Max Mullen: How Instacart Solved the Problem of Grocery Delivery

**Max Mullen** (0:00)
I would always get, from investors and skeptics, this question of like, yeah, sure, it works in San Francisco, but call me when it works for moms in Kansas.
And then one day, we had an employee start, probably in like 2016 or something like that. And they said they had just moved from Kansas. And I said, is your mom a customer? And she said, yeah. And so I was like, finally, we got someone's mom in Kansas to use Instacart.

**Mike Maples** (0:24)
That's the voice of Max Mullen, co-founder of Instacart. Grocery delivery looked like a reliable way to burn enormous amounts of capital with little to show for it. Webvan, Kozmo, and a.com graveyard had made investors swear off the category. But in 2012, Max asked a better question. What is possible now that wasn't then? Smartphone, GPS, and internet native consumers had changed the answer. This is Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate and it's Go Time with Max Mullen.
This is Mike Maples Jr and welcome to the Pattern Breakers Podcast. Where we explore why some founders radically change the future and how they stand apart. Together we'll learn about the counterintuitive mindsets and actions behind their remarkable success. Brace yourself for a world where chaos is welcome, naysayers are often a positive signal, and movements galvanize misfits who transform the impossible to the inevitable.
Max Mullen divides startup decisions into three realms, science, religion and art. Science has right answers, so you seek advice on those topics. Religion is culture and values, which must come from within. Art is taste and should never be outsourced. Instacart science was relentless, building its own catalog, scanning every barcode, and optimizing unit economics penny by penny. Its religion was equally deliberate. Values were written early, revised as the company scaled and treated as the foundation for everything else. And the art, the thing that started all of it, was that Max genuinely loved the problem. He'd been thinking about instant delivery since he ordered candy on his mom's credit card in 1999 So he'd been dreaming about it for decades.
Let's talk to him.
Max Mullen, welcome to the show.

**Max Mullen** (2:38)
Thanks for having me, Mike.

**Mike Maples** (2:39)
Yeah, thanks for coming. And I guess this is probably one of your first interviews out of Instacart. So have you been on the podcast circuit yet or is this kind of new for you?

**Max Mullen** (2:50)
Not too many, not too many. But I don't know if you know this, Mike, but even before Instacart, you were a big inspiration of mine.

**Mike Maples** (2:55)
Oh, boy.

**Max Mullen** (2:56)
Yeah. Back before I think videos went viral on the Internet, there was this video I saw of you talking about thunder lizards in Austin, Texas.

**Mike Maples** (3:04)
Okay, nice.

**Max Mullen** (3:05)
And I remember thinking, this is like my introduction to the power law of venture capital. Okay. And I remember thinking, wow, that's what a legendary investor looks like. I want to do that one day.

**Mike Maples** (3:15)
Well, it's funny, I guess if you walk into Floodgate, you kind of can't miss it, right? It reeks of thunder lizards everywhere that you look. You know, before we get into the founding of Instacart, I remember you guys pitched us, right? You came in and pitched me and Anne, and I think we've offered you guys a term sheet, but we got outbid.

**Max Mullen** (3:33)
We had an incredible time meeting with you in 2012 in a garage in Palo Alto or something like that.

**Mike Maples** (3:39)
Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Yeah.

**Max Mullen** (3:41)
Yeah.

**Mike Maples** (3:41)
So it's funny how fast the time goes. And it's just like just but for Augusta Wind, you never know.
What led you to do this? You know, what motivated you to get started with Instacart? Did it look at all like what it turned into?

**Max Mullen** (3:55)
So I had started another company before this, and it was a social network. And we learned very quickly that we weren't very passionate, my co-founder then and I, about building social networks. And I then asked myself, what am I passionate about? What's missing here? And I felt like what was missing was that we didn't really get to know any of our customers. And we weren't really solving an important problem in their lives. So I committed to myself that in my next company, we would solve an important problem for real people in their real lives. And I wanted to have a real world operational component to it. And right around then, that was, I think, in early 2012, I became struck with a bit of inspiration for the beginnings of the idea for Instacart.