Instacart's growth relied on partnerships and sales teams to jumpstart the marketplace, not just product and paid acquisition. The other key lesson: ruthless prioritization from the top down, with leaders like Apoorva constantly asking whether work aligned with yearly strategy.
Chapters
What do you think some of the biggest learnings were from your time there as maybe an operationally kind of complex marketplace?
I think people underthink about partnerships and sales as a lever for marketplaces because people think, oh, it's a marketplace, there should be lots of liquidity on both sides. So we do scaled go-to-market motion on each side via product, organic and paid or what have you. And certainly those work. But, you know, as I mentioned earlier, Instacart, as you guys know, is pretty consolidated on 2 of the 4 sides of the marketplace. And we invested in great partnerships and sales team that was able to, you know, jumpstart our ecosystem and then build out the right sets of deals that we needed for the marketplace to succeed. So that's at least for me, one big lesson. Another big lesson from my time at Instacart, especially, you know, due to the complexity that we talked about of the 4-sided marketplace, is just the value of prioritization. Having worked at, you know, a few different companies with a lot of different executives, I think everybody says that they're good at prioritization and that's the top skill for, you know, senior executives, but most people aren't. So if you give people the option of, hey, like we're thinking about doing A or B, These are the trade-offs. Both are good ideas. Majority of executive teams will say, let's try to do both. Let's squeeze it in. And the good ones will say, well, you know, like A clearly seems better. Let's focus on A. Let's come back to B, you know, next quarter, next year, whatever. And I think the really good ones like Apoorva would say, why are we doing either of them? they don't fit in with our overall core, you know, strategy for this year or what have you. And I saw Apurva actually doing that quite often at Instacart, which, you know, culture comes from the top. And because he did that, everyone else understood that focus was the most important thing. And it spread through the organization because of that. Because with a company that large, with that many sides to the marketplace, it's very easy to, you know, get caught on your own tail. And just be running on a bunch of things without producing results. And so I think trying to push that focus and being maniacal about what the most important thing is, only doing the most important thing, I think is critical.
