On June 2nd, 2012, I placed my first order on Instacart, and by then, the business was already profitable.

In 2012, while everything else was being bought online, grocery shopping remained inefficient, which motivated me to create a solution.

Instacart launched without any grocery store partnerships by purchasing items from Trader Joe's, photographing them, and listing them online. This creative approach allowed them to start quickly without waiting for corporate approvals.

In the early days of Instacart, I personally fulfilled orders myself, even without a car, leading to deliveries arriving in Uber black cars.

Despite missing the Y Combinator application deadline, I believed that if the partners experienced Instacart, they would accept me.

In the early days of Instacart, most customers were Y Combinator founders, making it easy to gather feedback and iterate quickly on the product.

As Instacart grew, we faced the challenge of making operations scalable while managing diverse customer orders and crowdsourced shoppers.

I raised over 55 million dollars in financing for Instacart and we're generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue every day.

The initial versions of successful startups like Instacart and Brex were often very basic and 'hacked together', demonstrating that a polished product isn't always necessary at launch.