Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
Welcome to this classic episode. Classics are my favorite episodes from the past 10 years published once a month. They're end of one conversations with end of one people. In the midst of our transition to OpenAI, we're spotlighting the force that is Fidji Simo. I hope you enjoy it.
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:37)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUMVC.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:05)
I guess this week is Fidji Simo, the CEO of Instacart. Fidji grew up in a small town in the south of France and was the first person in her family to graduate from high school. Since then, she's had a dazzling career with stops at France's leading university, eBay and Facebook. Fidji spent the better half of a decade at Facebook where she led the Facebook app before joining Instacart in mid-2021. We talk about Fidji's consumer product experiences, Instacart's role within the grocery ecosystem and delve into her personal leadership philosophy. Please enjoy this wide-ranging discussion with Fidji Simo.
Fidji, I've been so excited for this conversation ever since Ravi Gupta introduced me to you. I've so enjoyed learning about you, your history, the business, where you might be taking it. And as I toyed with ways of opening our conversation, I can't help but open with a comparison between your experience running the Facebook app at Meta and your initial experience at Instacart, in part because it's going to let us talk about AI first, which I think is just such an interesting topic for any big business that interacts with lots of customers. What was that experience like for you? Arguably going from one of the all-time great business models to one that I think everyone knows is a much harder business to get to scale and then maybe all the benefits come at great scale. Just wildly different businesses. And I'm really curious what that initial experience was like, shifting gears so aggressively.

**Fidji Simo** (3:32)
Thanks for having me, Patrick.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:33)
My pleasure.

**Fidji Simo** (3:35)
I would say Facebook was the right of a lifetime because it really taught me how to combine this long-term vision with short-term excellent execution because you never get to your long-term mission and vision if you don't have this excellence in the short term. And it also taught me how to build great consumer products. And so I definitely brought that to Instacart. But to your point, it is a widely different business with many more constraints. Just to give you a funny anecdote, during my first week at Instacart, I remember joining our weekly business review. And there was a team that had managed to save one cent per delivery to a set of optimization. And as soon as they announced that, the whole room erupted in applause. And I remember thinking, oh, we celebrate cents here. And at Facebook, let's just say we weren't focused specifically on the cents. And I actually think that that culture of sweating the details, sweating literally every penny, is what has made Instacart successful and has put us in a position where our unit economics are really strong in a market where there's been a lot of attempts at doing what we do and attempts that have been unsuccessful. So I've taken that culture to heart. And I actually think that constraints sometimes create just a better business and better operations. I find that people, when you set some hard constraints like you need to be profitable, you need to have great unit economics, it raises the bar on the type of talent you attract, the type of execution that you get in a way that differentiates the good companies from the great ones.