Instacart

“Grocery shopping is 100% agentic, like, for anyone who uses Instacart. Like, you tell your Instacart shopper, go bring me milk. You don't think twice when they say, oh yeah, you wanted whole milk from Organic Valley, but I found some other brand, and here it i…”

“I would say, I think that this could be really good for any sort of service that makes, that allows people to be kind of lazy, because I think that AI has a very strong ability to just sort of reduce people's willingness to do work. It's like you could offload…”

“I've got agents ordering on Amazon, ordering on Instacart, yeah, dealing with or like, you know, if there's, like, an activity your kid has, and there's this laundry list of things you're supposed to have ready, I'll, like, send that to the agent and be like, …”

“Fiji is like it's like the person I, one of the person I look up to the most, right? Whether it's her still at Meta, whether it's her leading Instacart for, like, very rough time, whether it's her not open AI and kind of, like, figuring out the business life. …”

“I think the best venture capital, I, someone asked me what's the best venture capital bets. I talk about a paradoxical one. I think it's Mike Moritz betting on Instacart. Why? Because he lost three hundred and seventy million on web van less than a decade ago.…”

“As much as A-B testing and like high velocity optimizations feel like progress, and to some extent they will be, when you're at a business of that scale where we're talking like 30 to forty billion in gross transaction volume, the only thing that really moves …”

“When we launched Snap EBT, which is like food stamps to be able to pay with those on Instacart. It became a billion dollar business line in less than a year and then grew up to be four billion.”

“Thumbtack, amazing culture, incredible workplace. I would love to have worked there forever, and Instacart, incredible business, but neglected culture, not a pleasant place to work.”

“So yes, DoorDash did beat Instacart. I mean, why did that happen? I think the main thing is they expanded faster, went, you know, beyond restaurant sooner. I think also their key insight was when the suburbs, they got there first, beat, you know, Uber Eats to …”

“There are so many loved features of Instacart, but at the end of the day, it's a billion items that updates 3000 times every single minute to get homeowners their groceries.”

“Would it be easier to start Instacart, Amazon, or Coupang, or would it be easier to start an enterprise SaaS software company? Definitely the enterprise SaaS software company.”

“And it's billions. It's like a giant percentage of their gross margin just gets plowed right back into things that you can just get on Instacart for much cheaper.”

“So I'm in for 25, but one big deal is we sold the company to Instacart. A while ago, and I have a bunch of friends who are executives at the company, and I do want to better understand this model from their point of view. That would be the one big deal is insi…”

“Like I started the e-commerce team at scale where we were labeling e-commerce data, like from Meta, from Instacart, from DoorDash.”

“I also think that works, you know, like the bar for consumers is so high these days. Yeah. We've been spoiled with incredible software. Like every time I use Uber, Instacart, like this is like, we are just so spoiled that the bar for polish, like nobody wants …”

“Almost all of Instacart's profits come from advertising.”

“I was reading about the deal that they made with, between Uber and Instacart, and I think that's brilliant, like, both of them, right? Like, it positioned them much better in restaurant delivery against players like, you know DoorDash.”

“You would say that Felipe, one of my business partners, he saw Instacart raise like forty one million dollars. I think it was like a Series B or something like that. And we thought that that was like all the money in the universe, right? And Felipe said, we sh…”

“Instacart would be a complete disaster if all the people running around as executives being founder mode. Like, you need them to, like, sign up for goals and hit them and turn cranks and take incredible joy out of hitting their metrics, right, so that you can …”

“Instacart signed up for Stripe with a Gmail address”

“When you get into those stores, really focusing on services like Instacart, I've seen that have a much higher, I'm talking like Two to three times higher ROI than spending on Meta.”

“I went to Whole Foods, and I tried to see what percentage of the people coming are paid shoppers versus individual shoppers. How many are holding an Instacart badge or a DoorDash? It was actually 17% over a period of two hours. That was zero two years ago.”

“Instacart's a very prominent one and one of the more recent ones that have talked about their use of ClickHouse and in an effort to obviously control their spiraling data warehouse costs, they've looked to ClickHouse to help solve that problem, but also in ter…”

“Not only do they have a. 33% annual year or year growth rate already, but they're also now starting to introduce ads and kind of playing that Instacart strategy of, you know, the bigger picture here in terms of how big the market can get.”

“When we looked at the data, it turns out like after five times when you go to Instacart, 90% of your order is the same, right?”

“So at the time there was a company called Instacart. They had raised something like two hundred and fifty million dollars before shipped was even open.”

“It's the same thing with like late stage private capital. It's like, it's just a shitty asset class, right? Like, it's like, I understand why you want to be a hyper profitable, super Thingy AI companies with infinite pop side and tons of control of their margi…”

“Instacart was one of these companies that got you know, really high valuations during the pull forward that we saw in the Zerp COVID period. You know, it hit a valuation of almost forty billion dollars. they went on to raise subsequent rounds of private fina…”

“Like even in the SPAC space, look at him and hers, or look at SoFi, Anthony Noto, like they, they've actually done well over the past six months, like numbers up and to the right, stock up and to the right, and much smaller than Instacart, so it is doable.”

“So you don't have to come up with new ideas. You can just look at the graveyard of ideas and ask, was the, was this a good idea, but just timing what was wrong? That's another way to do it.”

“I actually, I'd much rather own, as I guess I do, a little bit of Reddit than Instacart for a thousand reasons. It's a much easier business.”

“If you look at, yeah, companies like Uber, even Instacart, you know, I met not too long ago, the early CFO of Instacart who they would get like the police called on them because the shoppers are illegally going into like a grocery store without permission and …”

“Six hundred million? Five X. Yeah, six hundred billion. We would have been Instacart. We would have had a payment system because we'd have so much share of wallet. There was so much more we would have done.”

“And I will say in 24, you should still not buy Instacart stock.”

“Instacart and DoorDash are still our customers today. Uber Eats and Uber still our customers.”

“You've got your Instacart, your Uber, your Lyft. They've kind of, like, gotten to where they need to be. There isn't actually very many people in that middle zone in terms of Marketplace network effects today.”

“Most of the late stage investors in Instacart are underwater. The early stage folks absolutely crushed it.”

“All three IPOs within a few days have breached their issue price.”

“Instacart's float was 6.7%, and Klaviyo's float 7.6. Arms float almost hit the 10%, 9.4”

“Series F broke even. And then everybody who invested in 20, 20 and 20, 21 actually lost money.”

“I just want to give credit to Fiji who came in to this business while it was down, like shrinking, 16% year over year within two years, got it profitable, had like five straight quarters of growth, took it public.”

“Basically everyone, everyone since 2015 is underwater.”

“This is, like, a fake IPO, right in terms of how it's being structured. Like, yes, they need to get public, and they're getting public, and they're technically public. Yes, all true. Tiny float, right? You know, set it up, you know, set it up in a way where, l…”

“Instacart was in some ways an even more complicated business than Opendoor because it's a four sided marketplace. We have shoppers, we have buyers, we have advertisers, and we have the retailers that are on the platform as well with various different incentive…”

“Simplification is a superpower, and it's actually very difficult and a lot of executives, you know, when they're faced with two potentially high-impact initiatives, are often tempted to say, let's do both. Let's figure out how we can do both. The good ones can…”

“Instacart, the growth and consumer team was over 300 people, right?”

“And so at Instacart, for example, our North star metric for growth was monthly active orders.”

“There's a holdout for ads, for example. So there are some lucky Instacart users out there that are not getting ads and they've never gotten ads because they've always been part of Instacart's advertising.”

“I joined Instacart in 20, 21, and it was a very interesting time because the company had forex the year before.”

“Instacart was also a retail enablement company, meaning that we weren't just building the Instacart app. We were actually building technologies for our grocers. You know, when you go to Publix.com, Kroger.com, Schnucks.com, like that's Instacart technology tha…”

“We do a billion searches a month, a quarter, sorry. And you know, it's all powered by AI.”

“We have suggested a billion replacement at this point. And like, that's all powered by AI.”

“You can't expect every engineer to go super deep to understand everything that's going on. But at the same time, if you keep generative AI just in a centralized team, it's not going to impact all of your products. So you really need the combo of the two to mak…”

“We've also deployed an internal assistant called Ava so that all of our engineers can leverage the GPT-IV models in a lot of what they're doing, but do that in an assisted way that helps them figure out how to integrate that.”

“I think it's going to impact productivity well beyond engineering. A lot of people are talking about, you know, making software development easier, but I'll give you some other examples like our marketing team, for example, created an entire library of animate…”

“The fact that Instacart has aggregated, you know 80,000 stores, more than a thousand retailers means that we can create these magical experiences where you ask the software, you know, things in a natural language, And food shows up at your door in two hours.”

“In the future, I want to make that available kind of as a platform, because you could imagine any nutrition app, any apps that's doing like anything that has to do with food or even commerce tapping into this network and making it available to like, Basically …”

“We have actually have data that shows that customers who are omnichannel customers are more valuable than the online only customer or the Offline only customer.”

“We have a K-pop cart rolled out at Kroger, Sobeys, Wakefern”

“In the last two, three years, honestly we've had a lot, it's probably fifty-fifty now, but like we have a ton of interest in delivery. And so, you know, people still think of me as the rideshare guy, but like half of our revenue and traffic probably comes from…”