Another top Uber executive has departed the ride-hailing company, this time for Tony Xu’s San Francisco food delivery startup DoorDash.
DoorDash announced on Thursday that it has hired Prabir Adarkar as its first chief financial officer, a sign that the “unicorn” startup, valued at more than $1.4 billion and backed by SoftBank and Sequoia Capital, is growing up. Prabir led Uber’s Global Finance team of more than 500 employees. (Uber has been without a permanent CFO for some time, making Adarkar the most senior leader in Uber’s finance department.) Prior to that, he led M&A transactions at Goldman Sachs and worked in strategy consulting at McKinsey & Co. He joins DoorDash in August, reporting to co-founder and CEO Tony Xu.
On Wednesday, Xu appeared at Coins2Day’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen alongside Sequoia Capital partner Alfred Lin and outlined the company’s perspective on scale following a $535 million funding round. The CEO demurred when I asked him about reported plans to merge with logistics rival Postmates, but allowed that DoorDash plans to expand beyond food delivery.
In a memo published Thursday morning, Xu wrote that Prabir has “a sharp mind, possesses an owner’s mentality, and leads from the front.” The co-founder added that DoorDash plans to triple its geographic footprint to 1,600 cities and hire 250 people “to aggressively scale our platform.”
For Uber’s part, the ride-hailing leader continues to see its top executives depart as CEO Dara Khosrowshahi overhauls the San Francisco company. (In a statement, Khosrowshahi said that Adarkar had done “a terrific job” at Uber and he was “sad to see [Adarkar] go.”) Uber’s top executive also spoke at Coins2Day Brainstorm Tech this week, two days before Xu, to share updates about that process as well as address questions about a future IPO.