Apoorva Mehta on responding to crisis and the time Amazon bought Instacart’s largest partner

It's pretty rare for a company to not have moments where you think that's not gonna work out. You're gonna have that, right. It's just par for the course. What was that moment? I had several, but I'll give you one of them. It was summer of 2017 at this very early morning meeting with the CEO of Whole Foods, which was the largest partner on the Instacart. They had like, 30, 40% of our sales. So I get on the call. He tells me in the first five seconds of the call that Amazon, our largest competitor, had decided to buy Whole Foods, our largest partner. It was a gut punch. It was like, this is it. After I got my head together, I called in all hands with the whole company and told them that this means that we're going to be in war mode and we will prevail, and we're going to come back in the next couple of weeks with a plan. And that's what we did. And that plan involved signing every major grocery retailer on Instacart, continue to expand dramatically across the country, and growing our subscription business very significantly as well, to the point that by the time Whole Foods left our platform, they were less than 1% of our volume, and we had every major grocer in the country on our platform. And so this was obviously an incredible challenge. But the team rallied, and we came out far stronger. And obviously, today, we're far larger than Amazon. I do think a lot of times crisis is an opportunity. Crisis is a gift. It allows for focus in a way that is so hard to create. Every company, I'm sure, talks about sense of urgency and, you know, execution, excellence and so on, Right? But here we had this moment in time when our largest competitor had just bought the largest partner, right? I mean, how do you create that moment? All right? And that meant that there was only one way out, which was to really fight through it. And so we use this as an opportunity to rally the team. And the team worked harder than they've ever done.