monday because of the storm in Austin, Texas.Credit…Montinique Monroe/Getty ImagesToyota Motor canceled the first and second shifts at five factories, including its largest U.S. plant in Georgetown, Ky., and a pickup truck plant in San Antonio, because of the winter storm and energy disruptions it caused. The other three plants are in Kentucky, Indiana and Mississippi.Honda canceled or suspended late shifts on Monday and early shifts on Tuesday at plants in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and Indiana. The company is planning to resume production Tuesday night at all but its Alabama car plant, where Tuesday evening’s shift has also been canceled.The shutdowns add to troubles for Ford, G.M. and other automakers that have separately had to idle plants because of a global semiconductor shortage. The chip shortage is expected to reduce the profit of automakers by billions of dollars this year.Some companies are looking forward to a surge of business after the bad weather passes.Mr. Delongchamps, the Group 1 Automotive executive, said, “We will probably see a pickup in body shop business and repairs, from people whose cars got banged up or frozen.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Uber, After Buying Postmates, Lays Off More Than 180 Employees

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesVaccine InformationTimelineWuhan, One Year LaterAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyUber, After Buying Postmates, Lays Off More Than 180 EmployeesThe layoffs include most of the executive team at Postmates, the food delivery app that Uber bought last year.Uber bought Postmates last year for $2.65 billion. Food delivery has been crucial to Uber as its ride-hailing business has been hurt in the pandemic.Credit…Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesJan. 23, 2021, 7:42 p.m. ETSAN FRANCISCO — Uber on Thursday laid off roughly 185 people from its Postmates division, or about 15 percent of Postmates’ total work force, said three people with knowledge of the actions, as the ride-hailing giant consolidates its food delivery operations to weather the pandemic.The layoffs affected most of the executive team at Postmates, including Bastian Lehmann, the founder and chief executive of the popular food delivery app, said the people, who spoke on condition they not be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Uber bought Postmates last year for $2.65 billion.Some Postmates vice presidents and other executives will leave with multimillion dollar exit packages, the people said. Some employees may also see reduced compensation packages, the people said, while others will be asked to leave or serve out the end of their contract positions, which could lead to more exits in coming months.The cuts are part of a larger integration of Uber’s food delivery division, Uber Eats, with Postmates. While the Postmates brand and app will remain separate, much of the behind-the-scenes infrastructure will be melded with Uber Eats and supported by Uber Eats employees. Pierre Dimitri Gore-Coty, the global head of Uber Eats, will continue running the combined food delivery business, the people said.An Uber spokesman, Matt Kallman, confirmed the cuts. “We are so grateful for the contributions of every Postmates team member,” Mr. Kallman said. “While we are thrilled to officially welcome many of them to Uber, we are sorry to say goodbye to others. We are so excited to continue to build on top of the incredible work this remarkable team has already accomplished.”Food delivery has been crucial to Uber as its ride-hailing business has been severely weakened by the pandemic’s effects on travel. Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s chief executive, has pointed to food delivery as a bright spot; last year, Uber Eats’ revenue overtook the revenue from the ride-hailing business for the first time as people ordered more meals delivered to their homes.Uber, which loses money, laid off hundreds of employees in 2019 as it tried to get costs under control. The company currently has more than 21,000 full-time employees; its drivers are independent contractors.While Uber has been strong in food delivery, it has had to fend off deep-pocketed rivals that have sought to gain market share by subsidizing delivery costs with promotions and discounts.DoorDash, which went public in December, has rapidly expanded over the past few years and has acquired the smaller food delivery start-up Caviar. Other significant competitors include Just Eat Takeaway, which beat out Uber to acquire Grubhub last year for more than $7 billion, and Deliveroo, a delivery company that is popular in Europe.Uber has trimmed other businesses in hopes of becoming profitable by the end of this year. In December, it shed its autonomous vehicles division, Uber ATG, and jettisoned its flying car operation, Uber Elevate. Both efforts were costly.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    DoorDash Stock Soars After Initial Public Offering

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDoorDash Soars in First Day of TradingThe delivery company’s shares closed at $190 each, 86 percent above its initial public offering price of $102, in a sign of investor appetite.The New York Stock Exchange president, Stacey Cunningham, rang the opening bell as DoorDash celebrated its initial public offering on Wednesday.  Credit…NYSEDec. 9, 2020SAN FRANCISCO — Wall Street loves a pandemic winner.Shares of DoorDash soared in their first day of trading on Wednesday, capping a year of outsize growth for the country’s largest food delivery company. DoorDash stock rose 86 percent above its initial public offering price of $102 to close the day at $189.51.That valued the company at $72 billion, including employee-owned shares — more than the market capitalization of Domino’s Pizza and Chipotle Mexican Grill combined. DoorDash raised $3.4 billion, making it the one of the largest I.P.O.s of the year.Investors piled into the stock despite DoorDash’s deep losses and the intensely competitive market in which it operates. In the week before it went public, DoorDash raised its proposed price range 16 percent to $92.5 per share at the midpoint before pricing even higher. The pandemic has been a boon to the company, as people turned to delivery services while stuck in their homes.Tony Xu, the chief executive of DoorDash, said the company would try not to “chase the scoreboard” and the stock market hype as a public company. “I recognize the significance of the milestone and the moment, but it is one day on this multidecade journey,” he said.DoorDash’s listing heralds a banner week of public offerings for technology start-ups. Airbnb priced its offering on Wednesday at $68 a share, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The home rental company had raised its offering price range once, in the face of high demand, and could be valued at $47 billion, far above its $18 billion valuation in the private market this year. It will begin trading on Thursday.The e-commerce start-up Wish, the video gaming company Roblox and the real estate start-up OpenDoor also plan to list their shares before the end of the year. The events are set to deliver windfalls to the companies’ founders, employees and investors in what is expected to be the busiest year for I.P.O.s since 1999. More than 200 companies valued at more than $50 million have gone public so far this year, according to Renaissance Capital, which tracks I.P.O.s.Many of these companies lose money. Even so, investors have largely given them warm welcomes as they go public. Private investors valued Snowflake, a data warehousing company, at $12 billion before it went public in September. Since then, its valuation has soared to $107 billion.“It’s been 20-plus years since we’ve seen this many I.P.O.s,” said David Hsu, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania. But he added a cautionary note about the enthusiasm. “At some point, we do have to look at some fundamentals,” he said.DoorDash’s debut also shows the extreme economic disparities created by the pandemic. Restaurants, struggling to survive government-mandated closures, have increasingly relied on delivery apps like DoorDash to stay in business.DoorDash has grown during the pandemic as more people turn to meal deliveries.Credit…Sean Sirota for The New York TimesThe apps, which dispatch armies of gig workers to pick up and deliver orders, charge fees that some restaurant owners have said are onerous. In many cases, takeout orders have not made up for the lost revenue of indoor dining. Chains including Ruby Tuesday, California Pizza Kitchen and the parent company of Chuck E. Cheese have gone bankrupt this year.But DoorDash has thrived. In the first nine months of the year, its revenue more than tripled from the same period last year, to $1.92 billion. Orders surged to 543 million through September, compared with 181 million a year earlier.Ahead of its I.P.O., DoorDash announced a $200 million pledge to various programs to help restaurants and delivery drivers. It invited a number of restaurant owners and delivery drivers to virtually attend the stock market opening bell ringing and featured them in outdoor marketing campaigns around New York and San Francisco.Despite its rapid growth, DoorDash is burning cash. It lost $149 million in the first nine months of the year and warned investors that the pandemic-spurred growth was likely to slow down.Mr. Xu said the company would continue to spend money to grow “commensurate with the opportunity.”Mr. Hsu said DoorDash’s “astonishing” valuation made him think investors had overemphasized the effects of the pandemic.“When you get to this market cap level, there are questions about where do you go from here?” he said.DoorDash recently won a long-fought battle over its use of contract workers. Last month, Californians passed Proposition 22, a ballot measure that exempts DoorDash, Uber, Lyft and others from a state law that would have required them to treat their drivers as employees. The companies are expected to push for similar rules in other states.Tony Xu, DoorDash’s chief executive, said the company would not focus on the market hype. “I recognize the significance of the milestone and the moment, but it is one day on this multidecade journey,” he said.Credit…Jim McAuley for The New York TimesDoorDash has grown, in part, by focusing on suburban markets and partnerships with large chain restaurants. Founded in 2013 by Mr. Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang and Evan Moore, it survived a ruthlessly competitive market for longer than many of its competitors. This year, two players, Grubhub and Postmates, were acquired by larger rivals.Through the deal-making, DoorDash has remained independent. It counts one million drivers and 18 million customers in the United States, Canada and Australia.The company has experimented with different business models, including a subscription service, DashPass, which costs $9.99 a month for unlimited deliveries. DashPass has five million subscribers.DoorDash began operating commissary buildings where restaurants can rent space and prepare food specifically for deliveries. It has struck partnerships with grocers, pet food companies and drugstores. The company even invested in Burma Bites, a local restaurateur.The succession of tech I.P.O.s provides long-awaited returns to venture capital investors. Many of the companies going public are a decade old. Plentiful venture funding has allowed “unicorn” start-ups, worth $1 billion or more, to put off going public, and with it the pressure to turn a profit, for as long as possible.Sequoia Capital, which has backed Airbnb, DoorDash, Snowflake and several other sizable start-ups going public this year, is expected to reap a bonanza. So is Founders Fund, a venture firm that is a large shareholder in Airbnb and Wish. And the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, which was bruised by bad bets on the office rental company WeWork and others, could be redeemed by its investments in DoorDash and OpenDoor.Matt Phillips contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More