Instacart

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Best Workplaces Bay Area 2021-Instacart

Employees say:<br />
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“Everyone takes a really strong level of ownership and really cares about the company’s success. One of our values is 'This is Your Baby,' and I think teams and individuals really take that to heart.”<br />
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25 Best Large Workplaces in the Bay Area

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Sasha Rogelberg

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Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO, Thrive Global Fidji Simo, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart Moderator: Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Content Officer, Fortune

Most Powerful Women Summit 2024: What AI Means For Health

Conferences

Good morning. That was an awesome to get to know you. Thank you all for participating and thank you both for starting us off today with the agenda. Uh I think personally one of the most exciting use cases of the A I teacher is in health and in wellness and how it can improve all of our lives, especially through um not just, you know, the drug advancements that we're going to see but through behavioral changes and hyper personalization. So excited to talk to you both about that. But first, I want to talk about a really big overarching question. Um America spends more than any other country on health care but has a lower life expectancy than any other wealthy nation. Do you think that A I can actually move the needle here? Is this something this is, do you feel hopeful when you think about all the advances you're seeing in A I and your roles in it as your companies? Maybe Fiji, we could start with you? I think, you know, fundamentally at the heart of this problem is a data problem. And I think with A I, we're going to have way more ability to collect a lot more data, to mine that data, to find better insights and then to use those insights to tell people how to change their behavior. If you look at nutrition, which is obviously the thing I know the most with Instacart, there's also really like fascinating stuff which is that the healthcare system in the US spends about a trillion dollars on diet related diseases. That is the size of the US FOOD system. So that means that for every dollar you spend on food, the health care system spends an additional dollar treating you for from all of the problems that the food creates. That's pretty mind boggling when you think about it. And in fact, there is a real business case to solving that. Theres a lot of studies that show that if insurance companies funded the cost of healthy food, they would save $180 billion down the line, which is like a massive amount. But in order to do that, you actually need technology platforms and solutions that makes that easy. You need insurance companies to have a tech platform that can scale food as medicine. You need doctors to be able to prescribe food as easily as it is to prescribe medication. And right now, that's simply not the case. And then you need patients to be able to follow these changes in behavior in a way that's really that simple for them to be able to do. So that you can see over time this number of changing and go ahead. Well, I think Fiji is so absolutely right. And actually we are excited to thrive to be working with Instacart to address that. But the truth is that right now healthcare systems everywhere, not just in the US are literally breaking under the burden of chronic diseases in America alone. We have 130 million people with chronic diseases. We are spending over $4 trillion in health care. 17% of our GDP and the numbers are getting worse every year. I mean, anybody here who is a self insured, employer knows how deep the problem is. And there is this tool that uh Fiji alluded to, which is our daily behavior. That is kind of the neglected tool in health care. And yet if you look at the science, 7% of our health is our genes. Um at most 30% is medical care and the rest is our daily behaviors. Our motor arthritis health is what happens between doctor visits. Good point. You know, people go and have their annual physical and what happens in between. How are you sleeping? What are you eating? What's your stress level? Are you moving? We don't even call it exercise, movement, stress management connection. These are the five key behaviors, sleep food movement, stress management connection. Addressing this is really a miracle drug and A I has a unique power to address this problem because of hyper personalization right now. Even if your doctor uh mentions food, they are most likely to tell you go on a Mediterranean diet. People have no clue how they go about that. Um A I will know everything about you. The A I uh health coach that we are building in partnership with open an A I collect all your data, everything you are willing to give us biometric data, lab, data, medical data, but also your preferences. What foods do you like? How do you like to move and exercise? How do you sleep? And then the nudges and recommendations are hyper personalized. I mean, it may tell you at 315, you are picking up your daughter from school, go on a 10 minute walk in the afternoon, you normally have three sodas. Can you replace one of them with sparkling water and lemon? So it's very, very detailed and very applicable to you. And therefore through what I tried, we call micro steps, tiny little incremental changes. You can begin to adopt healthier habits. That's so interesting. Yeah, and you've said that behavior changes are the miracle drug and it sounds like you think through hyper personalization behaviors can be changed. We can you can nudge us in the right direction. Maybe finally use phone notifications for as opposed to stress. Um So one thing I did want to address is, you know, I think the most high functioning ceos have feel personal about the mission that they're solving. I know health is personal for both of you. You have high powered jobs. You always have, you're doing a lot and Arian, I think you might have been the first person on the planet medically diagnosed with burnout in 2007. Um, so I wanted to chat with you both. I know, um Fiji recently launched something called Metro Dora that's personal for you. Can you just talk about your personal health journeys and why this is a personal mission? Of course, um In 2020 I was kind of falling apart from head to toe is the best way to describe it. And I was diagnosed with a new iun condition. And um I realized that the level of research on these conditions were absolutely appalling very much in the same vein as autoimmune conditions. But 80% of the patients are women. And when I asked my doctors, the researchers in the field, why are these conditions impacting women so disproportionately, the answer was, I don't know, like they had no idea and we still don't fundamentally know why like autoimmune conditions impact women more than men. And that seemed to me like very terrifying that I would be diagnosed with a chronic illness that's incurable and that there was pretty much no research being done to explain the biology behind these conditions. And so I set out to create Metro Dora, which is essentially the idea of partnering with patients to enroll them in research and gather all of the 360 data points on them very similar to what you just described. But we look at their genetics, we look at their immune profiling, we look at our reported symptoms, we look at their environment and the beauty of A I is that in the past, these data sets were very siloed. And even if you wanted to analyze a ton of genomic data, that was a huge endeavor that could take many months. Now, let alone if you wanted to do that across all of the data points I mentioned. But now because we have this tool that allows us to analyze giant data sets, we're going to be able to understand patterns we couldn't understand before. And I fundamentally believe that the chronic diseases we're dealing with are not well suited for the current health care system that we have, which is really treating you as a set of body organs, right? Like you go to the cardiologist for your heart and the gynecologist just thinks you're a giant walking uterus, but it just happens to be that we are a whole body and all of these systems interact together. And I believe that by collecting the data about this very complex biology and analyzing it all together, we're going to understand these much more complex disease processes and be able to address them at the root source in very different ways. So that that's basically the mission of Metro Dora and why that's so, you know, important and personal because I can. And I said, I don't think we're on the path to solving chronic illness or at current cost and speed. I think we just got amazing tools with A I to allow us to do that. But it's really up to us on how we're going to deploy them in our organization in new applications in order to change the course one. And Ariana, I know it's personal for you as well in your book, thrive one of your many, many books. You're talking about how the lent this pursuit of success, money and power is actually killing us. Um And that we should be focused on other things. Instead, can you talk about how you've evolved in your house as you know, Alison, for me, it, it was really a personal wake up call when I collapsed two years into building the Huffington Post and divorced mother of two little girls. And I thought I didn't have the luxury to take care of myself. And I hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone. I was diagnosed with burnout. And that was actually the beginning of covering these things relentlessly at the Huffington Post. And, and realizing that we had defined what is a good life as simply a successful life based on status and money and ignored our health and well being, which is central, you know, we work with a lot of you, a lot of your companies here and sometimes CEO say, oh, you know, well being is so soft, you know, we need to focus on productivity and business metrics. Well being is a productivity multiplier if your employees are sick or stressed or depleted. Do you think they are going to perform at their best? So that's really what we are recognizing right now and that you can actually make huge changes with these micro steps. And you know, my favorite micros step um I thrive and we have thousands is the 62nd reset that I was showing you, which is the recognition again based on science. It's very important and to base all interventions on data and science so that they are not seen as warm and fuzzy and reset is based on this neuroscience that tells us that stress is unavoidable. If there is anybody here who doesn't have stress in their lives. Can you please meet me afterwards? But cumulative stress is avoidable and we can interrupt it in 60 to 90 seconds by focusing on conscious breathing on things that bring us gratitude and joy. We have hundreds of them that they are fed to, let's say employees on Microsoft teams or Slack or at contact centers and the results are absolutely amazing and it's 60 seconds. But my favorite thing is creating our own personalized resets. We have one for um Fiji, we have one for me who is people and things that give you joy quotes, music and to know that in 60 seconds you can interrupt. That cycle is really amazing because nobody can say I don't have 60 seconds. Yeah. Very efficient, very efficient stress saver. Good, good pro tip. Um, so I want to switch the topic a little bit. You both have a nice window into open A, I actually, um, the hot company of the planet, actually, 100 and $56 billion valuation. Um Fiji sits on the board, Ariana. You have uh co created thrive A I with open a sorry, thrive A I with open A I start up fund and S A. So I'm curious, you have this vantage point into the future of generative A I, you're sitting up close, you're apparently, I think there's probably you, I would assume frequent board meetings. Um What is the future of generative A I look like from your vantage points? Um Any concerns about some turnover recently or anything? We're gonna need another two hours. So I, I would say, I think we're about to witness a massive explosion in intelligence. And imagine if every single one of you had a phd level assistant in your discipline available 24 7 to help you realize anything that's on your mind. I think that we're very close to being able to realize the dream and being able to uh as a result, which is like abundance of intelligence, crack problems that we haven't cracked before I talked about biology earlier, but really cracked a variety of problems. And so that gets me incredibly excited. At the same time, I think that historically, we have seen that it's not always obvious how to translate the scientific breakthrough into people's lives and actually giving them all of the upsides and minimize the downsides of this breakthrough. If you look at scientific discovery in general, usually there is a gap of 17 years between a scientific breakthrough being discovered and that breakthrough impacting patients in the clinic 17 years is a really long time. And so my hope is that A I also helps us like really narrow that gap. But I know from experience that it is going to take a while for society to really absorb this massive innovation that's coming our way and actually turn it into applications that are really useful. I call myself a pragmatic technologist. And at Instacart, I really gave the mandate to the team. Let's not do A I for A I's sake, we're not checking a box here. Let's figure out the customer problems we've always wanted to solve and figure out if I can help us solve them. Uh And I think that's uh that's gonna be the right approach of like seeing it as a tool, seeing it as a tool that can massively accelerate solving the business and customer problems we're all solving uh so that we can put this goodness in the hands of people as, as fast as possible. Um Yes, I think um we completely agree here and that's how Sam and I came together to launch this new company because as Fiji said at the moment, the emphasis is um A I and drug development speed A I and diagnostics. But what about A I and everyday health and if A I, not just open A I, but all A I companies are going to be able to touch hearts and minds and convince people that A I can't be for good. We need to have a real impact on people's lives right now and we can do that because of the superhuman memory of A I. It can know everything about you all data points and then personalize the interventions and the micro steps. And uh and we are seeing that it can also democratize access to these behaviors because right now the 1% anybody with resources is all in on changing their behaviors. People are competing with how much sleep they got. I'm wearing my aura ring and you know, how much have you given up ultra processed foods altogether? You know, it's like it's constant, right? But millions and millions of people are being left behind and health inequities are huge and growing bigger every year. There is one statistic that I can't get out of my mind, which is that last year in America, there are 150,000 amputations of legs and toes of people with diabetes. Now we all know this is barbaric and completely avoidable uh diabetes, even if it's not preventable, it's a completely manage disease, not just with drugs, but with behavior. And the change here is not just to see behaviors as prevention, but as optimizing the management of disease. Because for millions of people, the prevention train has left the station. So we are working, for example, with Eli Lilly, they are going directly to consumers. They launch Lily Direct. You can go to Lily Direct, buy your drugs and then you are given the thrive coach for free. And you can say, why do they care? It's going to improve adherence of medication right now, 25% of people do not even fill the first prescription. So once you are engaged with people's daily behaviors, you are going to improve compliance, you are going to improve management of side effects. So the incentives are very aligned. And I actually see Pharma having a big impact here because they are directly into people's behaviors through the drugs that they, they sell. So we started this conversation talking about the health care spending in this country and, and really, um what's happening? One of the biggest fears I think people would have is hyper personalization sounds amazing, but in the wrong hands, it can be used against us. So um we're, you know, almost out of time here. But could you just give us some thoughts on how we can make sure that A I is working for us and not against us when we're giving it the information, what guard rails need to be in place. Well, I think it's all about value um that you give back to the, to the people. And um for example, at my clinic at Medora, we are asking patients to share a lot of data with us, but a lot of research studies don't actually drive results back to patients. So it's like give us your data, trust that something will happen. We actually really prioritize figuring out even though it's very complicated in jail care system. What is the return of results that can actually inform them and change their behavior? And so I think it's about clarity of how your data is going to be used and a very clear exchange of value so that you know exactly what you're getting in return and how you can change your behavior as a result. Wonderful. Thank you both so much. I would love to hear your answer, but we are getting the hook. Thank you both so much. Um And enjoy the next conversation. Thank you. Thank you all.

Asha Sharma, Chief Operating Officer, Instacart Clara Shih, Chief Executive Officer, Salesforce AI Moderator: Ruth Umoh, FORTUNE 

MPW Summit 2023: View From Silicon Valley

Hello, everyone. Welcome back. We can also please settle down so we can get this show on the road. Thank you so much. Welcome back. All right, we want to talk now about the state of the tech industry which is still in the effects of several shifts all at once from the impact of A I to a slowdown in fundraising and the growth of tech hubs outside of Silicon Valley. How these shifts in tech affect the broader business world? And what should corporate leaders know about implementing A I at scale safely and responsibly? Joining me on the stage now are two tech industry leaders with a view from the inside. ASHA Sharma is the co OO of Instacart and Clara Shai is CEO of Salesforce A I. Please welcome them to the MP W stage. Welcome. Welcome ladies. We're so delighted to have you. Thank you so much for joining us at NPW. Thank you for having us. Quick reminder for the audience. I will be opening up the floor for a question. So do keep it in mind as we kick off this conversation. Uh ASHA I'd like to start with you, machine learning. Has long been at the center of Instacart business. But the advancements in generative A I over the years uh have obviously turbocharged and unlocked the potential for new and innovative use cases. So how are you leveraging genitive A I across your marketplace? From customers to retailers to your more than 6000 shoppers who pack and deliver orders across the US and Canada. Yes. So to your point, we call it the invisible ingredient in Instacart. So we have a catalog of 1.4 billion items. It updates 6000 times every single second. And we are constantly thinking about how we connect the millions of customers to the hundreds of thousands of shoppers and the tens of thousands of retailers with generative A I I think the big innovation is that it's natural language. So all of a sudden we can democratize how people express themselves. So for consumers, the number one thing we're thinking about is how do we help the meal plan? How do we help them find what's for dinner? If you think about it, a grocery store has 30,000 items. It's really hard to spear fish by shopping for an avocado or cardamom instead of actually shopping for the meal. And that's what generative A I is going to do. At the same time, we have 5500. And so we are thinking about how we create the perfect ad for the perfect moment, an explosion of creative, that generative A I can help us with. So that's how we're thinking about utilizing it. Well, that's certainly useful for this audience because women never know what they want to eat so we can use generative A I in that regard, Claire, I'd like to turn to you. You were tapped with sales forces, new head of A I in the spring of this year in the last five or six months or so. What core areas have you been focused on to accelerate A I solutions across the company? And certainly among your customers. Well, it's really amazing because A I is not new, it's everywhere around us. Every time we use Instacart or Netflix or Amazon, any of sales forces, you're using salesforce, your salespeople are using A I over a trillion A I inferences every week now across every salesforce cloud. So what's new in the last six months is to Asha's point expanding upon traditional classical A I and now making generative A I safe, secure and trusted for enterprise use cases and sales force really thinking about this in four different ways, right? The 1st, 1st and foremost is data, right? Because A I is only as good as your data, you need data to train the A I models, you need A I to fine tune models and then of course to ground and give context into the prompts so that the models don't hallucinate. So for us, it really starts with our data cloud and so many companies B to BB to CS MB, all the way to enterprise, have their customer data already in salesforce. And so that's really where we start, I think from there, it's phase two and what we've delivered out into the market. And we have amazing four leading customers like Instacart and Gucci and William Sonoma using our generative A I now is bringing these use cases into the flow of work for sales teams, for customer service teams for marketers to really address operational bottlenecks and issues and kind of undesirable tasks that have slowed teams down. For example, if you're a customer service rep, customer calls in expecting a quick answer, instead of having to look through pages and pages of knowledge articles to read the solution and then let the customer know, generative A I allows us to automate that right. And that's just one example, salesperson walking into a customer meeting, instant account summary of everything that's happening at that account, kind of it's completely up to date. So that's what we have out in the market. And then what we announced last month at Dream Force is creating a platform around this so that our customers, they want to be able to customize those prompts. You want to be able to create your own prompts and build your own applications with no code. And so allowing customers to do that, we announced it's called Einstein Co Pilot and co pilot studio. And last but not least, it's our research team continuing to innovate across all areas of the stack from vector databases to the tooling training, infrastructure, ethics, toxicity, filters citations and more. We'll touch on epic shortly. I want to turn to you. How are you using A I in fulfillment logistics and to solve for or avoid inventory challenges? Yeah. So in our business, we often have to know what's on the shelf more than our retailers know. And so like I mentioned, we have a huge catalog that catalog updates, you know, multiple times every single second. And so when a shopper, one of our 600,000 shoppers are going into the store, we update our catalog real time when they're taking items off the shelf that feeds all the way through to our advertisers. So they're not advertising on products that aren't even available to customers. We use this term, we use A I to match shoppers with the right customers. We use A I to match them to the right stores to actually navigate through the stores, you know, in a business like ours, every second matters, every basis point matters and every moment of quality matters. So we do this from, you know, start to finish and the the customer delivery. Yeah. And the impact on the consumer is what? Talk to me about that consumer experience. Yeah, I mean, so when I open the app, what I want to be able to promise our customers is that you have the best selection, you have the best quality and it's going to be delivered when you want it A I is the way that we do that at scale for 250 million orders every single year. Question from the audience. If you have a question, please raise your hand and Mike handler will come to you any questions at this point? OK. All right. Let's keep going. If that changes, I will circle back around both of you view A I as a lever for scale and productivity to that end. What is your approach to using it internally? To simplify day to day workflows and to expand its adoption in the company outside of your typical tech savvy functions, whether it's hr legal marketing, etcetera. Yeah. Well, we have our CMO or CH I run in the room so they'd be great at answering this. But I mean, we look at, we look at A I as some that can augment the workforce offload tasks, but I also think it's a massive accelerant. So yes, generative A I is automating a lot of the code that is written, but it's also the first knowledge base we've ever had. We hired more than half of our employees during COVID and we're all in different locations. And so for the first time, we can build a knowledge base, we call it Ava named after avocado where anybody can query Ava and actually learn about the business learn what's happened in the past and can actually grow together. So that's something that I'm really excited about. We also are using it with customer service. So it's helped us decrease escalation rates, improve contact rates. That is a really important part of our operating leverage that we get out of that. Our legal team, we have, you know, 1200 retailers that we partner with thousands of pages of agreements. And so we are able to actually look at all the bespoke nature of those agreements, understand them and then build off of those, all the generative A I. So we're trying to use it and really explore and power the workforce with it and same question for you. Yeah. Well, we're, we're of course in the business of building A I for our customers, but we refer to our own company as Customer zero and we're always, you know, eating our own dog food or drinking our own champagne. And so we, every product we've released in the market, we test on our own teams first. And so some examples, all of our developers are now using developer GPT Apex GP T to do automated code generation, test case and comment generation. Our sales people are using sales GP T our own customer support team using service GP T both as an assist for our customer support engineers as well as there's a lot of common questions that customers just want to go directly to our website and be able to self service and ask. And so that's another great use case for A I. Yeah, going back to Instacart. Um you believe that the future of grocery shopping in commerce really in general isn't online or in store? It is both, which is great news for me because I love perusing through Trader Joe's Isles. How are you using the online experience? So then augment or compliment in person shopping? Yeah, it's a great question. I can also talk about why generative A I is important there. I think for decades, we have, since the advent of e commerce, we have taught people to express themselves in keywords, which is a very bizarre and unnatural thing to do. Again, if you're thinking about the 15 ingredients that go into a meal is so odd that you can't just ask what is for dinner. And so I think that's a big opportunity when you think about going into the store, it is a very generic experience. You're walking through the aisles, you're going in a, you know, a non linear pattern to get through it and you're spending 45 minutes in the store. So we've invested in a company called Caper Cards and it is in our opinion, the best computer vision technology to help you when you are shopping. And so now you can connect your Instacart account. You can connect your loyalty for the first time. Retailers can know who you are. When you get into the store, advertisers can know who you are. When you get into the store, they don't have to just wait until checkout. We have a screen in front of you. You can check out as you go and we know exactly what's going into the cart and you can pay and we can develop preferences. We can suggest things based on your past purchases. So I think that those are the types of experiences that are better because you're online or better because you're in store and only manically unlocks your technology. Absolutely anything to add to you were not in your head. So you had something to, I mean, just to build on that. I think that the first big UX revolution was when we went from very basic assembly language to higher, higher order, more abstract code. Then the big revolution. I think a lot of reason why companies use platforms like sales force is going from code to clicks, right? Being able to democratize who can build a business out. Now, we're seeing yet another UX revolution come from A I which is to go from code and click to conversation. And you know, exactly as you're describing whether it's consumer who's doing it that way or all the employees and partners that you have in your organization. And I think too about, you know, we've got Lydian and my colleague who leads Slack in the original conversational interface. It completely changes how accessible intelligence and creativity can be to every worker. Yeah, I want to talk about some of the concerns around A I because it obviously offers up a mixed bag of risks and rewards. Uh It can certainly help to enrich and enhance the customer and employee experience, but it can also fabricate information or promote bias or discriminatory information. Uh which is why data privacy and security is a major concern. How do you leverage A I at scale while ensuring ethical and responsible use within your respective organizations and perhaps we can kick off with you this time? Sure. So I mean, right now, this is our 1997 moment for A I, right. We know that it's going to be big. We know that everything is going to change every job, every department. We know the customer experience is going to change for the good. But we also know that there's going to be new risks that will be introduced some of those risks we've identified, we're having really healthy discussion and dialogue about as we have the last couple of days, some of them, they're unknown, unknowns and we have to be very agile and vigilant at looking at those. And so, I mean, if I look at salesforce 25 years ago, the company convinced organizations to put their most treasured data, their customer data in the cloud. That was, that was a controversial concept at the time. And in order for the company to do that. We all had to invent new ways of securing and encrypting data and do it in a trusted way. Right. That's why trust is the company's number one value. 10 years ago, we had to do the same thing with predictive. There were new risks that came with predictive A I, including some of the same risks that we are talking about today, like bias and unintended training data sets. Now we have a new set of risks and it's on a completely new scale because of how accessible and how broad the applicability that the A I is. And so we have to come with a trust first mindset which includes both data security and data privacy, not just across companies, but even within an organization, different employees and departments have access to different data. And so two people asking the same prompt can and should get a different response. And so making sure that access control is a part of it. The other side of it is is on the ethics side, right? Making sure that these large language models, they are trained on the corpus of content. On the that unfortunately, there is bias, there is hate speech, there is a lot of not trustworthy sources out there. And so we have to compensate for that with really good toxicity filters, citations. Again, going back to the data is so important to ground all the prompts in trusted reliable, truthful data to ensure that the outputs are reliable and accurate. And then I want to with you, ASHA very quickly A I can deliver real value to companies that are early adopters. What advice do you have for leaders who have yet to fully embrace the technology in a meaningful way within their organization? The last 30 seconds. Yeah, I mean, a couple of things, one, I think it needs to be leader led. This is the largest technology transformation since the shift to mobile, potentially since 1997. And I think it needs to start from the top and I think every single person needs to be experimenting and exploring with A I in order to get the full power of it. Third, don't just deploy A I for A I's sake, deploy to solve real world problems. That is what we're in the business of doing as technologists, as business leaders, as operators, use it to solve the most pressing customer problems and we'll succeed together. Absolutely. Very well said. Thank you both so much.

Mar Hershenson, Founding Managing Partner, Pear Ventures Jess Lee, General Partner and Chief Product Officer, Sequoia Capital Moderator: Terri Burns, Investor; Board Member; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech

MPW Summit 2023: Investing In Today’s Climate

Mar Hershenson, Founding Managing Partner, Pear Ventures Jess Lee, General Partner and Chief Product Officer, Sequoia Capital, Terri Burns, Investor; Board Member; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech

The venture capital markets. OK. Um So it hit new highs in 2021 breaking records in the United States and around the world. According to CB insights, global venture capital financing reached $621 billion in 2021 which is more than double the previous high, which was reached the previous year in 2020. But times have changed an endless flow of cash, an abundance of IPO offerings seem to be behind us. However, that doesn't mean there aren't opportunities knocking money to be made and the possibility of new unicorns waiting in the wings. So what are the best strategies for investing in this climate and how can we keep important principles such as diversity and inclusion and investing in companies with female founders, front and center. We are joined to discuss this by two leading women in VC Ma Hinson is founding managing partner at pair ventures and Jess Lee is partner and chief product officer at Sequoia Capital. They join investor board member and Fortune Brainstorm Tech co chair, Terry Burns for today's conversation. OK. So the market is tough right now. We've seen a lot over the last year we've seen layoffs, interest rates. SVB LO Lots has happened in the market. Jess, I want to start with you is now a good time to be investing in technology start ups. Yeah, it is definitely a very tumultuous time in the world in the market. But I actually think that now is one of the best times to be investing. I think there's, you know, the world moves in cycles and there are two cycles that are happening and intersecting at the same moment. The first is the capital market cycle. And you know, we see this boom and bust and it's happened multiple times across in the venture industry. We've seen it at Sequoia over the last 50 years. But the founder of Sequoia used to have this license plate and it said Baruch, which is German for like sort of crazy times. And it was a reminder that after the crazy times, the 2021 era, everyone's sort of throwing money at everything. There's a sharp correction and it's actually in those moments after the baroque times where some of the best companies are created because you've got all the capital flows away, the tourists leave the market and the founders who start companies in those eras where there's no money, no good reason. That's not glamorous anymore. All the parties are gone are the people who are the missionaries, not the mercenaries who don't care about the market. They're like, I just have this burning problem I need to solve. And so they start companies then and that, that burst after the 2000 crash or the 1999 dot com bust that bursts paypal, Google Yahoo in the 2008 era that bursts doordash stripe airbnb. And so I think we're seeing that. So that's one cycle that's happening. We're in the most fertile time for founders then the other cycle that's happening, the technology cycle, we've got the semiconductor industry that, that proved drove a lot of interesting companies. Then we had the internet and era which you know, Google and Yahoo, then the mobile era Instacart and a bunch of other companies. And now we're entering the A I era. And what's really interesting is these are overlapping at the same time. So I think we're going to see some very, very interesting companies started. So I would say now is probably like genuinely the best time to be investing. OK. Well, I definitely like to hear that we're all actually early stage investors. Mar I want to ask you as an early stage investor during what is, you know, a fertile time as, as Jeff said, how do you think about revenue and growth for early stage companies? What is it that you're looking for? Um Maybe I'll put it in perspective. I invest so early days. Um maybe a couple of people or three people uh many times there is no revenue and a lot of times there is no product. So I, I am what I call a, I know it's scary. I am, I am what I'm called a whiteboard VC or a spreadsheet VC. So there's no spreadsheet that I can look at and be, let me look at your projections. So a lot of people are like, well, how can you invest like that? Is it just God? And there's definitely more than God that goes into that investing. We are really trying to figure out what is the potential of that founding team to build a company that you know, can be a large company, high growth, positive unit economics and that. So how do you do that when there are two people in a room uh pitching an idea and I think there's maybe two a access that we use to evaluate a company, one is really the character of the founder. So I think, you know, different venture funds have different tastes and that's good because otherwise we would all invest in the same companies. Um but we have, you know, ambition or, you know, wants to win. I think I like people that really can't sleep at night. It sounds horrible, but that's kind of that tension uh every day. And the second thing which is a little more subtle, but it's really important for what we do is how deeply you know, the customer on the market, right. So many times we will invest in people that are in their early twenties. And, uh, you know, a lot of folks will tell me you're crazy. This person has no experience, but some of these people have been working on their company even if they don't know it for perhaps 10 years. So, um I don't know if you guys know Canva, which Melanie Perkins, the CEO, she was a graphic designer from being a teenager since she was a teenager. And then she went to college, started teaching Adobe Photoshop, started a company selling um year book soft software. So it would be easy to make yearbooks. And finally she started Canva at the age of 20. So, but, but when she was 20 she had already been working on her company for a year. She had figured out what was the real problem if you actually wanted to design something? So that's what we're looking for. It's a little subtle but uh you know, it's important. So in a moment, I want to see if anyone in the audience has, has a question or two. But before that, you know, this is a room of smart, powerful women. Um some of whom might be interested in investing. What advice I would love to hear from both of you. Would you give to folks in here who might be interested in angel investing or, or getting active in the investing market for start ups in some capacity? Actually? Can we do a quick poll? Um you know, I think what's really special is this is a room full of powerful and probably more wealthy and you know what you do with your, your money and, you know, a money is power in a lot of ways where you place those bets in the world and where you, you know, what problems you want to see solved in the world. Like I think angel investing is a really powerful way to do that. But I'm curious who here is an angel investor is invested in, in a, could be an S and B A tech company. It could be anything great. Half, that's great. It looks like about half be great to see the other 50% maybe also participate. But um advice wise, you know, I, I think Mar shared some of her, her thoughts on um you know what to look for. But I think another thing is you're, you know, you're looking for someone who is contrarian and right, and that can be kind of hard to pick out. And so I think if you focus on an area, you know, particularly well, where you have a perspective on like what is a unique thesis or theme that you believe in a problem, you know, particularly well, where you can be helpful to the founder if you're ac ro and there's a lot of CS in the room, you know, you control a health care budget, right? With your employers, you pick a lot of the software that, you know, is deployed to your department. So I think finding an area where you have like a little bit of that contrarian thesis or an idea of what customers want. So, you know, because I think it's hard to invest across everything and then I would just meet a lot of founders in that given space because it can be kind of hard to tell in the beginning. You know, maybe you're an optimist, you love everything and you end up spending a lot of money on things that don't work. But once you've met five founders that are doing something in kind of a similar space, you can start to tell because we're better as humans, we're better at relative assessments. Like knowing this is better than this, then this is great. And it's the only spaceship company I've met and it's fantastic versus like if you meet five of them, then you can kind of tell. And so I do think it's important to invest the time, meet a lot of people before you make that cut that first check. Well, II, I want to say that there's so much wealth in this room, but it's not just money, it's actually know how. And I think a lot of the founders, you may write a small check, but they're gonna get a lot more out of you if you spend the time helping them build a company and you have an impact. I mean, I think the, each of the companies, I think that we invest, the investor um can really make a, you know, a big impact on that company. So, in a way, I would say angel investing is really hard. Um I would consider almost a type of philanthropy and it's a great way. So if you want to back more founders that you believe in, that's a way great and then actively help them. It's actually a great way of being a participant of that wealth, right? Um I think Malin who's one of the co chair here runs Operator Collective, I was sitting next to somebody earlier that was got into investing through Operator Collective and she basically brings operators into investment um industry. And, you know, there's a lot of venture firms that have, you know, we call them Industry Council consider just as another name, but basically brings it operators into their companies because they're so valuable for them, right? I don't think we can do a company on our own and we need everybody. So I think um the first to your point, I think um being calibrated is so important, like the first year you're like, oh my gosh, everything is great. Um But, you know, just get involved, I think with a venture firm or an angel group or something to get your, you know, foot in the door and I think you can learn it pretty quickly because everybody here is super smart I would also say tap the power of the network, right? Um Mar and I are co founders of a nonprofit called All It was co founded by 30 women, some of who are in this room. And our CEO page is, is somewhere around here. Uh But it is hi page. Um It's, it's a nonprofit to level the playing field for women in tech on the VC side as well as on the founder side. And so, yeah, I think it's been very powerful to see the community come together and I'm sure there's a lot of, if you're a VC in this room, I don't know, raise your hand, like talk to any of us about investing or, or, you know, coveting, you know, I think you, you learn from other people and, you know, we have a power. I mean, I think what's so special about this conference is the convening power of really great women to build networks. Any questions from the audience, questions from the room? I'm curious to know you mentioned Jess um the idea of having a contrarian view and I, I agree, I think many folks would agree that having a contrarian view and being right, that's the winning combination for investors. Um I think we all know some folks who are contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. But anyway, um what's your contrarian view? I'd love to hear from both of you. What are you seeing in the market? That's your contrarian view right now. Um You know, it's funny, I don't think this would be contrarian to this audience, but it was, it, it felt contrarian for a long time. I was the founder working before this on a company targeting women and I would go into these rooms of V CS and people be like, oh, is that an important customer? Like, what is that? Is that a big market? And I was just shocked by that response. And so I came into venture with this like supposedly contrarian thesis that women are very important customer. We're the, we're the chief, you know, medical officers of the home. We're the Chief Financial Officer. We control a lot of the household purchasing budget, whether it's the groceries on Instacart or CPP or whatever it is, we make a lot of important decisions for the family and for the home and we have a lot of buying power. And so one of my contribution was invest in companies that target women as a consumer. Um and one of those is Maven Clinic. The founder Kate is speaking later this week, but her idea was like, well, women, you know, one in four hospitalizations are maternity related. And it's crazy that after giving birth, we get one checkup after six weeks. Like I think I got more frequent checkups when I broke my wrist, right. It's just crazy how health care treats women sometimes. And so her hypothesis was, let's build a telemedicine clinic, wrap around support for maternity fertility pediatrics. And let's sell that to employers. And it was so contrarian, she could not raise money, but she eventually, she made it happen. And now it's the largest telemedicine network for family health. And it was so crazy to me that that was so contrarian, but you know, she's done very well well. Um I, I'm an engineer by training and I am happy to say that there are some industries that have traditionally not been loved by venture, but today, uh they're getting a lot of attention, some of, you know, semiconductors, climate defense, I think the three of them. Um it's interesting because there is a big pool from uh industry and there's also a big support from government and they're solving major existential problems. So you take a look at semiconductors. Um you know, you have NVIDIA growing 100% year over year and it's 35 billion in revenue. It's like it's a mega company. Um And at the same time, 90% of our chips are made in Taiwan. It's a huge national security issue. So the government, you know, released the chips Act of 50 billion invested in semi. There is so much, you know, I think I have it for 10 years. I had not seeing any semiconductor companies and all of a sudden there's a couple every week in my inbox. So people are seeing like there's more companies after that same with climate. I think you cannot, you know, go on media and not hear about some disaster and saying there's a tremendous amount of interest from young folks to get into, you know, address that problem and also government support. So I think it's a trend, you know, same as A I and this is a big transition. There's these three other things that are happening around us that are geopolitical industry driven, etcetera. So lots of opportunities for us. Lots of opportunities on that note, Mar Jess. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you.

Fidji Simo, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart
Interviewer: Maria Aspan, FORTUNE

Most Powerful Women 2022 - Transformation On Demand: How Instacart’s New CEO Delivers

Transformation On Demand: How Instacart’s New CEO Delivers

we are moving along. Did you know you can have singer actress and entrepreneur Siara help with your grocery shopping. You really can Instacart. Users can look at cr's grocery list on the shopping and delivery app and use it for inspiration to buy products. It's just one of the company's efforts to broaden its offerings under Fiji CMO who became Instacart chief executive officer a year ago. Since then. She's expanded Instacart technology options, deepened its partnerships with retailers and signed up celebrities to help add some glamour and glitz to your grocery shopping. And in May Instacart filed confidentially for an I. P. O. It's not that confidential anymore. I guess it's a complicated time for tech startups to try to go public of course. But Fiji, a tech industry vet who previously ran facebook's flagship flagship app is used to leading through all sorts of challenges. She joins us today for a conversation with Maria Aspen about her vision for Instacart making moving from a tech behemoth to a startup and much more. Please welcome Fiji and Maria to the stage. Good morning C. G. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Hi everyone. It is really exciting to be sitting up here with you because um, just a little over a year ago we were sitting down at your house to talk about the new job you were taking on. Um, after many years at facebook and being a very senior executive there, you decided to jump to be Ceo of a smaller company, a big but still smaller startup and it's been an eventful year, both internally and externally for the company. How do you feel about your past year, your first year on the job as ceo Yeah, it's certainly been a full year I would say you know the thing that has been truly amazing is uh the fact that a big part of why I made the jump was this idea that I could take all of the skills I have developed that facebook, the operational rigor of the long term thinking and really apply it to a company I was passionate about and drive my own vision and so Over the last year I have really focused on getting our company to really look to the future and really focus on this big vision that we have of changing this industry which is a $1 trillion dollar industry grocery and enabled through technology and it's been so rewarding to start seeing after a year of the fruits of that, of that new vision really coming to life and uh and really helping people life. You know I was having a lot of conversation over dinner last night and I think that really showed me the most was a group of women saying that they were discussing what helps them be super women and they said like insta call really helps us like get our groceries and even save time and like even when they're traveling, make sure that the kids have what they need and they develop to their home and so we have a real impact on people's lives and that's been the most rewarding part of the job. I wonder if you could dive a little bit more into the some of the business decisions you've made because you've signed up Siara lizzo um you know Instacart developed um reputation during the pandemic as like groceries on demand, but you've done a lot of enterprise facing work to sort of diversify the revenue stream and I wonder if you could talk about how you think about you know, the less sexy side of building up a startup. Yeah, absolutely. So to me what I saw when I took on the job was not just a grocery delivery company, what I saw was this massive industry in the midst of the digital transformation and all of these actors, like mainly incumbent grocers really not adding the technology that they needed to embrace consumer needs which were you know, ever changing. And I saw insta got as the company that had the opportunity to be the technology backbone for that entire industry. And so a lot of what we've developed is not just you know, our own instagram app even so that's important but also building all of these capabilities for grocers on their own properties that should go to Kroger dot com, you can use our technology to go to public dot com. We actually built that entirely commerce experience, et cetera. And so so um that has been very much an expansion of the initial vision. And then the next step for us is doing the same thing inside the stores because the stores of the future are not what were you know experiencing right now. They're going to be much more personalized, much more immersive. And people are going to come to expect of the physical store, a lot of the personalization and immersive nous and information and inspiration that they get online. And so we're building now technologies for the store like smart cards like, you know, immersive, you know mobile app technology that you can use inside the store uh to make people's lives easier easier, both online and offline. It's been a difficult year in terms of external challenges. One of the things you did was write down Instacart valuation after investors had done so um you filed confidentially for an I. P. O. In May and not really a great time for company to go public. Um And you're not, can you tell us anything about the I. P. O. Sadly you know more in the quiet period says yes he wouldn't be very happy with me if I did have. But the bigger question is how do you how do you think about achieving a goal or changing a goal when there are these massive macroeconomic factors you can't control. Yeah I think um you you know the thing that uh the hardest to do as a leader is to really figure out what is in your control and what isn't and you know if the markets are going to do what the markets are going to do, I don't get to control that but I do get to control like the execution and the vision and how we're making progress towards that. And so the last year has been really about focusing the teams on the values that we can create increasing that value for farmers and for ourselves and even resetting our values like one of the core values that I carry deeply about this value that's called growth apply mostly because we like our food funds but also because in times like these where things are tough, you know the market stuff, people tend to go to scarcity and they tend to feel like you know you can only win if someone else's lose and we really what we're trying to do on instagram is do things that are better for the whole ecosystem, lift up our retailers, lift up our CPG partners, lift up our consumers, lift up our shoppers. And and I really believe that in times like these where things are hard, you can actually with the right values really thrive in the future. And if you keep your eyes really on the ball of delivering value for an entire ecosystem, another external factor yesterday the biden administration announced a proposal that would reclassify contract workers like you have an Instacart as employees and we saw shares of your public competitors kind of tank on the news. How do you think about this? What's this gonna do to Instacart business? Yeah, so the specific role is really guidance on, you know, what qualifies as an independent contractor, uh, Employees. So it doesn't have a very direct immediate impact on our business. But I think it sets kind of the question of uh, this type of work in the future. And I think that's interesting that when you think about personal shopper people will go pick items in the store on the art of customers. Um, about 70% of them are women and 50% of them are months. And when I talk to them, they are telling us that what they really need is extreme flexibility. We have a lot of them that are caring for aging parents, caring for their Children. And so the idea that they can open up an app and go to work like for an hour or for three hours or on the weekend and really set that into their schedule is really like important value that we bring to these people and help them earn money and make ends meet. And so I, I'm hopeful that in the future we're going to find a policy framework that maintains the flexibility where we don't end up classifying independent contractors of full time employees because like, you know, 80% of them tell us that's absolutely not what they want are very happy with this flexibility, but also give them all of the protection that they rightfully deserve and I don't think it has to be either or, and so I'm optimistic that the longer and we're gonna figure this out. Are there any questions for Fiji? I know. Okay. Um over there where mike is coming to you and if you could tell us who you are. Hi, I'm Khadijah, I'm one of the veterans here. Um it's not really a question. I just wanted to thank you um during Covid um had a lot of family members and people that were sick and you know, being safe in san Diego. I was able to actually go and Instacart and send the groceries in their area and send them groceries and things that they needed. So you made it easier for someone like me that you know, my sisters in one state, families in other states, so thank you for that. You've shown that. So I appreciate it. Any other questions. Okay. Yes. Hi, my name is Sandy Carter and with unstoppable domains and so we do what? three and metaverse. I just saw the amazing metaverse that Walmart did do you guys have any similar plans to execute shopping in a virtual environment as well? Great question. Well, you know, I kind of, I was spent 10 years that matter. So people ask me a lot about the metaverse and I, I kind of make the joke that if I deliver potatoes and tomatoes in the metaverse, people are gonna go real hungry and so for now we're staying very much in the real world but to your point I think I think that goes to the point I was making on like shopping experiences of the future are gonna need to be a lot more in and an example of something that could be amazing is that people still tell us that they go to grocery stores to be inspired to discover new products, which is kind of interesting because you don't think of the grocery store is the most inspiring place and that means that there's still a lot of room to go to really inspire people around food products but in a cultural environment you could imagine a lot of really interactive experiences around food around discovery of new products, new recipes, classes, all of that being delivered in a way that you don't have to you know leave your house and you get products delivered at your door after having at this much more immersive experience with the products you love. So that's still a little bit further away. We're trying to enable really basic technology inside the store right now but I think it will be coming in the future and one in the back hi I'm laura Manson smith from korn Ferry and I love the organizational value of grow the pie because it's real talk, you know it's not just some kind of random words and one of our speakers yesterday talked about how she likes to see the value in the halls and not on the walls, which I thought was kind of neat. So I just wonder what are some examples of how you're bringing that value, grow the pie to life? It's a great question, a very good example is so I was talking about the fact that we build technology for own marketplace, but we take all of these technologies and we make them available to our grocery partners for their own website. And initially, you know, when, when we pushed on that people investors, everyone was kind of asking us, wait, that's going to take people away from the instagram app, you're taking your secret source and you're giving it to us partners and the reality is that, you know, it certainly helps the retailers a lot, but it helps us address the entire market as well. And so a lot of what I push the team to figure out is like what do retailers need and because in the future, if we actually address their needs and if you make their business better, when it's not about like, you know, making our bottom line better, it's about really growing their business ultimately will be able to find some value out of it. Uh, and that has been the case and maybe it's lagging maybe, you know, it takes a little bit more time to figure out how you're gonna benefit from it, but when you make an entire ecosystem better, you always find a way to, you know, bring that back some kind of value for yourself, but you need to start with value for the ecosystem first, not the value for yourself, if you really want to lift the entire industry, I want to end by switching gears a little bit because we have heard a lot on this stage, including in the last session about women's health and I know this is something that you have a lot of personal experience advocating for yourself and being public about some of your health struggles, but also your um you have a different hat on in the women's health area and I wish, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about both your experience and how it shapes what you're doing today. So, you know, I three years ago I was diagnosed with a neuro immune condition. It's basically a condition at the intersection of the nervous system and the immune system and there's a lot of these conditions like 20 million Americans and that's even in the estimation of these types of conditions and when you look at the start, usually it's like 80% women. Uh and you know, I started asking the question to all of my doctors, like why is it primarily women? And you get a bunch of different like answers, oh, women's immune system is over reactive and we don't really know why. But mostly what you get is like, well, you know, we haven't really done to research to figure that out. Even though that seems kind of pretty fundamental. And so I I realized I realized that that needed to be solved. And so I found two incredible co founders, one fantastic your gastroenterologist, one scientist. And while building his clinic and research institutes around uranium conditions based in Utah. And the idea is to bring all of the specialties of medicine under one roof to treat the whole person. And that's really what I show we're missing the most in women's health. Where like it's funny because sometimes when I say we're doing something in women's health, people immediately assume its reproductive health. And you're like, no, you know, women have other organs like big news. And so and so it's been really interesting to like see, oh, these are conditions that primarily affect women that are not just Conditions. Uh and they are they are things that are really understood and studied. So we are opening all doors in Q1 of 2023. We are really excited about the progress that we can make in the space. And it actually ties into a lot of the things I'm doing at Instagram as well because I'm and I'm gonna have to stop you there. But I just want to say congratulations, thank you for joining us. Everyone

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