Instacart has a new CEO. Founder Apoorva Mehta, who has led the grocery delivery startup for nearly a decade, is now the company’s executive chairman and has handed the top job to Fidji Simo, a board member who will leave her post as a key Facebook executive. The move comes as investors are eyeing an initial offering for the company, perhaps before the end of the year.
“The idea of someone else running the company never crossed my mind,” says Mehta, who has been working alongside Simo since she joined the board in January 2021. “I won’t pretend this was an easy decision. This was an incredibly difficult decision. Instacart has been my life’s work. But when I came to the conclusion that this would be a better longer-term decision for our future business, the decision became easy.”
Mehta, a former Amazon engineer, conceived of Instacart at 24 years old when all he had in his Bay Area fridge was a bottle of Sriracha. In the early days, he did most of the shopping himself, making deliveries via Uber. Over the years, Mehta successfully navigated Instacart out of near-failure after its biggest customer Whole Foods was acquired by rival Amazon, as well as when demand ballooned five times during the first weeks of the pandemic in 2020.
Instacart now delivers from 55,000 stores across more than 5,5000 U.S. cities and is valued at $39 billion, giving the hyper focused and detail-oriented Mehta a net worth of $3.5 billion. Mehta told Forbes that his recent success just had him looking further ahead, echoing what he told Forbes earlier this year: “I’m playing a 20-year game.”
Simo, who now runs Facebook’s flagship app and was hailed is part of the company’s “new guard” in 2019, is now a key part of that future. An immigrant from France, Simo joined the social media company in 2012 where she has led the monetization of Facebook through web advertising on its News Feed, videos and games. Instacart’s advertising division, which debuted in 2019, brought in revenue of $1.5 billion last year, will be a big part of what Simo focuses on.
“The ROI for advertisers is already there. There’s literally an advertising product inside people’s cart, which is the holy grail in advertising,” says Simo. “A lot of what I want to do is continue adding more advertising formats and continue scaling that as fast as possible.”
A 36 year-old Instacart shopper prepares to fulfill an order at a Giant supermarket in Washington, D.C. in April 2020.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
The two quickly formed a close working relationship during her time on the board, often getting on the phone to hash out a problem. Over the past seven months, those calls became longer and more regular. Five months in, Simo hinted that she might be interested in leaving Facebook.
Mehta, who was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2015, says he hung up and immediately drove three hours to her house in Carmel, California. “He’s very convincing,” Simo recalls of the spur-of-the-moment 9 p.m. meeting. “My husband would joke when I was doing these daily calls with Apoorva that I am the most hands-on board member ever. But it was actually very gradual.”
The shakeup, which Mehta says was entirely his idea and not forced by investors, gives Instacart a leader with a decade of experience working at a publicly traded technology giant. Most recently Facebook has been dealing with antitrust lawsuits from government regulators and other political scandals that have embroiled billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg in a cloud of suspicion over its reach and control over the personal data of its users.
It’s a theme Mehta knows all too well. Critical to Instacart’s success is keeping the trust of more than 100 grocers who bear the cost of the expensive physical infrastructure without which Mehta’s delivery app is useless. Simo steps into the top job as that delicate balance has been rattled by Instacart’s incursions into the advertising space, which hits at a critical profit center for supermarkets and left some concerned that they may have let a fox into their hen house.
“I was very settled in my role and not considering anything else, but life happens,” says Simo, who was featured in Marie Claire two years ago as the executive working to rebuild trust in Facebook. “I had to take it. It felt like a really incredible adventure to get on.”