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