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

  1. “Also, a lot of data that shows that the first grocer that you end up buying online from is a grocer that you stick with. And so for grocers who tend to try to push back against that shift towards online, they're at risk of losing a lot of share because if other grocers are way more aggressive in capturing that online customer and that online customer sticks with them, that's a massive opportunity for share loss or share gain in this industry. Fundamentally, I think our incentives are completely aligned with our grosser incentives because as they move these customers online, these customers become more valuable to them and we can help them do that.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The thing that's really interesting is that there's tons of data showing that an omnichannel customer that shops with you both online and in store is more valuable, more retentive, more profitable than in online only customer or in in-store only customer. The thing that I work with with grocers is not telling them that it's not about shifting an in-store customer to be an online only customer. It is about shifting someone from being in-store only to purchasing on all channels because fundamentally that shift is coming. There isn't going to be a possibility to just let the e-commerce trend on the side fundamentally this is coming no matter what and what grosses need to do is to embrace that trend so that they really reinforce the loyalty that they have with their current customers.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Inside their stores because customers are going to expect a rich personalized experience, not just online but also inside the stores, that move to omnichannel is really what the next 10 years are all about in grocery.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “That can help the entire industry make their digital transformation. And that's why we don't just build the InSakart app, we actually take the software we build for the Instakart app and we make it available to every grocer that wants it on their own and open it property. So if you go to sprouts.com, that's powered by our technology. We build the e-commerce sites, public.com, same thing. That's a way for us to take everything we're learning about what it takes to create an omnichannel customer and distribute that to the entire grocery industry to accelerate that digital transformation. And that digital transformation isn't just happening online. It's also happening in stores. And that's why we made acquisitions like keeper carts, which are smart carts that allow you to skip checkout because we think that grocers are going to need to really embed this technology.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I don't think you have many people who are saying that groceries in store is so much more enjoyable than going and buying electronics or buying fashion. A big part of why that has been the case is because this is an industry that hasn't been technologically enabled. A lot of the large players resisted online transformation until it was absolutely needed. And now the big change that we're seeing is that there isn't really a grocery retailer who isn't embracing online and realizing that it's going to be a sort of their business at some point. That's really the big shift that has happened. That's fundamentally why I joined the company, Patrick, because if it had just been an online grocery delivery service, which is what Incort is known for, that would have been less interesting to me than this idea of building a technology platform.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Take a step back. Grocery is the largest category of commerce. We're talking one point one trillion in North America alone. It's a massive, massive retail category. And yet it's category of commerce that is the least penetrated online. It was 3% penetrated online before the pandemic. And then post-pandemic, we are at 12% online penetration. And it's interesting because everybody was, oh, you know, after the pandemic, everybody's going to go back to stores and fundamentally we've reached peak online penetration for grocery. But what they don't realize is that at 12% online penetration now, we are still vastly behind every other category of commerce if you look at fashion, if you look at beauty, electronics. They're all in the 25 to 30 percent online penetration, which is kind of weird because”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Exchange program with UCLA, which is literally taken out of the movies. It was the perfect setup. And then technology came as a way again to expand my horizons. I'm incredibly curious. I want to learn that's the thing that drives me the most. Technology was a way to really understand how could we change the world and change these core human problems, leveraging technology. And that explains why I call myself a pragmatic technologist, because I didn't come out of it building my first computer when I was seven. That wasn't my past. My past was very much really wanting to solve big problems for the world and figuring out which tools did I have at my disposal to do that. And business was one of those tools. Technology was one of those tools.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And asking them, hey, what kind of jobs would I do if I go in business? And they were like, well, you can work at City Hall. It was not a very expensive view. But I saw this documentary of all of these people who seemed really in charge, really having a view on where the world should go and driving it to the lens of business. And I became really interested in following that path. And so initially in my early years, it was literally just as simple as I saw the documentary, I just wanted to go to that school. It turned out to be a pretty high bar, even though it literally is not the one business school in France, but I made it. And then it was a game of discovery of what I didn't know before. So once I made it there, I realized I hadn't traveled the world at all. And again, the media made me see the US as this land of possibilities, this land where everything is possible. And I became really enamored with it and I ended up doing.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I would say the answer will be so incredibly disappointing, but I think media helped a lot because as I grew up, I wasn't exposed to much. I grew up in a small town and this world wasn't really even visible to me. And a big part of my career at Facebook was spent in the entertainment category because I have a deep appreciation for the fact that media and the availability of media can expose people like me to the rest of the world. And I'll tell you, I was, I think, nine or ten when I saw a documentary about HEC business goal, which is the top business call in France. And I didn't even really know what I wanted to do. I didn't even know which jobs existed in business. That wasn't a thing. I remember going to my high school counselor.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Minimize the bad. And the way to maximize the good is to really anchor on these technologies solving real human problems.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Ask themselves every week pretty much since the dawn of time. And yet it is still a very complicated thing to do. That's why a lot of people consider grocery shopping a chore because it is a complicated set of questions that you have to answer before you put food on the table. So again AI technologies can fundamentally change that and make it easier because you can align them with a fundamental human problem. And I think where we go wrong is when we start thinking of technology for technology's sake and when the debate gets very theoretical and we're seeing that play out with AI right now where you have so many of the theoretical debate on the robots going to kill us when fundamentally I'm thinking of any technology is having a lot of potential for good, a lot of potential for bad and our job is to make sure we maximize the good”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I grew up in a family of fishermen. I was always very down to earth, very much thinking of technology in the context of literally at the time putting food on the table. So even when I joined the tech industry, I always thought about technology being used to solve real human problems. I joined eBay early in my career and I never thought of eBay as this technology. I thought of it as this network where people would be connecting around their various commerce interests and communities. Then Facebook was the same thing. Incredible technological feat, but fundamentally what I cared about was, oh, I could stay in touch with my family in France very easily. I always go back to what is the fundamental problem that we're trying to solve. And in the case of Instacart, this question of what's for dinner is a question that every family”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Whatever recipes or meal plan is into a set of ingredients, understanding the catalog of these different merchants is absolutely critical. I encourage companies to really think about what is the thing that the data sets that's going to create most value or the experience in translating the digital into physical experience in the world that's going to be really hard. And then you can combine these really hard things that you've done with all of the magics that's coming out of AI and that's when you can create really amazing experiences.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The point that I made about data earlier is a good example where creating these experiences on top of large language models is going to become, again, fairly easy. And then on top of that, you're going to have a lot of tools to help the software development process itself. But if you don't have incredibly rich data to start with, that becomes a lot harder. And so for us, building a catalog of millions of items where you know the availability all across the US, where you know the nutritional value and all of the ingredients that go into every product, that is a very hard thing that take years to build, take a lot of work, and becomes the foundation for any other experience because fundamentally any AI experience that we can think of in the context of groceries is going to result at some point into translating.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Into products showing up at your doors within two hours because the physical world is still going to remain pretty difficult to navigate even in an AI-enabled world.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Products in a completely different way. And then the second piece of advice would be, I fundamentally think that AI is going to make software development easy. And that means that there's going to be fewer barriers to entry. So when I advise companies, I always tell them, focus on doing the hard things. It was for 10 years we have had the luxury of creating a lot of value from fairly easy things in consumer software. And now I think it's going to come down to really creating much deeper technology. And even for us at Instacard, the way I see it is that we are this unique translation layer between the digital world and the physical world. The hard thing that we've built is connecting to 80,000 stores across the US, connecting to 1,100 retailers and this ability to translate your intent of cooking something for dinner.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Tools that are currently available, how would you rebuild your product? Would you rebuild it the same or would you rebuild it in a completely different way? Would you have full conversational experience instead of having a search box? And that is really important because that echoes in earlier stage of my career where I was asked to figure out how to monetize mobile at Facebook during the shift to mobile. And there was a clear contrast between the companies that were embracing the shift to mobile by taking their web experience and desperately trying to shrink them on a small screen versus the companies that were really using all of the tools that a mobile device had from location awareness to ability to take pictures and all of that to create a really unique mobile first experience. And I think we're going to see the exact same thing with AI. I would encourage companies to think from first principles with this new tool set would you rebuild?”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “you would have an engine that tells you okay with all of these things this is what we would recommend for breakfast and chain dinner and in one tap you can add all of these ingredients to your cart that is a much more natural way of thinking about the problem of what's for dinner what are we going to put on the table than the current search experience so we are really rushing towards this ideal use case of helping you with all of the questions that you have to run your family and helping you answer them in a much easier way thanks to generative AI in order to really embrace the shift you need to think about what it would look like to go ai native and what I mean by that is having AI not bolted on the side to your current experience but if thinking about if you were solving the problems at your company is trying to solve now from scratch with”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think the biggest change that we're seeing with generative AI is this shift towards natural language. Because if you think about commerce fundamentally, it is a pretty weird experience online because you already need to know exactly which products you want, go into a search box, type that product, select that product, add it to a cart. It is not how people think about their lives. They've gotten used to it because that's all we could do with the tools that we had. But fundamentally, when people think about feeding their families, they think, okay, I have a budget of $200 for 10 meals. I have a family of five. One of them has food allergies. We all like Mexican food. What can I make this week with all of these constraints? That's the way you think about managing your family. And then ideally,”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Having incredible catalog data so that we know for millions of products exactly what's on the shelves at which retailers, what is the nutritional information, all of that is an incredible data set to build AI experiences on top of. That really is a part about the readiness. Now there's a question of, okay, how do you build new delightful”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “In the context of Instacart, we've already been using AI for pretty much everything. If you go to Instacart, search is obviously powered by AI or replacement algorithm if something isn't available in the store. What we recommend instead, that's powered by AI and informed by the massive hundreds of millions of data points we have on what people choose as replacements. Same thing with how we connect shoppers to the right store and so that they get to you as soon as possible. All of that is powered by AI. And for us, it meant a very big investment in our data infrastructure because fundamentally without unique data and data that's easy to feed into models, it's really, really hard to take advantage of these new technologies. All of that unique data, as I said, that we've built over the last 10 years of understanding customer preferences.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “What else is things that people are already trying to do? And I did Sakharov, it translates into they're trying to figure out what their meals for the weeks are. They're trying to actually come up with new recipes to diversify their diet. And every time we see something like that, we just build a product experience around it to help users with the things that they're fundamentally already trying to do.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I think it was a lot about understanding exactly what consumers wanted and also understanding lit and demand. And what I mean by that is what the playbook at Facebook was really understanding what users were already doing with a product that wasn't necessarily built for that use case as a sign that there was something there that you could productize and do something bigger with and that has been the case at Facebook over and over again. If you look at Facebook marketplace, people were already using the core Facebook product to try to exchange good. So we built Facebook marketplace as a result of that insight. People were already posting links to YouTube to share videos. Oh, actually it might be better to create a real video experience. But there was always a seed of something that we would build upon. And I've taken that to heart at Instacart and really understanding”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Let's just say we weren't focused specifically on the sense. And I actually think that culture of sweating the details, sweating literally every penny is what has made Instagram successful and has put us in a position where you need economics are really strong in a market where there's been a lot of attempts at doing what we do and attempts that have been unsuccessful. So I've taken that culture to heart and I actually think that constraints sometimes create just a better business and better operations. I find that people, when you set some hard constraints like you need to be profitable, you need to upgrade unity economics, it raises the bar on the type of talent you attract, the type of execution that you get in a way that differentiates the good companies from the great ones.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Would say Facebook was the right of a lifetime because it really taught me how to combine this long-term vision with short-term excellent execution because you never get to your long-term mission and vision if you don't have this excellence in the short term. And it also taught me how to build great consumer products. And so I definitely brought that to Instagram. But to your point, it is a widely different business with many more constraints. Just to give you a funny anecdote, during my first week at Instacart, I remember joining our weekly business review and there was a team that had managed to save one cent per delivery through a set of optimization. And as soon as I announced that, the whole room erupted in applause. And I remember thinking, oh, we celebrate sense here at Facebook.”

    2025-05-30 · Invest Like the Best · Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source