Instacart: Apoorva Mehta

App developer Apoorva Mehta almost gave up on being an entrepreneur until he figured out what he really wanted to do: find a hassle-free way to buy groceries. Five years after launch, the grocery delivery app Instacart is valued at $3 billion. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  I remember telling my investor, "My heart's not in it." I felt just terrible. I mean, this was likely the worst sort of few weeks in my life. And I remember I was sort of being myself up at that point in time, just because I sort of kept telling myself, "I should have known that I wasn't passionate about this. I should have known this." So, do you know how much money did they end up losing? I think they lost the $1 million.

• 0:37Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 0:48Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Apoorva Mehta went from couch surfing computer programmer to founding a billion-dollar company that's changing the way we get our groceries.

• 1:07Guy Raz?

  So if you ask me what it is I've learned about business from all the entrepreneurs we've had on the show, the number one thing is, "There is a problem. If it could be solved, the world will be better off. And here is the proposed solution: Throw in some hard work and lots of luck, and you've got a business," which is what eventually happened to Apoorva Mehta. He couldn't stand going to the grocery store, hated the parking lot, the lines, the lighting, the whole experience. And as a programmer, he knew there was a technology solution to his problem. And the proposed solution? It's called Instacart. You open the app, check out the grocery items you want, and those groceries are delivered to

• 1:52Guy Raz?

  your front door. The company is now valued at more than $3 billion. And it was founded barely five years ago by Apoorva when he was just 26 years old. And unlike lots of wonderkin tech entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, he didn't go to Stanford or MIT. Apoorva actually grew up in Canada, went to college there, and he studied, of course, computers. And when he graduated, he landed a job in Seattle, working on supply chain for Amazon.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  To be honest, I loved it. I wasn't even sure why they were even paying me. I was just having so much fun. I was learning so much. I was working on the most interesting problems that I'd ever worked on. So to me, this was just fun. But after about one and a half years, I realized that my learning was plateauing. I wasn't really necessarily growing. I wasn't being challenged. And so as I stepped back and reflected on what I wanted to do, I realized that it wasn't that a different role or a different company would change that. It was that what would be fulfilling for me is to make a material difference in this world.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  And I wouldn't be able to do that, working in a bigger company. And so one of the ways that I thought that would allow me to make a material difference is to be an entrepreneur. And I thought that being an entrepreneur would be cool, but I didn't know anything about it. And so I started to go to these tech meetups in Seattle. And I remember the first one that I went to, they had invited a bunch of these tech luminaries to the meetup to speak to us.

• 3:41Guy Raz?

  Who was there?

• 3:42Speaker 00

  It was Gordon Bing, or sorry, I think it's Bing Gordon. But he was an executive from Electronic Arts, EA, which is a really big game company. And I remember listening to this talk, and they could have been talking in Hebrew for all that mattered.

• 4:01Guy Raz?

  Like you had no idea what he was talking about?

• 4:03Speaker 00

  I had absolutely zero idea. They were talking about things like enterprise startups. And to me, if you were talking about an enterprise startup, it meant like you're talking about the car rental company.

• 4:13Guy Raz?

  Because you were a computer geek. You did not understand the language of business at this point.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  At all, but I liked it. So I sort of thought that I was going in the right direction.

• 4:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  And then I realized that work was getting in the way. And the the fact that I would come up with all these ideas that I would want to build into companies, and I wasn't able to put my full attention to those because I was going to work.

• 4:40Guy Raz?

  Right, because you were you were still at Amazon.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and to me, the way to do this fully was to actually quit my job. And a couple of weeks after that, I decided to quit. I didn't have a clue what my startup was going to do, but I knew that I wanted to do this.

• 4:57Guy Raz?

  And so did you leave Seattle at that point?

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so as I read more and more about entrepreneurship and as I started to find all these people that I would be able to talk to who are sort of, you know, prolific entrepreneurs and investors, they just had something in common, which was that all of them were in Silicon Valley. To me, it was like, if you're in acting, you're probably a good idea for you to be in Hollywood. And so it wasn't like I was, you know, I had a job to do, so, you know, why not move to San Francisco?

• 5:30Guy Raz?

  Paint a picture for me. Were you like, did you get an apartment in San Francisco and you had like your computer there and you were just tinkering on it all day? Or were you meeting with people? Because I'm assuming you probably didn't know that many people there, did you?

• 5:45Speaker 00

  When I moved to San Francisco, I only knew one guy here. And, you know, lucky for me, he also had a couch. And so that's where I was. And I would, you know, sleep on the couch and wake up and start tinkering and starting to write code for the new idea that I was working on. That was pretty much my life for the next two years.

• 6:06Guy Raz?

  And when you say writing code, you were writing at that point, apps or writing code for for websites?

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Both, whatever the the idea required. For example, one of the ideas that I was working on was, it was this thing called office hours. And this would allow anyone to connect with tech luminaries or luminaries in general. And it would be like a one on one session with someone for 30 minutes or an hour. And that was a website, that was in an app.

• 6:34Guy Raz?

  And what happened to that idea? Because it sounds pretty cool.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, so turns out that you really can't get that many quote unquote tech luminaries to spend enough of a time on this platform, because they're all busy. And so it didn't work.

• 6:50Guy Raz?

  So all the while, you're sort of living with a friend and you don't have to pay a coder because you're doing all the backend technology, right?

• 6:59Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 7:00Guy Raz?

  So were you, I mean, was it super exciting? Were you having just like tons of fun?

• 7:05Speaker 00

  It started off being really interesting and fun because I was learning a lot of these interesting things like how to, what business models work and what don't, what, how to build a prototype really, really fast, how to advertise. But then sort of, you know, after going through all these ideas, I was getting pretty tired. I was getting tired of sort of failing. I remember this was a pretty low point in my, in my life when I was like, well, am I even cut out to be an entrepreneur at all? And, you know, I remember sort of one idea that was sort of something that had been in my mind and I thought that this idea was just brilliant. This is going to be the one that is a home run. It's just, you know, it's going to be awesome.

• 7:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  The idea was a social network for lawyers.

• 7:51Guy Raz?

  Wow. You clearly don't know many lawyers. They do not tend to be social.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  That is something I overlooked.

• 7:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So what, the idea behind it was like a sort of like a LinkedIn, but, but more specialized?

• 8:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the idea was that LinkedIn was just too generic and it was just not for everyone.

• 8:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  You know, this was the hypothesis that, that if there were specific features that were built for lawyers, then it would be useful to them and they would be willing to, to use this product. And if they were willing to use this product, maybe there are ways to monetize as well.

• 8:27Guy Raz?

  So, but, so you have this idea and, and what, you, you ran with it?

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. In fact, I even raised about a million dollars in financing. But I realized very quickly that, that as soon as I went home after work, I stopped thinking about work. I stopped thinking about lawyers. I didn't care about lawyers. I didn't, I didn't care about what they did on their day to day life. It was just, it just didn't matter to me. And, you know, after about, about a year of doing this, I just realized that I, I was going in the wrong direction and just wasn't going to work.

• 8:59Guy Raz?

  And was the company, was the concept proving to be successful in any way? Or was it, did it seem pretty clear that it just wasn't working?

• 9:08Speaker 00

  I think that it could have worked. But what I had been doing so far in my journey as an entrepreneur was that I had been looking for good, quote unquote, business ideas. And they were not necessarily business ideas that I cared about. They were just business ideas. And sort of that's when I realized that the odds of success in a startup are so low anyway. You sort of have to go, you have to put everything that you have in it. You just can't do that for an idea that you just don't care about. And that's when I said that I just can't do this and I quit my own startup.

• 9:50Guy Raz?

  So what did you do? I mean, do you remember like what you told your investors?

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember telling my investor the same thing, which was that my heart's not in it. I felt just terrible. I mean, this was likely the worst sort of a few weeks in my life. And I remember having to tell them, look, I'll do what you think is best. If you want, we can return the money. And the good thing here was that these guys were very experienced investors. And they had seen this happen before and they knew that it was the right thing to do for the company. And it was the right thing to do for me. And they were extremely supportive during this time.

• 10:33Guy Raz?

  So do you know how much, like how much money did they end up losing?

• 10:37Speaker 00

  I think they lost the million dollars.

• 10:40Guy Raz?

  Wow, that must have been, that must have been really tough.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's this feeling that I should have known this. I should have known that this was not going to work. I should have known better. I should, and this is sort of a continuous feeling that happens to me. And I think that I was sort of being myself up at that point in time, just because I, I sort of kept telling myself, I should have known that I was impassioned about this. I should have known this. And, you know, to give you some perspective, I was.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  You know, I'm not an American. And so I didn't have any income. And I was in a country where I only had a limited amount of time that I could really be here. Because I'm an immigrant. And so during this time, my mom also was going through some health issues as well. And this was just the worst time in my life. I remember sort of so many nights when I would just wake up and cry because there was just nothing else I could do.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  How were you able to turn that around? I mean, it's hard to pinpoint one sort of single aha moment. But it was sort of a feeling in my mind that had been developing over the whole entire year, which was that I should be doing something that I care about. I should be doing something that I'm passionate about. And it turned out to be something that was sort of pretty close to home. And that was the fact that ever since I can remember, from childhood memories I'm talking about, I had always hated every aspect of grocery shopping. Going around and around in the aisles in a grocery store or waiting in line at the checkout.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Or in some cases, frankly, memories of being in Canada and waiting for the bus with all the bags in your hands and your fingers are just freezing in the cold. You know, everything about it to me was just painful. And for the last two years of my life, I had just worked on building all these cool apps and products and so on. And I realized that I did everything online. I did, I bought stuff online, like books or whatever. And I met people online. I watched TV online. I was doing everything online. But the one activity that I've always hated in my entire life,

• 13:05Speaker 00

  I was still doing in the most inefficient way possible. To me. That was a problem that I cared about. That was a problem that I was so passionate about that I had to solve it.

• 13:19Guy Raz?

  Apoorva, how long did it take you to go from that low point when you left the lawyer social network company to when you started to think about Instacart? Was it days? Was it weeks? Was it months of being depressed or longer?

• 13:38Speaker 00

  It was a few weeks. And I remember, this was really interesting because there were weeks where I was so depressed, the lowest points in my life. And as soon as I started thinking about this idea, I was at a high all the time. Right. Like, this was just, you know, it's sort of like the feeling of falling in love. You can't stop thinking about it.

• 14:02Guy Raz?

  That's Apoorva Mehta. In just a moment, how quick thinking and a six pack of beer got Instacart on the radar of Silicon Valley's biggest investors. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 14:38Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012. Apoorva Mehta has just come up with the idea for a grocery delivery app. And he's sure it's going to become huge. But at this point, the company is just Apoorva.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  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 going to have in the first version of the app. And so, you know, over the next few weeks, I built the app and I placed the first order. But because I was the sort of the only person in this company at this time, I placed an order and then I went to the grocery store, picked the order and delivered it to myself.

• 15:35Guy Raz?

  So was the whole concept already mapped out by that point?

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, the idea was that we would connect to all the people who wanted to get their groceries delivered with all the people who wanted to earn money while picking and delivering groceries.

• 15:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  And so, you know, I started sharing this with my friends. And it was really interesting because, you know, before Instacart, I would share products with my friends and they would use it out of guilt. It was just, oh yeah, we want to help Porva out. But this one was different. It was very clear that the people wanted to use this product. It was really cool because in the first version of the app, anytime anyone would place an order, I would get a text. And every time I would get a text, I would look at it and say, oh, let's see who places the order. And so for the first few days, for a few weeks, I just saw my friends using the app on a regular basis, which was really cool.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  And then I saw people who were using the app who I didn't even know. And so what had happened was that my friends were sharing the app with their friends. This word of mouth was starting and people were telling each other about, hey, you can get your groceries delivered. And so that's when I realized that I needed more people to pick and deliver the groceries.

• 16:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah, was it called Instacart at this point, already at the beginning?

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the name was called Instacart. I didn't have the domain name at the time, so it was called getinstacart.com was where you would find that.

• 17:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  And to me, the idea was that customers should expect instant gratification. And anything less than that would essentially mean that there was just another barrier in the customer experience that you're adding.

• 17:22Guy Raz?

  And there were, I mean, there are, and even at the time, there were other... Delivery services, right? Like Peapod and Amazon even had one and still has one and Fresh Direct and others. But I guess their models were completely different, presumably because they were actually, they had inventory. You did not have any inventory.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. I realized even from day one at Instacart that our biggest competitor was going to be Amazon.

• 17:49Guy Raz?

  Your former employer.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  That's right. And 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, it wasn't that. It just had to be something that they just wouldn't be able to do. And it turns out there are a lot of retailers across the country where people really want to shop from, people get their, their favorite types of groceries from, and they don't like Amazon. And so to me, it was the ability to sort of build something for, for the retailers to be able to compete with Amazon was the way to go.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  And what that would allow the, the customers to do is get their groceries from their favorite grocery stores and get a much better selection than you would be able to get on Amazon just because every single grocery store is on this platform. And so you have just many more items and many different types of items than you would be able to get on Amazon.

• 18:55Guy Raz?

  So from the time that you built this and started to kind of test it, to the time when you thought, all right, I better go out and like get some money to scale this. How, how long was that? Like a few months?

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it was just two, two and a half months. And I mean, it was, it was becoming pretty clear because I was just hiring all these people with my very limited money. And my bank balance at a time actually hit zero.

• 19:24Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  I knew that was obviously not good.

• 19:26Guy Raz?

  And how were you finding, how were you finding people to hire? I mean, you're talking about personal shoppers, right? That, that would do the grocery shopping. How were you able to, to find those people?

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Well, at first, it was just Craigslist, really. I maybe just post an ad and get a bunch of people to interview. And I remember the first guy who I hired as a shopper, he was wearing a suit and a tie for the interview. And I was like, this is a job for picking and delivering groceries. But if he's wearing a suit and tie, I better hire him. And so that's what I did.

• 19:57Guy Raz?

  How were you able to make sure that the shoppers that you were hiring were, you know, like honest and upstanding and all that stuff, right?

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Believe me, it wasn't easy. I think we had lots of interesting experiences there where in the early days of Instacart, one of the ways that shoppers would check out at the grocery store when they had bought the groceries for someone else is by using gift cards. So, you know, you would have to trust them.

• 20:24Guy Raz?

  Oh, you were giving them gift, you were giving them these big gift cards, essentially a prepaid credit card?

• 20:30Speaker 00

  That's right. That turns out to be great for a lot of people. I mean, most people are pretty trustworthy, but for some people, they were just buying their own groceries.

• 20:39Guy Raz?

  So were there like other hurdles you had to deal with? Like, what would happen if the store was like out of avocados or something?

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, so for example, if you don't have the Heinz ketchup that you ordered, right? How do you make a substitution for that?

• 20:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  And so we realized that we would have to make that app pretty smart because it would have to understand, hey, this item's out of stock. What should I replace this with that costs around the same, but is something that the customer will be happy with?

• 21:09Guy Raz?

  So what happens? Does the shopper call the customer and say, hey, they don't have Heinz ketchup, but they've got Hunts, do you want that?

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, so 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 our shoppers call the customers because they feel so special. They're like, hey, yeah, this person's actually looking out for me. When the papaya has gone bad, the shopper will call the customer and say, hey, you know, I could get you this papaya, but it's not the best quality. Right? And that's a very sort of intimate experience.

• 21:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  And so we, you know, we encouraged it.

• 21:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I just have a curiosity, like, how much money at the beginning did it take?

• 21:55Speaker 00

  To keep this going before you had any outside money? I think it just took a few thousand dollars because you were paying all these shoppers and you had to pay them for the hours that they worked. And then the money that the customers would pay would show up a few days after. And so there were times where I would just not have any money. And it was very clear that we needed financing. So how did you find the investors? I realized from going through the startup ideas that I had, which was that who you're raising money from, the quality of the investors was really important. And so to me, the way that I would be able to attract some of the best investors in Silicon

• 22:37Speaker 00

  Valley was if I went to an incubator, like Y Combinator, which was the incubator in Silicon Valley. And there's only one problem with that, and that was that I had missed the application deadline by two months. Which meant that what, you'd have to wait another year, basically? That's right. And I just didn't have the time to wait for that. And so I asked some people that I had met in San Francisco to connect me with the partners in Y Combinator. And then finally, I get one response. And it was Gary Tan, one of the partners at Y Combinator. He said, "Look, it's likely not going to work, but you can fill out a late application."

• 23:20Speaker 00

  So I filled out a late application, and then finally, I get a response from him. And he says, "Nope, it's too late." And I was like, "God, this sucks." And I was thinking about it, and I was like, "This guy, does he even know what Instacart is? Has he even tried out the product? Does he even know why it's different?" And so what I did was 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 pretty good, because he asked me to come in the next day for an interview. And so I show up for the interview the next day, and soon after that, I was accepted.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  And so that's how Instacart got funded. Wow.

• 24:09Guy Raz?

  And the business model was based on the idea that there would be a delivery fee plus, obviously, a premium, like you'd pay a slightly higher price for a product than you would if you actually went to the store and bought it yourself.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  That's right. Early on, because we didn't have any retailer relationships, we would have to mark up the items and there'd be a small delivery fee as well. We didn't know, you know, customers would actually want to pay that. And it turns out there are a lot of customers who are OK with that. But then we realized that if we partnered with the grocery stores, we could really reduce the premium or make it to be, frankly, the same price as the store. And that dramatically changed the way that people interact with Instacart today.

• 24:54Guy Raz?

  So when you say partner, I mean, you were able to reduce the cost of the groceries because the supermarket partnered with you, actually paid you guys to do that service on their behalf?

• 25:06Speaker 00

  That's right. So today, you know, hundreds of retailers across the country pay us a fee to be on Instacart.

• 25:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, and I guess the question is, why wouldn't a big grocery chain, right? Like, I know you do a lot of Whole Foods, for example. Like, why wouldn't they just make their own Instacart? Is it just cheaper to work and more efficient to work with a company like yours that already exists and has the infrastructure?

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Well, so it's definitely cheaper because, I mean, you know, we have all these grocery stores that will already work with us. And so it's definitely that. But I'd say that the main reason is that we are a technology company and a lot of the grocery stores are very good at managing grocery stores, managing the inventory in the grocery stores, managing how the produce is fresh and so on. What they're not very good at is solving technical problems, like some of the problems that, for example, I was working on at Amazon, some of the logistical issues.

• 26:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  So how do you make sure that the shoppers, when they're picking the groceries in the store, they are doing that in the most efficient way possible? We know where the items are already located. We've mapped them in many cases. And so those types of things are things that a soft a software company would be able to do and and and not necessarily a grocery store would be able to do.

• 26:28Guy Raz?

  So I mean, in those, you know, those sort of first two years or so, were were investors like beating down your door to invest in this as as people started to download the app and use it?

• 26:41Speaker 00

  You know, I wish that was the case.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  You know, it was it was pretty hard, to be honest. I think that, um, you know, early on, it wasn't very obvious to most people that this would become something and because there had been other ideas like this before, like Webvan back in the day and during the dot com era. And that was one of the biggest failures of all time, like it literally lost billions of dollars. I remember one time I was pitching a venture capitalist and you know, we were in a conference room and he suddenly gets up and he leaves the meeting.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  I was confused. I was like, well, I was in the middle of the presentation and he came back with a floppy disk in his hand. And he sort of slams it on the on the table and he's like, go home and study what's inside this floppy disk because it has the Webvan business model. And so you need to understand that really well and why it didn't work. And I was like, well, this guy is just so smart and, you know, he's like well known a person in Silicon Valley and like I must be completely wrong. And thankfully, I guess I didn't have a way to open the floppy disk, but it just didn't have floppy drive. But um, so I never really looked at the the business plan there, but you know, it was just, it was, there's a lot of self doubt, you know.

• 28:02Guy Raz?

  How did you overcome that self doubt? How did you know that? Or did you just kind of live with it?

• 28:09Speaker 00

  I think, you know, as a as an entrepreneur, at least me, I've just gone through these roller coasters of emotions every single day. You know, there you'll hear some investor telling you something like that where they completely rule out your idea, something that's going to work or someone in the Says something and the other times you're growing really fast and customers love your product. Right. And to me, it was just that I just felt like this should exist. I was really solving a problem that, you know, I wanted to solve. And so I was okay with going through a lot of just terrible times to make this a reality.

• 28:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, I wonder how you how you deal with the roller coaster stuff even now, right? Because, I mean, of course, there's always going to be criticism and there are always going to be people who who have complaints, but I mean, how do you? How do you manage quality? How do you maintain, you know, a quality of service across, you know, thousands of employees?

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'll start with saying that we're learning and we have a long, long way to still go. You know, we went from having zero shoppers to having tens of thousands of people on our platform really, really quickly. And so I don't think we're doing everything perfectly yet. But we've had luck so far in building a very strong culture. And the teams in the store have metrics that they are assigned in terms of how fast they're picking. What is the quality of their picking? How how many good replacements are they making? And they're sort of all working towards a common goal. And I think that that has helped build that camaraderie and the culture that I truly care about.

• 29:53Guy Raz?

  What what what keeps you up at night like like drones delivering groceries to people? And or like, what is it that you're worried could could like knock you guys off?

• 30:04Speaker 00

  I think that it really is just our lack of execution that I think will be the cause of our failure if we end up failing. That's what keeps me up at night and it's it's little things like this small element of a meeting just did not go well or project is not going well, even though it may not be the most important project in the company. But to me, that's a sign that that we're not doing our job well overall. And that transfers to to other important things. And so to me, I think it's making sure that that the team is working on all the little details and they're paying attention to those details and doing a great job at it is very important. And I when I when that doesn't happen, I get pretty stressed out.

• 30:49Guy Raz?

  And how many how many people work directly for Instacart now?

• 30:55Speaker 00

  We have around 3,000 employees at Instacart. And we have over 12,000 contractors.

• 31:07Guy Raz?

  Wow, the personal shoppers.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 31:10Guy Raz?

  That's incredible. I mean, you started this five years ago, like in a depression, in a funk, after failing with this million-dollar gamble. That's nuts.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'm so lucky to be where I am today. And, you know, being surrounded by some amazing people who work very, very hard. It's just really, really lucky.

• 31:36Guy Raz?

  I mean, obviously, you're a super smart guy and you worked really, really hard. But is that, I mean, do you think that luck is a bigger part of it?

• 31:43Speaker 00

  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 possible. Anything before that, it's too early. Anything after that, it's way too late and there's too much competition. And so the timing, being there at the right place in the right time, is everything.

• 32:13Guy Raz?

  Apoorva Mehta, founder of Instacart, a company, as we mentioned earlier, now valued at $3.3 billion. It's made Apoorva a rich young man. On Forbes list of the richest people under 40, Apoorva comes in at number 31. Oh, and his late-night Instacart order? Apoorva told us it's ice cream, cheese, crackers, and figs.

• 32:49Guy Raz?

  And please don't turn us off just yet. In a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you guys are building.

• 32:58Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And I gotta tell you, when we heard about this next product, at first, we thought, could this be a joke? Because, well, anyway, we called up the inventor, Tim Gazza. Have there been people who have written to you and have asked, like, what? What are you thinking? This is crazy.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a hit or miss product in terms of a lot of people like it, a lot of people don't. But anytime something comes in and disrupts an existing market, there's always going to be backlash.

• 33:28Guy Raz?

  And the backlash is coming from some of the most opinionated people on earth, parents. But before I tell you what's going on, a little background. So about a year and a half ago, Tim became a parent himself when his son, Jack, was born.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  So I was literally feeding my child every hour for up to 20 minutes at a time. And let's be straight, I mean, feeding is a great bonding time, you know, there's a lot of interaction during the day. But there's also a lot of feeding times at midnight, 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock, in my instance, you know, where the child is basically asleep.

• 34:00Guy Raz?

  And during those moments, you could, of course, be getting stuff done, accomplishing important tasks.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  So that's when the idea came to me that I think I can solve a problem and make a device that connects your smartphone to your baby bottle and give you the opportunity to multitask when you never thought possible.

• 34:18Guy Raz?

  Yes, a problem that many parents did not know needed solving. And Tim's solution? A plastic device that clamps around a baby bottle with an arm that clamps onto your smartphone. You hold the baby in one arm while the clamp holds the bottle at a perfect 45 degree angle. And with your free hand, you can just scroll and swipe to your heart's content.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  There's no harm in when your kid is half asleep and just maybe being able to catch up on some news, read an NPR article.

• 34:49Guy Raz?

  Or, you know, play Candy Crush.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  You know, everyone has their own opinions, but parents are already using their phones while bottle feeding. We're just providing a more secure method of doing it.

• 34:58Guy Raz?

  Tim has the perfect name for this device. He calls it the Swipe and Feed. And after he had that lightbulb moment, he made the first one for himself in his basement.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  I got some actual tin foil and layered a bunch of pieces.

• 35:11Guy Raz?

  Tim made a mold out of the tin foil. He flattened it out over some plastic. And then he used a heat gun to bend the whole thing into the right shape.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  And I made my first very rough prototype. And I kept making those prototypes for probably the first couple of months and just talking to people, especially parents. I talked to a lot of parents. And, you know, after some parents thought that this is definitely something that they would buy, I thought, well, should I sell these?

• 35:34Guy Raz?

  So Tim started a Kickstarter campaign. He raised $13,000, enough to pay for his first batch of inventory. And he eventually found two manufacturers, one in Michigan, the other in North Carolina, to make the plastic and silicone parts of the Swipe and Feed. And then he assembles them right there in his house.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  So I get boxes and boxes of plastic pieces that are assembled and finalized in my basement. And I'm shipping from the same desk that I'm talking to you from right now in my basement in Reston, Virginia.

• 36:05Guy Raz?

  Since January, Tim sold almost 1,000 of these things. But for now, he's keeping his day job as a corporate recruiter.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Would I love for this to be my full-time job? Or do I think it could be? I mean, that's like asking someone if they want to win the lottery. Sure, you know, this, this could be a great success, and I hope it is.

• 36:23Guy Raz?

  OK, but back to the backlash part. Parenting blogs have been lighting up, and some parents say the Swipe and Feed will utterly destroy the parent-baby bond, perhaps even bring an end to civilization as we know it. But Tim, he's, he's optimistic.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  You know, and if you spend all your time focusing on the people who just, you know, are there to try and bring you down, then you never look forward, and you never get anything done.

• 36:48Guy Raz?

  And I mean, it's, it's not like you made an ashtray connected to a bottle feeder. I mean, that would be bad.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Again, it's, it's just new, you know? And there's going to be some buzz around that. And, you know, to some extent, you know, that buzz, whether people are saying great things or whether people are saying bad things, that buzz is still good when you're bringing your product to the market.

• 37:08Guy Raz?

  That's Tim Kaza of Reston, Virginia. To find out more about his company, swipe in feed, go to our Facebook page. And of course, if you have a story about something you're building, please tell us about it. Go to build.npr.org. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or listen to previous episodes, you can go to howibuiltthis.npr.org. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis. Please also help us out by subscribing to our show on iTunes or however you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Our show was produced this week by Ramtin Arablouei, who also composed the music.

• 37:51Guy Raz?

  Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Claire Breen. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  Hi, it's Rachel Martin with NPR News. And you know what? We're doing something new, and we want you to be part of it. It's called Up First. It's the morning news podcast from NPR. It's a way for you and about 10 minutes or so to get up to speed on the news of any given day, the most important stories, the biggest ideas, the stuff you need to know as you go through your day. Up First, it starts April 5. You can get it at npr1 or anywhere you listen to your podcasts.