Apoorva Mehta at Startup School NY 2014

Summary

Apoorva Mehta, the CEO of Instacart, spoke at Startup School NY 2014 and shared the story of Instacart, offering lessons for other entrepreneurs. Here are the key points:

Mehta left his job at Amazon to pursue entrepreneurship, immersing himself in learning and developing ideas.
He faced challenges in finding a successful startup idea, trying various product ideas before coming up with Instacart.
Mehta emphasizes the importance of solving a problem one truly cares about, highlighting the inefficiency of traditional grocery shopping.
Despite initially being rejected, Mehta made a last attempt to get into Y Combinator by sending beer to one of the partners, which led to his acceptance.
He discusses the challenges he faced at Y Combinator's Startup School and the early days of Instacart when most customers were YC founders.
Mehta emphasizes the importance of perseverance and iterating based on feedback.
He talks about doing things unscalably in the beginning and fulfilling orders himself, even using Uber black cars for deliveries.
Instacart faced challenges in raising a seed round due to past failures in the industry but was able to secure funding.
The company experienced rapid growth and revenue growth but faced challenges in creating a scalable system to handle customer orders, shopper locations, and store inventories.
Mehta believes that solving this problem is crucial for retailers to offer fast delivery experiences to online shoppers.
He discusses the ability for startups to operate without infrastructure and emphasizes the importance of persistence in the face of failures.

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