Ravi Gupta
speaker
157 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Ravi Gupta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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If we take our logic of work from the customer backwards, one thing I think that we were good at at Instacart and Instacart's still good at is percentage of time they spend thinking about the customer. So I don't think there's like a huge optimization on that. I do think that figuring out the most abstract thing of like, what does a customer want? A customer wants to save the trip to the store.
They don't want to go. And they want to be able to be at home when they get it. So when I was thinking, to your point, having these tools, the better, faster, cheaper version, I would be trying to make the orderer use as much context as I could to make their ordering process be as fast as possible and to make sure that their order is delivered as accurately as possible.
True like main thing things. And when I say make the order as fast as possible, I would be trying to do stuff where like their last grocery order is something that I can ingest in some way, even if it wasn't on Instacart. And so therefore I can as quickly as possible get them through to where they can check out. So that's one.
And then on the like, as accurately as possible, I'd be trying to be better at figuring out what's in the store right now so that I never show them something that they're not going to get. And then on the delivery side of it, I am not technical enough to tell you the optimal batching strategy that would be used using an LLM.
But whatever I could do to cut off minutes off that delivery, I'd be trying to figure out what is the AI way of doing that. And then maybe the other thing I'd be trying to do is like, is there something we can do like over the phone that's now not economic today that will be economic in the future for people that don't want to do it online, but want to just call.
Older people maybe aren't as familiar with the app. What can I do to make it where it feels like magic for them of like, I want these groceries. Okay, cool. Then they show up. What you're saying, though, has like a very embedded thing that's very real, which is the more your product is physical, the more the bottleneck for using the AI is the physical world rather than the software world.
And I do think it will be slower as there are constraints that are physical in nature. The AI is not fixing traffic today. It's not making a human being run faster through the store. I think figuring out whether your constraints are physical or whether they're like software related, digital. I think the more digital only you are, the faster this will come and create magic. It's sort of like this.
Either you're going to create magic or someone else is going to create magic with a lot fewer people than you. And the customer is going to expect magic. This Bezos thing of customers are divinely discontent. They are just going to expect magic. We already do this.
We are going to expect magic from every experience and either you're going to deliver it or someone else is going to deliver it, but that's the new standard.
this has been observed in the past, but I think sometimes there is historical status in business to the size of the team that you manage. Sometimes, still today, how many people do you have is a question that is asked to a startup founder as some indication of progress or the scale of your company. How much money have you raised? How many people do you have? I think if you take
This idea that you talked about, the small team meme, or Dharmesh's idea of small and mighty businesses, it seems possible that the new status is having a small team. The ratio of magic to people, and I think magic, sure, it can be like measured in revenue if you want to use a very blunt instrument.
But like maybe this idea of magic per employee implied being like, oh my God, you did that with 10 people. That kind of thing. Can't you feel that already? That feels like that shift has happened already. I think so. And I think that if it's happening, that's great. And it's not because that means people will lose their job. That's not the point.
The point is that each person will deliver more magic. They might leave a bigger thing and start a smaller thing or join a smaller thing and have more impact, have more purpose. Nobody likes being a cog in the wheel. Nobody likes feeling like if they left, nothing would change. And I think that the more we can get to people like getting more out of their potential, the
That would be freaking awesome. It does seem like it's starting to go that way. And I think that is an awesome thing. Small teams feeling like they can do anything. Oh man, there's nothing that stops us from doing that. I think that would be an awesome thing for the ecosystem.
And frankly, I think that this is conflating two things, but most companies are probably way too big relative to what they need to be public companies. There's no way that most of these companies will like run efficiently right now. Even without AI, you have this thing that these companies are bloated relative to what they should be.
I think now you factor in AI, you actually have a real reason to change that and to make yourself lean and customer oriented and seeking of magic. But I do think that this idea of the new status might be a small team. I think that's very possible.
One of my favorite concepts that I've heard, I don't know who the first person was to say this. The first person I heard it from was Pat Grady, my partner, which was we invest in slope, not intercept. I guess if I really take that as the logic, I think that's still very true. I think the thing that is possible is that for the best companies, the slope can be way different.
And the slope can be way steeper. And I think if you take that to its extreme, that means that for the best things, sure, like you should be willing to pay more. What I think it really puts a premium on though is be earlier into those companies, figure out what those things are going to be.
And I think that what that then comes back to is like, okay, what are the attributes of the people who are building them? And I think that comes back to some of the stuff that you've talked about and we've talked about, but like I mentioned ambition, I mentioned curiosity, I mentioned resilience, I mentioned adaptability. You mentioned imagination in there.
I think that's a hugely important word for thinking about this. So figuring out people that are close to what this can do, optimistic about what it can do, have some imagination. and then are also adaptable as hell because it keeps changing. When it changes, the only thing that you keep dear is like the obligation to deliver magic to the customer and everything else can change.
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