Facebook FB 1.92% parent Meta Platforms Inc. appointed DoorDash Inc. DASH 7.64% Chief Executive Tony Xu to its board of directors, adding outside executive experience to a group that has been criticized for its lack of independence.
Mr. Xu’s appointment Tuesday is the first change to the board since the company rebranded itself as Meta in October. It is also the first addition to the board since the departure of Jeffrey Zients, who chose not to seek re-election to the company’s board in March 2020. Mr. Zients was succeeded by Robert Kimmitt, a lawyer and former deputy secretary at the Department of the Treasury during the George W. Bush administration. Mr. Kimmitt is the lead independent director.
Mark Zuckerberg is Meta’s chairman and CEO and controls the majority of the company’s voting stock through supervoting shares. The majority of Meta’s outside shareholders in recent years have voted to separate those roles, which the company has rejected, and some investors have said they believe the board is too beholden to Mr. Zuckerberg.
Several directors with significant executive experience, including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and former American Express Inc. chief Kenneth Chenault, have left the board in recent years.
Mr. Xu brings experience running one of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing companies. He co-founded DoorDash as a student at Stanford University in 2013. The 37-year-old executive worked as a dish washer in his mother’s Chinese restaurant after emigrating to the U.S. as a child, and drew on some of that experience during his early days at DoorDash.
The pandemic served as an unexpected boon for food delivery, catapulting DoorDash into the nation’s largest food-delivery app thanks to its strong foothold in the suburbs, unlike rivals Uber Technologies Inc.’s Eats and Grubhub Inc.
While DoorDash continued to grow despite restaurant re-openings this summer, profits have largely eluded the cost-intensive food-delivery industry. Mr. Xu expanded DoorDash’s offerings to more lucrative deliveries like groceries and alcohol, in an effort to boost customers’ average order sizes during the health crisis.
Mr. Xu “has built a great service for millions of people to get food and more from hundreds of thousands of restaurants and small businesses. I’ve always thought it’s important to have great tech leaders on our board, and Tony has direct experience both running a tech company and solving complex challenges in commerce,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a statement.
A DoorDash spokesman declined to comment.
The Meta board now stands at 10 people: Messrs. Zuckerberg and Xu, Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg ; venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel ; Dropbox Inc. Chief Executive Officer Drew Houston, PayPal Holdings Inc. vice president Peggy Alford, former McKinsey & Co. partner Nancy Killefer, Estee Lauder Cos. Inc. finance chief Tracey Travis and Mr. Kimmitt.
—Preetika Rana contributed to this article.
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Appeared in the January 12, 2022, print edition as ‘Meta Names Doordash CEO Tony Xu to Board.’
