DoorDash’s unusual timing

Yesterday, there was some big news at DoorDash with NYC’s relatively new mayor announcing a $131.5 million settlement with DoorDash, the giant food-delivery service for what Mayor Mamdani described as “stealing workers wages”.

DoorDash hasn’t filed an 8-K yet, but they did put out this press release in which they admit to “screwing up” and go into some more details.

In looking for that 8-K, I was reminded of a different 8-K that DoorDash filed on Friday after markets closed reincorporating in the State of Nevada. Needless to say, the timing seems more than coincidental, given yesterday’s news.

While DoorDash isn’t the only company to reincorporate from Delaware to Nevada, they are one of the biggest. The only other one that I could find — with the help of the folks at DoTadda — was Datadog, which did this back in April.

In an earlier notice filed in late August, DoorDash cited the “increasingly litigious environment” in Delaware “and high-profile litigation outcomes that involved companies with controlling stockholders” similar to DoorDash. As the filing notes, the company also looked at Texas, where a number of other large companies including Tesla, Dell Technologies and Coinbase have reincorporated in. But ultimately, Nevada won out.

Maybe the shift to Delaware was entirely coincidental. But given that the stock has fallen about 4% on the news and is down about 17% year-to-date, that seems a bit hard to swallow.