YouSaid · the spoken record

Sarah Friar

lines on the record: 81
first: 2018-09-29
most recent: 2018-09-29
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

“Really good question. And it's something that candidly we think about a lot. So look with any new technology that comes, sorry, this is going to be a little bit longer. Is that okay? All right, great. Thank you. Any new technology that comes in, right? You have to remove the barriers for customers to adopt that technology. The first barrier that we removed was, well, most Americans couldn't get their groceries delivered, period. That was just not an option, right? And over the last couple years, that's what we've done. And so we moved that barrier. Now comes the quality barrier. We want to be the grocery experts. We want to be able to pick groceries better than the customer can themselves. And today, many of our shoppers do that. They provide that service. I hear that from the customers all the time where they're like, well, I don't know how to pick the right avocados, but the shopper picked the perfect ones, right? And so we want to be able to do that. We want to scale that so that all of our shoppers can do that every single time. And that's something where this is a big priority for the company.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Harder than you think because you have to figure out the labor model in smaller markets like Chattanooga or Anchorage and all these markets. Getting that right, especially when you have unionized labor is very difficult. And it's also the e-commerce side of things, which is very difficult to get right. One of the things that we talked about was a replacement algorithm. Imagine having to build a replacement engine from scratch at every single retailer. So we give those advantages to retailers, and we're building many, many more that we can bring to the retailers.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's look then, right? Let's look at that structurally. So from a customer standpoint, we want to make sure that customers have a subscription service where they can shop from any of the grocery stores. Most Americans do not just shop at one grocery store. They actually split their basket with multiple grocery stores, right? And Instacart is a perfect way for them to do that. So that's number one. The second is, now if you think about what you would have to build as a grocery store, because grocery retailers today understand that this is critical. They need to get this right. And so they have to think about, well, they have thousands of stores across the country, and they need a partner that can light all of them up overnight. Instacart is the best place to do that because we today cover 70% of the households. And hopefully soon in the next six months, we're going to be covering 80% of the households. No one else can do that.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the long term, we think a substantial portion of our revenue really comes from advertisers. And the reason is it's actually quite simple. If you look at the consumer package goods companies like PNG and others, they're the largest advertisers in the world. They spend billions of dollars on TV and on Facebook and other channels. These advertising channels are mostly focused towards brand. They're not direct response. And that's because no one has built a direct response way of targeting those customers for consumer packaged goods. And so what we want to do is we want to build the adwords for groceries. And that's something that we're actively working on. And over time, we believe that that's one of the main ways that we can actually drive prices down recovery.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'd be very open to pilots like that, and we're going to consider those. But the reality is the scale that we're operating at and the scale that the overall grocery market operates at requires a solution for right now as well as for later. And right now, we want to be focused on the grocery stores.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So today, if you look at the number of stores that exist in the United States, in Canada, in most of the developed world, you will see that there's a grocery store within 10 to 15 minutes of every household. That's definitely the case in America. And so now when you think about what is the best way to get the groceries to the customer's door, we think it is from those grocery stores. And that's why today we're delivering from 15,000 locations. And that we think is only going to increase. And so we really want to focus on delivering great experiences from the existing grocery stores.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the place where we are is that right now we really want to focus on groceries. Groceries are so hard and overall, it's nearly a trillion dollar market. It's an enormous space. And we really want to focus on it. We want to get this right and we want to be the category leader in groceries. Today, I'll give you an example. 80% of the groceries that are bought in the United States are not bought at Walmart, are not bought at Whole Foods. They're bought at local retailers. They're regional retailers and national retailers. That partner with Instacart. And we want to make sure that we are there to bring them online and allow them to deliver their customers door within one hour.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you. Thank you for being an Instacart customer. Really appreciate it. So look, the prices that we have on Instacart are set by the retailers. The retailers tell us exactly what the prices should be, and that's the prices that we reflect for the customers. And over, I think around 50% of the grocers have the same price as they have in store, as they reflect on Instacart. And so in Whole Foods case, I think it's the same price as in store, but if it's not, I would love to look into it and bring it up to Whole Foods attention.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With Walmart and Trader Joe's? Look, sometimes these things take time. The reality is this is a new model. This is an unproven model to them, and we want to make sure that we're continuing to build our relationship. And at some point, hopefully, they see the value in the incremental business that we can bring them.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as you know, we recently launched Walmart Canada. We're very excited about that. We are partnering with SAM's Club in the United States, which is obviously a Walmart subsidiary. The way we think about this is that we can bring incremental volume to them, and so we would love to partner with them at some point. But if you think about...”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like PNG, like Unilever, like others who promote their products through coupons on Instacart. And now customers can get those savings, which in most cases they wouldn't even be able to get offline. They can get those savings on Instacart. And so we think that there's more and more room for improvement in pricing, and we're actively working on it as well.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so today we announced our partnership with Aldi where we're launching over 1,300 stores with them. And the way we see it is that that is really cool because we can give customers not only the convenience of getting a grocery delivered, but things like 99 cent milk, which you cannot get online. So it truly is something that we're really focused on over time as we have the economies of scale, right? As we have some of the coupon revenue coming, which is, for example, today we have one of the largest coupon platforms on the internet for groceries. We have thousands of coupons.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Assistant and sustainable. I think we've learned a lot. And candidly, this is something that this is a new technology that we're bringing to market. There's going to be things that we have to learn on. For example, we're making the unit economics work. This is a very hard business. No one's been able to figure out grocery delivery so far, right? And so the pricing and the labor cost is something that we've learned on. And I'll be honest, I think we executed and communicated the service be really poorly. So if there are going to be changes, we're going to have to make changes. That's for sure. But hopefully we execute and communicate those things better.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So one of the things that we've noticed is that tips can only go to the last person who touched the order. Fundamentally, it's legally required that the person who delivered the order. That person may not have actually picked your order, right? And that is something that we cannot actually give the tips to the person who picked your order. And so we have to collect some part of the revenue to make sure that overall, because we have thousands of people who are picking the groceries for you that you never see, right? We want to make sure that those people are compensated really well as well. That's why there's a service fee and it's a 5% service fee for everyone.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me make it very clear, right? When you have negative growth margins and you grow, right, that means that you're burning more money, right? Well, no, no, a lot of people have gross margins where they're not linearly associated with this, but in our model, the more we grow, the more money we have for our business to be able to spend on research and development. And that's what we want to do. Now we're set up to grow more and more”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, great. Let's do that. So on the revenue side of things, we get a fee from the customer, right? Whether it's a subscription fee or a delivery fee, we also get revenue from our retail partners, right? It's a rev share on the sales that we do. We also have revenue from our advertisers like Coca-Cola, P&G, Unially, very many others. That's our revenue. And our major focus on our costs is our labor costs, right? That is on the picking costs and on the delivery side of things. And people... The costs associated with the wages that we pay for the picking and the delivery. This is, of course, credit card transaction fees and other things. But the main is the cost associated with picking and delivery. That's our unit economics, and we've been gross margin positive for over two years now”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so let me tell you. So that means that, for example, if the organic carrots are missing in the store, should we replace them with conventional carrots? And if that preference is something that we understand, then our shoppers are going to be able to make better decisions to make that happen. And that is something that our team is actively working on.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, look, I mean, I think first, we're doing billions of dollars in sales. We're delivering from 15,000 locations over 300 retail chains in 4,000 cities. And that's millions of grocery items from retailers that do not have, in most cases, a great way to track inventory real time. And so the only way to solve this problem in a great way is by making sure that the customer feels that the shopper is representing them really well. And so that is the area we're focused on, to make sure that we understand that...”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're working with dozens, hundreds of different partners, different inventory systems, sometimes people can find the right replacement, sometimes they don't. It seems like a point where the experience can break on both sides shopper and customer. How do you solve the real-time inventory problem across different grocers? In a way that works for everyone. Or is it solvable, I guess?”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think what we've seen is that shoppers in our markets where we actually understand our supply and demand, and we've been in for some time, we actually understand how to give them that predictability much sooner. And because we're launching a lot of new markets and we've seen how these markets actually mature, we now have that predictability earlier and earlier. And so we hope that this gets better next year because of the work that the team's doing.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is not going to be an area where a shopper can say to themselves, I'm going to make $500 every week, and that's going to be predictable, or this set amount and budget accordingly. It doesn't seem like that's feasible with the way your model works.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, candidly, this is an example for technology where it could have been much better. And I understand the predictability as well, and I've seen that happen to our shoppers. And I get those emails from those shoppers as well. So I recognize those things. And I'll give you an example of the predictability and why that is actually difficult to do. The experience for a shopper when you're delivering in New York is actually quite different than the experience that a shopper in Chattanooga has. The experience when you're delivering to an apartment building which has no elevators is quite different than what you have when you are delivering to a single family home. When you're delivering a 20 pack of gum versus 20 pack of water, different experiences. How do you make sure this predictability across those orders? That's something we're actively working on. But I want to be very candid. We're not going to rush into this. We've done that before.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of feedback I get from a lot of these people over the last couple of years has mainly been around predictability or lack thereof predictability of income week to week, day to day. Is the rate I'm getting today going to be gone in six months? Is that something they just have to deal with because it's the nature of the work?”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, that they understand how to provide a great customer experience. And so we're expanding our engineering team to make that happen. We just brought in our VP of engineering to lead our shopper team. And before joining this team, this person had done over 100 hours as a shopper so they know what's wrong and what's working. In addition to that, we have a chopper council, which is a group of shoppers from across the country that we have brought together so that we're listening to the shoppers. We're hearing the feedback before things go wrong, things like the ones that you mentioned. We make sure they understand what features we're going to be shipping, and they help us get better on those and make sure that they are shaping the roadmaps that we are building as well. This is a key area of focus for Instacart, and we're working on it.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So first of all, yes, we have made mistakes in the past, and we have debt with our shoppers. The reality is that we have 50,000 shoppers on our platform, and this number is growing really, really fast. And so we need to do much, much better here. And we recognize that. And we're working on it. This is a core focus of our company. And the few things that we're doing, I'll just give you an example of this, is the first thing that we hear from our shoppers is that when something goes wrong, in the store, in the app, outside the customer's door, they need support. They need to be able to call in and make sure there's someone from Instacart who's there to help them. And so what we're doing is we're bringing in, we're building an office in Atlanta, which is going to have 300 people just focused on making sure they're providing the greatest level of support. So we're doing that. We've also heard from our shoppers that they need way better technology that routes them in the cities or in the stores.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I don't think anyone expected. And the contract was obviously written with that expectation not in mind. And so today we're delivering from Whole Foods and other parties may be delivering from Whole Foods as well. But as you know quite well, I won't be able to go into the detail”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are not the markets where Whole Foods has a dominant share. Our largest growing markets are more closer to markets like Chattanooga and Anchorage and Fargo, where the household population is under 100,000. Those are where more than half of our business comes from.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, If you look at subscriptions like Spotify, like Netflix, like Amazon Prime itself, they're actually not that much more cheaper than Instacart's Express membership, right? And so what we see is that customers order on average once a week, right? So that's about $3 per delivery. That's cheaper than a gallon of gas. And what we see is as economies of scale come in, as we have more and more delivery volume, we can drive the prices down as well. So we're seeing a lot of adoption since last year. We have more than doubled our volume. Whole Foods is not our largest partner. We're seeing more adoption for our existing mainstream conventional retailers, like the Albertsons, like Aldi, for example, where you can get 99 cent milk. And what we also see is that our largest growing markets”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I won't be able to speak to that. What I can tell you, and I think it's important to put these new stories into perspective. Whole Foods is about 1.5% of the overall grocery market, right? Most Americans do not shop at Whole Foods. The retailers that most Americans shop at are partners of Instacart.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the thing is that it sort of works for both of us to have both of those experiences because the more volume that we have on Instacart, whether it's through Instacart.com or through the retail experience itself, we can drive more efficiencies. We can drive down the costs even more. And when we do that, we actually increase the adoption from the customers. And so retailers want the incrementality that they can get from Instacart's marketplace. And they also want to build their own brand through their own.com experiences as well.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what we built on Instacart is a marketplace. Customers pick a retailer and they shop within that retailer and they can get their grocery delivered from that store. And in the next shopping experience, if they want to buy from a different store, they can do that as well. So we've done that, and of course we have over 300 retail partners across the country who partner with us. But what we've heard from retailers is that they want an experience on their own platforms as well, right? And so what we have done is we've probably.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they're generally between five and seven years. And because we're today, we're delivering in over 4,000 cities in North America, and seven in ten households in the United States can use Instacart and get their grocery delivered within one hour. And so the deals that we have with retailers cover their whole network. So all the stores are coming online today. As you know, we announced that we're expanding our partnership with Aldi, with the whole network of stores. Today we're going to be able to deliver from 1,300 stores that Aldi has across the United States. So these are nationwide long-term deals.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It took a couple of weeks. It took a couple of weeks, but the six months after the conversation, say six months after the conversation, we signed a partnership with nearly every single important retailer in the United States and Canada.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Second. There's not much to say at that point, right? It was probably a one minute call. Really, at that point, we had the game plan, right? Instacar had the game plan. And it wasn't just Instacar. The whole industry had the game plan. This was a shock to the whole industry. And at this point, for the few weeks after that, everyone went silent.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So by last year we had proven both those things, that there was a lot of demand and that the model was sustainable. And so in the early days of Instacart Candidly, we were losing money on every single delivery. And we were growing really fast. Not a good combination, right? And so we had to learn a lot of things. One of the things that we had to learn was how to batch orders effectively. And we had to learn how to make sure that our labor model works. We had to make sure that we had economies of scale. None of those things were what we had in the early days. But over time, we built those things. And so one of the things that we've learned, for example, is that in every single market, as we continue to grow, as we are more volume, we build density. And with density, each delivery takes less and less time. One thing that we've learned is that each minute that we save in each delivery is 25 cents in gross margin. And so when we save that money, we can give that back to the customer so that it's”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I already see it happening, whether it's in parts of their business. We don't have the whole book of business. Or like I said, we have merchants that do $100 million plus on Square already. I mean, those are pretty big businesses. I see a lot of things like franchises. We have a car cleaning company up and down the West Coast that has multiple, multiple locations. Even blue bottle coffee, right? We love blue bottle because we love coffee at Square, but Blue Bottle is in the US and in Japan opening up new coffee shops all over the place. And they have a really vibrant wholesale business. And so it's on us to how do we take that whole book of business because ultimately then the merchant has just a single view of what they sell. And that's really what the merchant cares about.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I would say international because I think to date, you know, I absolutely dream that the company is going to have global impact. And so when you're doing, when you start with more offline mode, so you need hardware, that is a slow going because you've got to get PCI compliance, regulatory compliance, moving money with the bank's compliance. There's a lot of impediments to fast motion, but I think we have an unlock, but we really need to lean in on that. And then I would say the second part is awareness. Like, we actually do a lot, but most of what we run into is that particularly bigger businesses don't think of us that way. They think of us as like, oh yeah, no, I saw that when I saw the pop-up, or I saw that when I was in the farmer's market, and we need to show them more and more examples.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, absolutely, we could and should. I love when our customers are telling us what they need or want and think about real corridors like US to Mexico, US. I mean, again, these are places where I think the current system really lets down the people most in need. So think about how much it costs you to send money from US to Mexico, for example. And those are exactly the people that can afford to spend $25 or $50 to send small amounts of money. absolutely a square unfolds over the next decade plus like these are all areas that I think we can go innovate in and really kind of make it ultimately a much more fair system”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we spend a lot of time doing market development in any country. The UK is super top of mind for us right now because of that stat that 50% of businesses don't accept payments. As we go into next year, there's kind of two other vectors as we think international. The first is Weebly, who we bought. So being an online only business, Weebly is already 40% of revenue is coming from outside the US, and they're in 100 plus countries because they're effectively anywhere that online happens they can be. And then cash is the other interesting one. So it's not a hardware dependent business. They launched in the UK. It was a pretty fast launch given how young the cash app business is, only three-ish years old. And so to already be in the UK. And then what was interesting is the minute we launched in the UK, the main question we got was, great, can I not send money from the UK to the US? Well, not yet. We can't do cross-border, but it's always really edifying when you hear your customers.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, International is a great question. So, a couple of things. This year, we stayed very U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, UK, which is not a global footprint, right? It's a good start footprint, but not a global footprint yet. And the great thing about all those markets is we see the same hallmarks of lots of small businesses where there's a lot of greenfield. So before you even need to go kind of club competitors to death and move out all the old stuff, there's just a lot of market development of helping small businesses understand that cash is expensive, right? Cash is it tends to shrink, it tends to slide into people's pockets and away it shouldn't. It costs you time because you've got to travel to and from the bank to put it in or take it out. It's usually because you think of it as something you have to keep really secure. It's often the business owner that is the person at the end of the day literally counting bills if you think about it. It's the least value add thing you could or should be doing and yet it's often what the most senior person in the business spends their time on.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't need to know his email address or his phone number, anything personal about him. I just know that he's hashtag, I can't even remember what his hashtag was, but that I could quickly send him like three, five bucks or whatever for his busking. Those things give me joy because you start to see how everyone's getting accepted up onto this network that up to that point had kind of discriminated against them.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but like I'd be happy to cash you later. I think, okay, so I can answer it in two forms because you can probably hear in my voice, score capital is definitely right up there because I think it really broke free into small businesses, access to capital. And then I think this coming together now of Omni is the thing that really makes me happy. But I'll tell you on a side note, I love just when I talk to the most teeny tiny businesses and they tell me the story of how they were going to miss that sale or they saw people walk away from their farmer's market stall. And suddenly with Square, they feel like they're a credentialized professional business. I was in San Francisco on Friday coming back from an event and there was a guy bus going. It's actually on my Twitter feed. But I love that he had his cash handle and it said no cash, no problem. And so if we're even getting to a world where you can put something out there that's totally anonymous.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is just sound business. In fact, again, every stat shows that companies, for example, that have more gender diversity of the executive team or gender diversity at the board are actually better for shareholder returns. Like if I told you here's a single factor, why don't you go act on it? And yet Fortune 500 CEOs, for example, where it should be 250 of them, because I can do basic math, is like 23 or something. It's gotten worse in the last five to ten years. So there is definitely systemic bias. I think it's in all of us to figure out how do we take that systemic or that unconscious bias out of how we all act and react. And it's in all of us, but it's absolutely, you can train yourself to feel the bias, but then react in a different way to it. And again, I would kind of really just cajole and ask of senior leadership.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're just going to wind me up now. We first of all square, we firmly believe you can't be what you can't see. And so, first of all, just forgetting great talent into the organization, we want to make sure that we show diversity up and down the organization. I'm really proud that over half of the, actually I think it's over 60% of the organization reports into a woman at the executive team level. And total kudos to Jack, by the way, because that has to be a tone at the top. Second thing is, how can you know what your customers want if you don't look anything like them? And so you need that divergent perspective happening, whether it's at your executive table, at your board table, as you do any sort of planning, right? Again, how do you push that into the organization? It's not just gender, it's every kind of form of diversity you can think of. It seems like it should be...”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had everyone from like Joe Malone spoken in London, the keynote speaker coming up in San Francisco is Hintwater, if you know Kara Golden, just like women who've kind of been there done that. But what I think is important is to know that while their journey might look straight up into the right, it's actually, it looks more like this, and sometimes it's very down and not fun. And I think sharing those stories is really important for women to stay resilient and really do all that they can do.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just, we have an event coming up in St. Louis next week, so total blatant shout out for it. But I have women that have done everything from making the most amazing swimsuits to belts for kids, to technology companies that do things for maternal health. Like you name it, like women are amazingly entrepreneurial. But what I find and the reason behind the nonprofit is, A, community is really important. All the stats show women do much better when they get peer mentorship. Second, education. Often they feel like they don't know how to build a business plan. Or how to go about getting a loan. In fact, capital 56% of our loans go into women and the background rate in the US is about 15%. That is how bad it is for a woman trying to get funded for her business. And then the third piece is just inspiration.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, not just technology, so think more Main Street businesses. So when I'm looking for is women who are just starting their own businesses. So it could be everyone from like Emily Glossier, who you had here yesterday down to today. I thought it was yesterday. Amazing woman entrepreneur.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One more topic I want to get to. We're going to have questions in about three or four minutes. So if you have them line up if you don't think of some good ones. You start an organization now called Ladies Who Launch, correct? Which encourages and nurtures women in technology. Is that”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Narrowing down what they would offer, and it's because over a two or three day period when perhaps stores were shuttered because of a hurricane, the capital model would think your business had just gotten dramatically worse. It was like a major recession had just happened. But it would take the models two, three, four weeks to actually recover when in actual fact a human being would say, oh, no, no, that's behind us. Now just go back to where you were. But you could actually see the models reacting in real time. So I don't want to say that we're perfect, but I do think the way we've approached risk as a company is a core competitive advantage. So whether it's on the payment side, whether it's in areas like instant deposit, in lending with core capital, I really do feel we've brought technology to bear.”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, with any cycle, you've got to be watching the cycle. And so that's actually something I say all the time when I talk to investors. The great thing about machines is they're watching second by second. And so they are literally changing in a way the human eye cannot see. If the environment starts to get worse, the machine models or machine learning models will effectively start dropping, first of all, the size of loan that we're willing to facilitate. And then some people will start dropping below the hurdle. And we have seen this in microcosms, right? The US broadly hasn't gone through a recession, but you've seen recessions in different smaller parts of the US, like the shale states, for example. So we can watch and actually see that the models are responding. Another good example is actually when weather happens, so hurricanes or whatever the heck is going on outside these windows right now, we could see that our capital models were kind of really kind of”
2018-09-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Square CFO Sarah Friar and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT