YouSaid · the spoken record

Fidji Simo

lines on the record: 75
first: 2025-05-30
most recent: 2025-05-30
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

“I think it's take a chance on me. Give me a shot when I didn't even believe I was ready, but see the magic in me and make a bet.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's who you want doing your meal planning. I think what we call content is going to evolve towards being much more personality driven. The next wave of creator content might be these different personalities for different chatbots.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of the things that I found super interesting is we're still with AI in the very early innings of what personality looks like. If you go to ChatGPT personality of that chat is fairly generic because it is a generic experience that needs to work for everything. But if you think about what that can evolve towards in the context of food-specific experiences or travel specific experiences, we're going to see a lot of evolution of what we call content because it's not just going to be, oh, it's a podcast or a video. There's a traditional way of thinking about content, but it's also going to be about what is the character of the AI, what is the personality of the AI. And so imagine if you could go to Instacart and select that actually the chatbot you want to interact with the personality of an arrogant French chef and you want your plans.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ends up being truly unique. And I don't think we've fully seen that play out yet, but if you think about recipe content, you can now with AI create entirely new recipes that do not exist in the world. You can just create recipes that are like very specific to your taste and your family, et cetera. And AI will generate that for you. I think that there's going to be a really interesting transition in what we think of in terms of content experiences and how this blocker of content needing to be produced at spending. Some of that in some categories of content is going to go away and allow for an explosion of this much more inspiring experiences.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just eat the same meals over and over again. Content is a way to make it easy for people to get out of that, inspire them to change their diet. Maybe it's toward the healthier diet. Maybe it's toward the more diversified diet. And so that's why we integrated recipe very deeply into the Instacart experience. That's why we also launched lists, which is influencers celebrities, nutritionists being able to create this list of products. If you're on a low sodium diet, these are the products that you should buy. All of these things are a way to inspire people, nudge them in a direction of the experience being a little bit more exciting and nudging them towards products that they would not have sought to buy otherwise. And so that's the role that content plays. And I think the real question with AI is which content gets fully commoditized versus which content”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give you a fun start people spend way more time watching content about food than preparing and eating food. That tells you everything you need to know about the role of content. But the way I think about it is that content is fundamentally inspiration. And I think when you develop a business that is based on inspiration, not just utility, you have a fundamentally more valuable business. And this is something that we're trying to crack with Instakart where Instacart was a fairly utilitarian business. You already had to know everything you wanted to order for the week, put it in your cart, and that was a chore. And we're trying to move to a model that is much more based on inspiration because when you ask people, what do you not like about the things you eat every week, very often people tell you, well, it's the same thing every week. We are just in a rut. We don't want to think about it.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of having a diet that is completely medically tailored to your exact needs. And all of these ingredients showing up at your house. I think we're way further away from that because every time you touch health, it is obviously very scary to make any mistake. And I don't think the technology is there yet for us to trust that. So we still need human intervention in the process. But over time, I'm hopeful that we will be able to democratize experiences like that.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A picture of that, and now the ingredients show up because it is very cumbersome to open a recipe book, try to take lisopholes, order them online. All of that could be completely automated. And then I think there's a lot of applications in health, wellness, and nutrition where you could imagine having nutritionists being able to make a lot of recommendations in right now, if you are someone who wants diet advice going and seeing a nutritionist is a very luxury experience. That's not affordable for most people. If all of that knowledge is captured by an AI system, you can make nutritional advice completely democratized, which could be totally game-changing for the type of problems we have in the country where house fundamentally starts in the kitchen. So I'm really excited about that as well and really reach the promise.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can get an immediate answer on the world with what's left in your fridge. This is the recipe that we would suggest. Or, hey, you took a picture of your fridge at the beginning of the week and now this is the difference. We can reorder all of these items. That would be pretty cool. You can imagine taking pictures of recipes on a recipe book, the recipe book we all have on our shelves and never open. You could very...”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same thing. Apparently ChatGPT recommended a caprici salad, which means that ChatGPT really hasn't met my own in-law because it would not be impressed by that. All of these use cases are actually very magical when you go from natural language to a set of ingredients to these ingredients showing up at your door. I think that's incredible. On meal planning specifically, the ability to say this is my budget, these are my food restrictions, these are the number of meals I need to plan and have a set of suggested recipes and then being able to, again, in natural language, iterate on that and say, you know, the thing you recommended for Tuesdays, that's not really my jam. Can you suggest something else? That's maybe a little spicy and have something else show up. That's really, really magical. I think going forward, there are some things that are really incredible where you can take a picture of your friend.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think in the very short term, we've already released a plugin for ChatGPT, which allows you to go and basically start talking about anything you want to do. I'm organizing a birthday party and I need snacks for 15 kids. What do you recommend? Boom, you get an answer and you can order it in OneTap on Instagram. That's pretty magical. Same thing for entire meal plans, which I find amazing. My favorite one because we were collecting those from employees was my very judgmental in-laws are showing up in two hours. What can I make to impress them?”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That Facebook would definitely do that to you. I arrived at the cottage and they called some minor pressing, Oh, this is a crisis. No, you have not seen crisis.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you feel you don't have the resources in you to solve a problem, and I would say it's just focus not on the problem, but focus on the leadership that's needed to solve the problem. And you'll find a path.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the problem was hard. It was more that I thought my own leadership was an up to what I wanted it to be to solve the problem. The stress was getting to me. I was trying to solve the problem by just pressuring the teams harder. And that's never the right solution when you want to solve a hard problem. And one of the mighty members took me aside. It was a 10 second conversation, hey, I've seen you at your best. This is not your best and we're going to need your best to solve this problem. Bye. You'll slap in the face. She's one of my most trusted team members. Yes, I need to bring my A game and that means no fear, no stress, none of that. And we ended up obviously solving the problem. But I think fundamentally.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helpless is just really not one of the emotions in my repertoire. Always think about it as anytime something happens, there's a solution just gonna find it. And sometimes it's pretty hard to find, but I know it's there and I'm going to find it. I'm incredibly stubborn that way, which is a less generous view. But I think there's always some obstacles. I remember at Facebook, I had made a very big pitch for creating a video destination inside Facebook called Facebook Watch. For about a year, it really wasn't working at all. No one was going there. And it took many pivots to be able to get it to a place where it's actually now an incredibly successful product that's responsible for a large chunk of Facebook time spent. But at the time, I remember I call that time my walk through the desert because I was really looking for solutions and not finding money. But I'll tell you, this thing that made me feel helpless at the time wasn't.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking at the full picture. And that's one of the things that we are trying to solve with my medical and research center, but it's, I would say, a micro example of the bigger problem in healthcare, which is so many different silos and myopic views that don't serve the whole patients very well.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's that fundamentally we have a healthcare system that for many reasons hasn't been optimized to really self-patients. And I think a lot of it has to do with sometimes misalignment of incentives, sometimes oversimplification of the complexity of the human body. And so to give you an example, it's about 80% of healthcare costs come from complex chronic conditions that affect multiple body systems. And yet the healthcare system is still organized by specialties that look at you as if you were just one organ. You go to cardiologist and they look at your heart, you go to neurologist and they focus on your brain. But a lot of complex chronic conditions are actually at the intersection of immunology, cardiology, rheumatology. And that's why patients are bouncing around from specialist to specialists with no one.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Benefits as part of that. All of that healthcare knowledge came into play. And that's what I love about it is all of the parts of my life end up adding to each other and I constantly take what I learn in one area and apply it to another. I'm on the board of Shopify, for example. And again, great example of learning from one of the best commerce companies and applying a lot of that knowledge to Instacart and vice versa, taking all of my lessons at Instacart and hopefully bringing that to Shopify as well. So a lot of cross-pollinating of the different passions in my life.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Top to bottom that has helped me a lot in ramping up in a lot of areas. And whenever I talk to someone new, I try to spend a lot less time talking about what I'm doing and really instead listening about, oh, okay, tell me more about your world. And I think that helps when you have that attitude. The other thing is that I try to connect the dots between all of my different passions. So to give you a concrete example as a passion project on my weekends, I've partnered with two co-founders to create a medical and research center around chronic complex chronic conditions. And I had to learn a lot about healthcare in that context. And this is knowledge that I was able to bring to Instacart when we were trying to figure out, okay, how do we crack getting into partnership with Medicare and Medicaid programs so that Instagram would be one of the reimbursable?”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned first a lot from my team and my team will tell you I am never ashamed of stopping a meeting and hey, sorry, dumb question. I do not understand this. I want to learn. And that has helped me a ton because coming from Facebook, it was interesting. I was running a team of 6,000 people, so larger than Instagram. the Facebook app by many dimensions could be thought of as bigger jobs than running Instagram. But when I came into a CEO job, there were a lot of things that I had to ramp up on really quickly. We just talked about capital location. That's why I read books on it, because when you're a product leader at Facebook, that's not what you spend all of your time thinking about. I had to ramp up on HR matters and things like that. I think having the humility to say, hey, I don't know this. I want to learn, spend an hour with me, explain it to me.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Create an environment where even when you're at the top of your game in one field, you can still feel, you can learn and you're expanding in other territories.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meanwhile, when I look at my CO, for example, she's obviously the best operator I can think of, but she's very good at taking a complex problem and figuring out how to organize teams around how to solve it. And again, that can apply to finance, that can apply to plenty of teams she doesn't manage. I organize these dinners with my team where I push them to talk about their superpower. No one will volunteer. Oh yeah, I'm amazing at blah, blah, blah. So I usually just push them a little bit. This is what I see you do really spectacularly well. How do you do it? Try to articulate it for someone for whom that's not a natural skill and try to give them tools so that they can become good at that. And I think that has made us all around the table better. That has allowed us to change our playbooks, step up our games.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing I mean by that is that I always try to focus whenever I have a new team member on trying to understand what is the thing that that person will be spikes on, the thing that makes them really unique and map problems we have to solve or opportunities we have to tackle to that person's unique strengths. And that seems very basic, but sometimes it requires going beyond the thing that this person is obviously good at. So I'll give you a concrete example. My chief comes officer is obviously exceptional at communication, but she's also exceptional at creating a team that has a very high bar and very high consistency in their output. And that's the thing that it's very useful to have in ops. It's very useful to have in product. When I picked that up, hey,”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think when I arrived in the job, I spent a lot of time with our grocer partners to really try to understand what were their fears, what were their hopes, how do we align incentives. And I think we're now at a place where it's very clear that our success doesn't come at their expense. In fact, the incentives are aligned. And by driving this customer online, we are actually driving their business for the future and making sure that their customers remain loyal and increase their share of wallet with that grocer. And so that I think has really changed in the last couple of years where that tension used to exist and doesn't exist that much anymore.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think first off, there is still a big cloud over the industry of thinking of these models as fundamentally unprofitable. And I think it's up to all of the players in that industry to show that that's not the case and that these models can actually at scale be very profitable. That's the thing that I'm spending a lot of time on and showing how we get to the type of unit economics that make us a really successful business. So that's, I think, very, very big thing. I think the other thing might be that InSakart release only the app. And so that conversation shed a spotlight on the fact that that's not the case and that a network of partners are actually contributing a lot to our business and that's also very important. There might also be this perception that I think is outdated of grocers not fully embracing the relationship with”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact that the tech industry has very much gotten a pass in the past for TOC-based comp, and now we need to hold ourselves to a much better standard and actually think about stock-based compensation as actual compensation, really wanting to be profitable net of stock-based compensation. And once we clear all of these milestones, really thinking about the cash that we have in terms of opportunities to fuel the business and grow and that can include M&A but that can also include investing in a lot of the experiences that I have mentioned because we fundamentally believe that we're in the early innings of that industry and we want to continue to invest to grow and capture more share. But the things that never serves you poorly is focusing on free cash flow. And as a result, we are very focused on that because that gives us a lot of opportunities.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamentally, we want to create value for everyone in our ecosystem. And when I came to Instacart, we revamped our value and the value I cared the most about is this value called grow the pie because I fundamentally believe that the best companies are really making an entire ecosystem rise and creating a lot of value for other players around them and then end up benefiting a lot from that value. And that's why you're seeing me invest so much in making our retailer partner successful, making our brand partner successful, working with the healthcare industry. To me, it's all ecosystem that when they rise, we will win. And a lot of the things I think about is one, we are in a market where it's even more important now to show financial discipline, to show that this is a model that is already profitable but can be even more profitable over time. I also think a lot about”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technology, we can provide that for them. In fact, we just announced that we are doing that with sprouts where we power advertising on sprouts.com. And that means that overnight sprouts can start getting some of that advertising revenue directly to them. And for us, it's also beneficial because that means that we can take the customers that are very loyal to Sprouts going straight to sprouts.com and also monetize that customer base. All of these technologies are already part of many retailer sites. And we do that in a modular way. Sometimes we power the whole website plus the fulfirm and plus y ads. Sometimes we just do the fulfillment connected to a retailer's website. So we have multiple models to really adapt to where the retailer is at in their own digital transformation and what they want to build themselves versus what they want to come.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, a fairly sizable And advertising, but it is already very meaningful. And that goes back to the point I was making earlier, which is that you have a set of customers that are going to want to go to a marketplace, but you also have a lot of customers that want to go straight to publics.com, which we power, straight to Wegmans.com that we power. And that's part of the market that we want to serve. We have partnered with a lot of grocers to make sure that the technology that we build and perfect with our marketplace knowing that we reach millions of customers, we can take all of these innovations and put that on their own properties. A good example, by the way, ads where I was talking earlier about this massive trend towards brands wanting to spend on retail media. And that's a massive opportunity for grocers to turn their commerce website into advertising platforms. But that requires a massive investment.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Major shifts that will take many years to play out, obviously, but we're optimistic that we can accelerate that shift as a technology player that makes it really easy for the healthcare industry to start again prescribing food and funding the cost of fresh food as easily as they reimburse and prescribe medication.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We reached more than 85% of the US can get fresh food in under two hours. How can we put that in the hands of a hospital system for doctors so that they can just prescribe food as easily as they prescribe medication? And how can we at least payers health insurance companies to reimburse the cost of fresh food because it would save them so much in healthcare costs down the line? There's this recent study that came out that showed that If health insurance companies were funding the cost of fresh food for people who are food insecure and people who have conditions that are diet related and they were just literally funding the cost of that fresh food, they would save $185 billion in healthcare costs down the line from people not having to go to the ER, from people saving on medications on the line. And so that's a pretty...”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what it is is taking our entire infrastructure of, again, access to 80,000 stores, thousand plus retailers, and making it available to the healthcare industry so that they can scale food as medicine. And what I mean by that is making it really easy for doctors and providers to prescribe food as easily as they prescribe medication and have that delivered to your door the same way you would have a prescription delivered to you because it is pretty crazy when you think about it that about 87 of healthcare costs come from diet related diseases and yet to this day it is much easier for a doctor to prescribe medications and to prescribe a diet for us what we are thinking about is hey we've built that entire technology and platform infrastructure so that anyone in the U”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a few pieces. The first thing I'll say is our number one job as a market leader is accelerating that shift from in-store only to omnichannel. That's the core of our business. We are always going to be focused on that. We're still in the underpinnings trade market. So having a lot more consumers end up adopting the Instacart we all know and love is the primary mission. But I think there's a lot of ways in which you get there. One of the things I talked about is going and expanding our technologies to the store. And so how can we be helpful to our retailers and to our customers by developing in store technology, whether it's smart cards, whether it's in-store mobile technology so that the experience is much more seamless between online and offline. So that's definitely something we're thinking a lot about. Another thing that we've launched recently is called Instacart Health.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, when the product is this way, actually people react better. When it's that way, people react worse. And they optimize their products the way you would optimize a feature online. And I find that approach fascinating. It's very hard to do with physical products and a lot of companies are not built that way, but because your push was if you were to build it from scratch, how would you build it? I think it's all about leveraging all of the data that online gives you access to so that you can create a product that consumers are really going to love. in a niche that's not oversaturated.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all about tapping into a category of products that consumers have demand for. I think it's a little bit of stream of just designing for instance the cart. It's more designing for the online consumer, which we are a proxy for. And there's this company full disclaimer. I'm an investor, but it's called starday foods. And I love that company because basically what they've done is really thought about how do you build emerging food brands with all of the new tools that online allows you to do and what would it take to build a CPG product like we build software products. And what that means is that the AB tests, the name of the product, the AB test, all of the colors of the packaging instead of having focus group of five people, they put that through Instacart ads instead and through Instacart ads. They try to figure out, oh.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of these channels that are just incredibly costly, whereas with us, if you're carried at a couple of grocery stores, you can put money behind that and make sure that customers that shop online for that grocery store discover your products and then you can move your products off the shelf at retail by doing that. And so that's the holy grail for these emerging brands who are trying to get these expansions at retail stores and are trying to spend their dollars in very measurable channels.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And where exactly that, you can literally advertise right as a person is building their court and get your product in the end of that person within two hours. That's the most magical experience you can think of when you think about ads. Compare that with the way a lot of consumer packaged goods companies have been advertising over the years where you see an ad on TV and maybe they hope that a month later you're going to go into a grocery store remember that ad and buy that very, very different and that's why you're seeing a massive rise in what's called retail media networks and the type of dollars going towards that. We're really helping brands with that transformation. And one thing I'm really excited about is that it also gives a shot to totally emerging brands because if you're a really small emerging brand, you have just developed this one amazing product. Good luck figuring out how to spend your money on TV or radio.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a sponsored unit that's very typical advertising, but also more storytelling capabilities. We recently launched what we call shoppable display and shoppable video ads where brands can have full video messages about the attributes of their products and then within one tap encourage people to buy them. We're seeing a lot of momentum with brands leveraging these products and we just released new studies that show that by using InSakart ads, brands are able to see a 15% sales lift, which is actually really massive in that industry. And so we know that our advertising solutions work. And in fact, during this interesting market conditions, what we've seen is that brands have tended to cut down on unmeasurable top-of-the-funel advertising and put more dollars behind very high performance. Target”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So brands are going through the same massive digital transformation. They are seeing a business that used to be fundamentally just in store move online at a very fast clip. So they are all adjusting to the same reality of how do we go capture this online consumer, especially since we're seeing the same phenomenon we're seeing with retail brands, which is when a consumer finds a brand that they like online, they tend to stick with that brand. And so you really want to be first to make sure that you maintain your category share. If you're a category leader in, let's say, you know, cream cheese or gain share if you're a new entrant. The way we work with them is by offering them a set of marketing solutions to be able to attract that customer. One of them is sponsored products, which is if you type in our search engine cream cheese, you can appear at the top.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They offer very often next day delivery, which there is a market for, but that's not by any stretch the majority of the market. So if you want to offer delivery in the next one to two hours, leveraging the 80,000 store that already exists to do that is by far the most optimal solution.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Live grocery store nearby. That's the ideal situation if you start from scratch. You're perfectly right. But we're not starting from scratch. We're starting from a place where these massive stores already deployed. And that means that they are already close to the customer. And it is actually relatively inexpensive to send people to a store to collect these items and deliver them to the customer compared to the capital intensiveness that it takes to recreate an entire warehouse, put a lot of robots into it, have that warehouse be probably further away from the customer because you want to have a lot of orders going through that warehouse. So you have to aggregate. And that means you're going to be many hours away from the customer. And that's what we're seeing play out. If you look at the people who are investing in this automated model, what's happening is that there are usually many hours away from the end customer.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say there's a couple of things. First, there are some places like that that exist. The reality, though, is that the thing that matters most to the end customer is, are you a brand that I trust and are you going to get my groceries delivered on time and quickly? And when you think about that, the fact that we have already 80,000 grocery stores that are close to the customer, that is fundamentally the biggest advantage. You are completely right, Patrick, that if we were starting from scratch, meaning no grocery store in the country, you build it all from scratch, we would likely build a mix of fully automated facilities and the grocery stores as we know it, usually, I would imagine co-located so that you could have your high velocity items in the automated facility and then for the more specialty items you could go and manually pick these items from the”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The person who had placed the order was actually the daughter of this gentleman and said, Hey, that doesn't look good. I don't want to leave. And the daughter arrived and it turned out there was a gas leak for Shopper hadn't picked up on that. You god knows what would have happened. We hear every day stories of shoppers going the extra mile because they really consider it a job where they exceed customer expectations all the time, which is why I'm so proud that we have these people 600,000 shoppers delivering for Instacart.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of our shoppers really love the customer service aspect of Instacart. I know you're a user, Patrick, but very often our consumers end up inside the chat talking to their shoppers and problem solving. Oh, I was wanting to make Pasa for dinner, but the tomato sauce is out of stock. Let's figure out how we can adjust. And that requires a certain type of shopper who likes interacting with customer, who really thinks of themselves not as, to your point, drivers, but really as customer service people and wanting to provide the best customer service. And that's why we end up with just incredible stories, I think. Last year there was a story of one of our shoppers delivered items to her house and she saw an older gentleman looking a little confused and disoriented instead of just leaving the item she actually reached out.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are just incredible and they are very different from the rest of the app-based economy. If you look at our shopper demographics, about 70% of them are women, that's really not the case in other apps. More than 50% of them are moms. And a lot of what we hear is that they first feel safer doing that kind of job than the other jobs. A lot more of the time is spent inside the store in the case of Instacart because about half the time he's actually spent picking the items, only half is spent delivering them. That's really important because that makes the job very different and also that means that the cost of fuel and all of these things that shoppers have to account for is less in the case of Instacart than in the case of other platforms. That matters a lot. And then the last thing we hear a lot is that”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point it is a game of sense. You optimize based on the data you have, you continue collecting more data, you optimize again. And every time new orders come in, you can figure out a way to batch them more efficiently and ultimately turn a profit.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The case in restaurant delivery. With grocery, you can actually batch orders and pick multiple orders at once without any issue. And so that's a very big driver of our unit economics and something that can only be achieved when you have so many orders within a given store that you can combine that. The other thing is that scale gives you a lot of data. We're back to the data topic with a lot of data you can optimize much better. We now have shoppers that have gone down the aisles of grocery stores hundreds of millions of times. And that means we can tell them exactly how to optimize how they pick products in which aisle, where they should go, which products they should pick first, so that we minimize the time that they spend in the store and therefore we can be more efficient with that time. All of these things combined lead to the superior unit economics, but to your”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scale is absolutely everything in this business. We used to lose money on every single order until we got to 100 million orders. That's a lot of orders. It took a lot of investment to get to the point where we had delivered enough orders and we had enough density that we could turn a profit. And the way it works in our business is basically having density of orders at the store level so that we can batch orders. And what I mean by that is that we send a shopper to the store and instead of picking just one order for one customer, they might be picking two orders and then delivering that to the end customer. Which saves a lot of cost, as you can imagine. That's something that's really unique to grocery because most of the time you don't need the items to arrive at a certain temperature. That's much more.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Order from Kroger.com, and that's going to be their one mode. And then you have customers who actually really want the convenience of a marketplace where they're going to get our membership program, which offers free delivery and they want to use that on many different categories, not just grocery, but also maybe doing that at Sephora, the exporting goods, all of the retailers that we have on the platform. And grocers want to capture both customers. So we have options for them to do that on their own properties and on our marketplace, which tends to be extremely incremental to their own and operate business. We've had many surveys showing that it is actually capturing a customer that just wouldn't capture otherwise if they only focus on their own website.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first off, we do share quite a bit of data with grocers, obviously within the boundaries of privacy laws, but also because we power the online experiences of grocers on their own property, they're collecting a lot of data from their customers there where they can build a completely direct relationship with our customers on publics.com, sprouts.com, et cetera. And that's really important to them because to your point, they do want to build that direct relationship. They do want to be able to remarket to their customers and what we are doing with that is just helping them take the best technologies that we build for our own app and making that available to them on their own properties, which is valuable. The thing that's important to understand is that there are different types of customers for different use cases. You're going to have some customer who are so deeply loyal to Kroger that they're just going to go straight to Kroger.com.”
2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source