We realized that we had to be at the customer's doorstep to improve retention, so we started doing initial deliveries ourselves to understand the customer experience better.

We faced existential crises, especially when we realized there was no retention in our early model, leading us to question if there was even a viable business model for grocery delivery.

The insight was to do 10-minute delivery while also building out the full stack of commerce, allowing us to run logistics and maintain better quality control.

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

Our growth demonstrates that we've figured out how to make consumer deliveries work, and our driver network and logistics software allow us to expand beyond food delivery.

Listening to customer needs was crucial in shaping our strategy, as we found that suburban areas had higher demand and better unit economics for delivery services.

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

Being global from the start was crucial for us to serve customers everywhere, which required significant backend infrastructure development.

Despite initial investor reluctance due to past failures in grocery delivery, we eventually closed a seed round with an investor who believed in us.