Instacart Co-founder Max Mullen on Building a $10B Consumer Marketplace | Ep. 47

And I look at their sneakers. If you're looking at a founder and, and they got dirty white sneakers on, people that are busy building, they're locked in on their companies, they're sleeping at the office, right? They don't have time to buy nice sneakers, right?

Yeah.

They just put on the same pair of sneakers, and they get dirty, and, like, the real builders, you know, they sort of just, they look the part.

[upbeat music] All right, Max, I'm very excited for this one. I love doing this with close friends. As you know, we've had some other ones on the show, and one of the things I was just sharing to you is we've hung out a million times, and we barely talk about work. I barely know what you do. So I'm excited to learn about your work-

[laughs]

... along with the rest of the audience.

Well, thank you so much for having me, Jack.

Let's start with Instacart because you obviously just completed, you know, sort of the, the end-to-end dream of any entrepreneur, and then I wanna go into sort of your investing and some of your other work. But starting with Instacart, and I don't even know all these stories, which I, I really should given how much we've hung out. Can you talk about Instacart getting started, like the early days, the idea coming together? I know this was YC, like back in twenty twelve, right?

Mm-hmm.

So tell me about the beginning.

I'm, I'm so fortunate to be, um, to be able to be a founder of a consumer company because it's like a household name and everybody knows about it. And today-

I mean, I use it like seven times a week.

You really do order a lot.

You probably know what I u- too.

I do not look at customer accounts, but-

Could you if you wanted to?

I, I can't, no.

Okay. You probably could.

But [laughs] but, um, um, what's great about being a consumer founder is, is that, you know, everybody knows kind of what you do. You don't need to repeat yourself anymore, uh, when you're pitching the company, and that wasn't the case in the early days, right? In twenty twelve, grocery delivery was basically something that didn't exist in the US. It was quite a contrarian idea back then to have an app.

Well, actually, it's even more contrarian because didn't people try it in like Web one point O and it was like a big high-funded failure?

Yeah. There were some spectacular failures, uh, in twenty, in, uh, like the dot com era.

Like hundreds of millions went in, and it didn't work or anything.

Yeah, like Sequoia invested over a billion dollars in a company called Webvan.

Yeah.

And it failed.

Yeah.

And that was ten years earlier before we started.

So did you have that when you were talking to... Was that like the big thing when you were talking to investors was like, "This has been tried. It doesn't work"?