YouSaid · the spoken record

Apoorva Mehta

lines on the record: 46
first: 2017-04-10
most recent: 2017-04-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh, I think luck is the 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 is way too late and there's too much competition. And so the timing, being there at the right place and the right time is everything.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I'm so lucky to be where I am today and being surrounded by some amazing people who work very, very hard. It's just really, really lucky.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 we're not doing our job well overall and that transfers to other important things. And so to me, I think it's making sure 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 when that doesn't happen, I get pretty stressed out.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 are picking, what is the quality of their picking, 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think as an entrepreneur, at least me, I've just gone through these roller coasters of emotions every single day. 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 press says something. 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 I wanted to solve. And so I was okay with going through a lot of just terrible times to make this a reality.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were in a conference room, and he suddenly gets up and he leaves the meeting. I was confused. I was like, well, I was in the middle of the presentation. And he came back with a floppy disc in his hand. And he sort of slams it on the table and he's like, go home and study what's inside this floppy disk because it has the web van 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 person in Silicon Valley and like, I must be completely wrong. And thankfully, I guess I didn't have a way to open the flapsy display. It just didn't have floppy drive. But so I never really looked at the business plan there. But, you know, it was just, there's a lot of self-doubt.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish that was the case. It was pretty hard, to be honest. I think that, 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 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...”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're not very good at solving technical problems, like some of the problems that, for example, I was working on at Amazon, some of the logistical issues. 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 software company would be able to do and not necessarily a grocery store would be able to do.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's definitely cheaper because, I mean, we have all these grocery stores that 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Early on, because we didn't have any retailer relationships, we would have to mark up the items. And there would be a small delivery fee as well. We didn't know, you know, keep customers would actually want to pay that. And turns out there are a lot of customers who are okay 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 got a call from Gary Tan. 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. And so that's how Instacart got funded.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right I just didn't have the time to wait for that. And so I asked some people that I hadn't 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. 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, this is, this sucks. And I was thinking about it, and I was like,”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Realized from sort of 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 Valley was if I went to an incubator, like Y Combinator, which was sort of the incubator in Silicon Valley. There's only one problem with that, and that was that, you know, I had missed the application deadline by two months.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it just took a few thousand dollars because you were paying all these shoppers and you had to pay them the hours that they worked. And then the money that the customers would pay would show up a few days after. And so there are times where I would just not have any money It was very clear that we needed financing.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And so we, you know, we.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so for example, if you don't have the Heinz ketchup that you ordered, right, how do you make a substitution for that? 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?”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 grocery with it.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 would have to trust them with. Oh, you were giving them gift.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was wearing a suit and a tie for the interview. And I was like, well, 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At first, it was just Craigslist, really. I would just post an ad and get a bunch of people to interview. And I remember the first guy who I hired as a shopper.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it was just two and a half months. I mean, 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. I knew that was obviously not good”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 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 the retailers to be able to compete with Amazon was the way to go. And what that would allow 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the name was called Instacart. I didn't have the domain name at the time, so it was called get Instacart.com was where you would find that. 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 it 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 to myself.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 bought stuff online, like books or... 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 I was still doing in the most inefficient way possible. To me, That was a problem that I cared about Was a problem that I was so passionate about that I had to solve it.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's hard to pinpoint one sort of single aha moment, but it was sort of a feeling in my mind that it 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 around the aisles in a grocery store or waiting in line at the checkout or in some cases, you know, 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 sort of kept telling myself I should have known that I was impassionate about this. I should have known this. To give you some perspective, 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. So this was just the worst time in my life. I remember Of so many nights when I would just wake up and cry because there's just nothing else I could do.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that it could have worked. But what I'd been doing so far in my journey as an entrepreneur was that I had been looking for good-uncode 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. In fact, I even raised about a million dollars in financing. But I realized very quickly 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 care about what they did on their day-to-day life. It was just, it's just didn't matter to me. And after about a year of doing this, I just realized that I was going in the wrong direction and just wasn't going to work.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the idea was that LinkedIn was just too generic and it was just not for everyone. This was the hypothesis that if there were specific features that were built for lawyers, then it would be useful to them and they would be willing to use this product. And if they were willing to use this product, maybe there are ways to monetize as well.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, 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 life when I was like, well, am I even cut out to be an entrepreneur at all? You know, I remember sort of one idea though, 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. And the idea was... Social network for lawyers”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both, whatever the idea required. For example, one of the ideas that I was working on was there 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 enacting, you're probably a good idea for you to be in Hollywood. And so it wasn't like I had a job to do. So why not move to San Francisco?”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And to me, the way to do this fully was to actually quit my job. And a couple 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At all, but I liked it. So I sort of thought that I was going in the right direction. And then I realized that work was getting in the way. And 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.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 were talking about the car rental company. And so you were a computer.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bunch of these tech luminaries to meetup to speak to us. 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 sort of listening to this talk, and they could have been talking in Hebrew for all it mattered”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After sort of 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 sort of 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 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 be, it 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...”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 had ever worked on. So to me, this was just fun.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember telling my investor 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 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 was impassionate about this. I should have known this.”
2017-04-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Instacart: Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT