Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS]
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What is Fidji Simo’s background and how did she transition from Facebook to Instacart?
Welcome to this classic episode. Classics are my favorite episodes from the past ten years published once a month. They're N of One conversations with N of One people. In the midst of her transition to Open AI, we are spotlighting the force that is Fidgisimo. I hope you enjoy it.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolossus.com.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest this week is Fiji Simo, the CEO of Instacart. Fiji grew up in a small town in the south of France and was the first person in her family to graduate from high school. Since then, she's had a dazzling career with stops at France's Leading University, eBay, and Facebook. Fiji spent the better half of a decade at Facebook where she led the Facebook app before joining Instacart in mid-2021. We talk about Fiji's consumer product experiences, Instacart's role within the grocery ecosystem, and delve into her personal leadership philosophy. Please enjoy this wide-ranging discussion with Fidji Simo. Fidji, I've been so excited for this conversation ever since Ravi Gupta introduced me to you. I've so enjoyed learning about you, your history, the business, where you might be taking it.
And as I toyed with ways of opening our conversation, I can't help but open with a comparison between your experience running the Facebook app at Meta and your initial experience at Instacart, in part because it's going to let us talk about AI first, which I think is just such an Interesting topic for any big business that interacts with lots of customers. What was that experience like for you? Arguably going from one of the all-time great business models to one that I think everyone knows as a much harder business to get to scale. And then maybe all the benefits come at great scale, just wildly different businesses. And I'm really curious what that initial experience was like shifting gears so aggressively.
Thanks for having me, Patrick.
My pleasure.
I would say Facebook was the right of a lifetime because it really taught me how to combine this long-term vision with short term excellent execution, because you never get to your long-term mission and vision if you don't have this excellence in the short term. And it also taught me how to build great consumer products. And so I definitely brought that to Instacart. To your point, it is a widely different business with many more constraints. Just to give you a funny anecdote, during my first week at Instacart, I remember joining our weekly business review, and there was a team that had managed to save one cent per delivery through a set of optimization. And as soon as they announced that, the whole room erupted in applause.
And I remember They're thinking, Oh, we celebrate sense here and at Facebook let's just say we weren't focused specifically on the sense.
Ha ha.
And I actually think that that culture of sweating the details, sweating literally every penny is what has made InstaCard successful and has put us in a position where our unit economics are really strong in a market where there's been a lot of attempts at doing what we do and attempts that have been unsuccessful. So I've taken that culture to heart. And I actually think that constraints sometimes create just a better business and better operations.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Fidji Simo’s background and how did she transition from Facebook to Instacart?
0:00–8:46
2
How does Fidji compare her experience building consumer products at Facebook versus Instacart?
8:46–18:20
3
What does “pragmatic technologist” mean to Fidji and how does it shape Instacart’s AI strategy?
18:20–27:26
4
How is AI currently used at Instacart and what advice does Fidji have for other companies ready to adopt AI?
27:26–36:14
5
What is the current grocery ecosystem landscape and how does Instacart fit into it with major players?
36:14–45:47
6
How does scale and unit economics drive Instacart’s growth and profitability?
45:47–54:45
7
What is Fidji’s long‑term vision for Instacart, including health, AI‑native experiences, and becoming a software platform for retailers?
54:45–1:02:07
8
What is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for Fidji and how does that reflect her leadership philosophy?
1:02:07–1:10:49
Speakers
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