Apoorva Mehta, founder and original CEO of Instacart, built the company in three weeks in 2012 after noticing groceries were a trillion-dollar category still stuck offline. He wrote the first version of the app alone, then placed an order, drove to the store, picked up the groceries, and delivered them to himself. That is how Instacart started.
The early investor reception was hostile. One meeting ended with a floppy disk slapped on the table containing the Webvan business plan, a company that raised a billion dollars, hired the CEO of Accenture, and collapsed. Mehta's counter was simple: smartphones with GPS now existed, meaning Instacart needed no trucks and no inventory. The model was asset-light by design, not by accident. Sequoia, which had backed Webvan, eventually funded Instacart anyway. Mike Moritz, likely a Webvan board member during its collapse, was involved in both deals.
This transcript is worth reading in full for Mehta's framework on parsing startup ideas from first principles versus inherited conventional wisdom, his account of what Instacart did in its earliest days that could not scale but kept the company alive, and his reasoning for why he is now building a second company. The conversation covers hypergrowth, hiring pressure, and what act two looks like for a founder who already won once.
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