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AM

Apoorva Mehta

06/20/14

@ Y Combinator

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

Video

YC

Apoorva Mehta at Startup School NY 2014

@ Y Combinator

06/20/14

Related Takeaways

AM

Apoorva Mehta

06/20/14

@ Y Combinator

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

PC

Patrick Collison

11/05/15

@ Greylock

The first users of Stripe were mostly from the Y Combinator community or friends of those who had gone through YC, which helped us gain traction.

AM

Apoorva Mehta

06/20/14

@ Y Combinator

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

JL

Jessica Livingston

09/07/24

@ Y Combinator

The early days of Y Combinator were marked by a lack of distractions, allowing founders to work hard and focus on their startups without the pressures of social media.

AM

Apoorva Mehta

06/20/14

@ Y Combinator

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

LP

Lenny's Podcast Cast

05/02/25

@ Lenny's Podcast

Four companies—Airbnb, Coinbase, Reddit, and Instacart—account for over 85% of Y Combinator's returns, illustrating the VC power law in action.

JL

Jessica Livingston

06/27/24

@ Lenny's Podcast

The early days of Y Combinator were magical and pure; we focused on helping a small group of founders without distractions or negative scrutiny from the press.

BC

Brian Chesky

12/01/15

@ Greylock

During Y Combinator, we focused on building strong relationships with our first 100 customers, doing things that don't scale to ensure they loved our service.

JL

Jessica Livingston

02/24/15

@ Y Combinator

At YC, we followed the principle of treating founders like family, which was easier in the early days when there were fewer founders to manage.