Instacart founder Apoorva Mehta reflects on his decision to leave his engineering role at Amazon to pursue entrepreneurship.
Insight
Mehta: Competing with Amazon required partnering with retailers rather than underpricing them
“I realized in order to sort of really compete with them, I would have to do something that's meaningfully different, and it couldn't be something that was just, it was like cheaper or anything like that, because Amazon has gobs and gobs of money, so it wasn't …”
Insight
Mehta: Startup success is mostly luck and narrow market timing windows
“Oh, I think luck is majority of it. I mean, you know, there's just so many elements of luck, so many times when luck plays a part, but I think it's specifically true in startups, because in startups, what you have is this moment in time when a company is possi…”
Assertion Supported
Mehta: Instacart launched its first catalog by scraping Safeway.com
“The first version of the app, I found that there was this website called Safeway.com and there was just a grocery store and I saw that they had all their inventory available online. And so I just scraped it and I was like, great. I have all the items that I am…”
Insight
Mehta: Grocery delivery customers love receiving phone calls about out-of-stock substitutions
“Initially we tried with not calling the customers, and we said, hey, customers will probably find this pretty intrusive, but then we realized that, no, actually, customers love it when, you know, when our shoppers call the customers, because they feel so speci…”
Assertion Supported
Mehta: Instacart got into Y Combinator after sending Garry Tan beer
“I opened the app, I ordered a six pack of beer, and I addressed it for the Y Combinator headquarters. And half an hour later, I get a call from Gary Tan, and he's like, what is this? And I was like, oh, this is Instacart. And I guess the beer must have been pr…”
Insight
Mehta: Tech founders should be in Silicon Valley like actors in Hollywood
“To me, it was like, if you're an acting, you're probably a good idea for you to be in Hollywood.”