- Facebook just added Tony Xu to its board of powerful tech players.
- Xu cofounded DoorDash in 2013 with some classmates from Stanford University.
- Mark Zuckerberg noted Xu's history of "solving complex challenges in commerce."
Tony Xu is the latest major tech player to take a director seat on Facebook's board.
The company announced in a filing with the SEC on Tuesday that Xu, the co-founder and CEO of delivery company DoorDash, would join its board of directors. While he does not yet have a committee appointment, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement, "I've always thought it's important to have great tech leaders on our board."
"Tony has direct experience both running a tech company and solving complex challenges in commerce," Zuckerberg added. "I look forward to learning from his perspective as we build towards the metaverse."
Xu noted Facebook's various business tools for "local merchants" and said he, too, is looking forward to "working with the board as the company enters the next stage of its journey." Xu has been CEO of DoorDash since its founding in 2013, with a trio of Stanford classmates. It went public in 2020.
Among the rest of Facebook's ten person board are Peggy Alford, who leads global sales at PayPal; Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz; Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO pf DropBox; and Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund.
The company, which recently changed its corporate name to Meta, has also seen a number of top executives leave in the last year. Longtime CTO Mike Schroepfer announced he would step down last year, with Andrew Bozworth, its head of augmented and virtual reality, taking over as it pivots toward building an immersive future of social platforms, dubbed the metaverse.
The addition of Xu comes as Facebook, which makes nearly all of its revenue from selling digital ads on its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp, invests heavily into the commerce part of its business. In 2020 it acquired Kustomer, a chatbot startup, for a reported $1 billion. And a leaked document from last year detailed the company's plans to invest more into shopping capabilities with Dan Levy, the VP of Ads and Business Platform, saying he envisioned Facebook's apps "being a primary destination for commerce" to rival Shopify.
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