Jason Lemkin Founder of SaaStr, a community and media platform for B2B software founders, and managing director of SaaStr Fund; he previously co-founded EchoSign, acquired b...

“I think agents are an existential risk to DoorDash. … Hey, Harry, did you know that Lemkin's Curry down the street will actually deliver for $2 and you don't need to go through DoorDash? An agent can figure that out for you.”

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · Startups & Venture · November 2026

Context

Discussing DoorDash buying Instacart, and DoorDash's remark that AI agents placed only a few hundred orders against millions of daily deliveries, Lemkin argues an agent could route around platform fees by finding restaurants' own delivery.

Listen to the episode → More from Jason Lemkin → More Startups & Venture quotes →

Transcript

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch Around 28:08 into the episode

Speaker 2

…behavior happen more and more? And then how does DoorDash respond to it? You know, they're all doing versions of the same thing, which I mean, I could totally see for some of your standard food orders, just it's not that much easier for the record. I mean, telling your agent to order your dinner,

Rory O'Driscoll

it's just as easy as to just go click on the DoorDash app.

Jason Lemkin

Well, but there's a thing. DoorDash has two competitor, big competitors. It has Uber Eats, right? And it has the restaurant. The restaurants don't want to use DoorDash or Uber. So most restaurants have self-pickup. At least they have to-go pickup where they can avoid most of the fees, right? Or self-delivery. An agent can figure that out for you. Hey, Harry, did you know that Lemkin's Curry down the street, actually, it will deliver for $2 and you don't need to go through DoorDash or whatever they have in London? I did not know. Thank you, Muse. Thank you, Instinct. I'll take that. That'll save me $14 on my order. What's the pub right behind your office that I really like, Harry? The Grazing Goat. Love that place. Five out of five, okay? Maybe they could just drop it off at the next time we do the pod for free. I don't have to pay 20% and plus tip plus this. You think I'm kidding? I think agents are an existential risk to DoorDash Buys their number three competitor is nobody. Can

Harry Stebbings

I put out a cultural difference between us? You guys pay 15 bucks a burger and it gets delivered at 50. And there's like federal charge, state charge, delivery charge, service charge. It's ridiculous. In London, it's kind of like 15 quid is 15 quid. It's fascinating to see the difference in like…

Speaker 2

Yes. And that's

Rory O'Driscoll

why these businesses are widely profitable. They figured out exactly how to extract every dollar of rent from the person who wants to sit on their couch, press a button and get the meal an hour later.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

“There's a valuation premium in the private markets. I don't know where Anthropic's going to go public, but it's clear to me they could have raised capital in the private markets at north of $2 trillion if they wanted to. I'm not convinced the public market's going to give them that same valuation. Same with OpenAI.” — Scott Wilson, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

“Half of these AI companies probably don't exist 10 years from now. And it's not clear how many have a defensible moat around their business. It's not clear to me what the ultimate profit pools look like. If you take the top five large language models and they all had the same user interface for 99% of tasks, you probably couldn't tell the difference.” — Scott Wilson, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch