# Apoorva Mehta at Startup School NY 2014 > `[00:00:00]` Instacard CEO a poor of a Matassa started out with a company that offered something pretty amazing shopping from stores across your city. All in one bag delivered to your home within a few hours. So you can have that case of youngling from Costco shipped right alongside the organic kale from Whole Foods. And I\'ll just show up and very recently they announced a significant 44 million dollar round of funding and are bringing Instacart to New York City it\'s here right now. You can order that said Caille and youngling right here to the theater if you so desire. But in the meantime while you\'re planning out your recipes please give it up for a vote. Come on out of a. `[00:00:51]` Hey guys. Thank you so much for having me here. I\'m psyched to be here today with you. So as Alexis says My name\'s appartement on the founder and CEO of Instacart. So what is Instacart into car as a product where you can order your groceries and get them delivered to your door within 1 hour. What\'s interesting about this is how we actually make this happen. Car is entirely a software company which means that we don\'t actually have any warehouses no trucks and we don\'t hold any inventory. So when you order your groceries we have one of the thousands of personal shoppers in our network. Pick up your groceries from stores such as Whole Foods Costco Safeway and many others and bring them to your door within 1 hour. We\'ve been around for two years now and we have raised over 55 million dollars in financing. And today we\'re doing over hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue every single day. Today I would like to share with you the story of Instacart. Hopefully there are some lessons here that could be useful to you in your journey. The story of Instacart begins two years before I started the company I used to live in Seattle and I worked at Amazona at the time and I always wanted to start a company but it wasn\'t until January of 2010 when this became serious. I realized that my learning at Amazon was plateauing and I was getting tired of the slow and bureaucratic environment there. So I knew I had to make a change to get started. I started going to these these foundry meet ups in Seattle and every week they would have these entrepreneurs who would come in and do a talk and this was great but I realized that every time they would be talking they would talk about things like convertible notes versus Series A or angelsvs. vs CS and end consumervs. enterprise and I\'ll be honest I had no clue what they were talking about to me if you\'re talking about Enterprise. I thought we were talking about a car rental company so given this what I starting with I knew I had a lot of catch up to do. I immersed myself into this. I started talking to as many founders as I could find. I started talking to as many investors as I could find and I start reading as many books about startups I could find. I also started to come up with and develop ideas in my spare time and this was a lot of fun even though I enjoyed my work at Amazon. I would look forward to come home and work ideas. It got to the point where I was working on my ideas even during the day at work. Very soon my co-workers started to notice that something was wrong. I was a backend logistics engineer at Amazon. So my co-workers would always be curious why I had X code open on my computer all the time. So I knew that I was being unfair to my co-workers and so I decided that I wanted to quit and focus on my ideas full time. In fact today is the fourth year anniversary of me quitting my job at Amazon. At the time I was scared and uncertain but now I know that was the best decision I\'ve ever made in my entire life. After quitting Amazon I had a decision to make whether to stay in Seattle or move to San Francisco. Ligia say it wasn\'t a very difficult decision. Laughter. I packed my bags told my friends goodbye and moved to San Francisco a city where all I knew were two people. `[00:04:46]` Lucky for me those two people also had a couch. `[00:04:52]` After I moved to San Francisco I found a co-founder and we got to work. We weren\'t picky about a particular vertical or market so we were very flexible about the ideas that we wanted to try. One week we would work on something like analytics platform for advertisers. Another week we would do Groupon for food and for each one of these products we would try to get traction with the customers and around this time we must have built around 20 products or so. But the results were always the same failed product after failed product after failed product. About 12 months after leaving Amazon and working on so many different products and continuously failing this started to get to me. At this point in time we began to question whether quitting Amazon was the right decision for me whether entrepreneurship was really even for me. Around that time we had been brainstorming about this idea and we thought it was worth a shot. The idea itself was a social network for lawyers. And are a product to allow lawyers to connect with each other share articles and interesting opinions. At the time I remember thinking that this idea was brilliant that after all those failures that this was going to be the one I guess there was one thing that we may have overlooked and that was that we don\'t really know anything about lawyers. We had never even worked with a lawyer before and so we were working we were building a product for people that we didn\'t really know much about solving a problem that we didn\'t know they had. After after building the product building a team and and raising money and talking to as many lawyers as possible I finally realize how terrible of an idea this was. Lawyers don\'t like technology lawyers don\'t like sharing and most of all lawyers especially don\'t like someone trying to get them to sign up for a service then they never needed in the first place. After one year of iterating and pivoting on this product I realize that that this was just another failure to add to the list. I told my co-founder that we need to part ways and I quit my own startup. I learnt a very important lesson here and that was the reason to start a company should never be to start a company. The reason to start a company should be to solve a problem that you truly truly care about and connecting lawyers was definitely not a problem that I cared about. One thing that has that has been with me for as long as I can remember is the pain of grocery shopping that was a problem that I truly cared about and I have dreaded going to the grocery store once you get there. You have to circle in through the aisles to find the item that you\'re looking for. You have to wait in line to check out and lug your groceries back to your apartment only to realize that you\'ve forgotten something at the store. This was 2012 and we were buying everything online from bags to books to big screen TV. But one thing that all of us had to do every single week we were still doing in the most inefficient means possible. I had felt this pain for as long as I could remember so I knew exactly what I needed to build in the spring of 2012. I started to write the code for the first version of Instacart. And I promised myself that I would not go to the grocery store until the product was ready laughter. `[00:08:54]` And on June 2nd 2012. I placed my first order on Instacart and then of course I went to the grocery store picked up my groceries and delivered them to myself. Laughter Instacart was already a profitable business. Laughter. `[00:09:12]` This is the first version of instict I realized something very interesting here which was that my friends were using insta car as well I didn\'t have to force them to use it. And this was something that I\'ve never experience with all the products that I\'ve built before this. So I decided that I wanted to go to Y Combinator but there was one slight problem. `[00:09:37]` The application deadline had passed two months ago. `[00:09:43]` But somehow I knew that if the if the YC partners experienced Instacart they would have to let me in. So I contacted all the NYC alumni that I had in my network for introductions to the partners and in the next 24 hours I started to get those introductions. Now all I had to do was wait. One by one all the responses started to come in there and the answers were always the same. `[00:10:14]` No way. It\'s too late. `[00:10:17]` And then finally I got I got Gary Tange response and this gave me some hope. He said you could fill out a late application but it\'s nearly impossible now. So that meant it was possible. `[00:10:36]` Laughter. `[00:10:40]` I realized that at this point none of the Y see partners that actually experience the product that they even know what it was. Did they even know how it was different. I knew I had to make one last attempt. I opened my app placed an order for a six pack of beer and addressed it to Gary 10 at the Y C headquarters. `[00:11:04]` One of my drivers John made the delivery and texted me to let me know it was done and half an hour later I got a call from Gary 10. `[00:11:14]` I\'m not sure if it was the big talking but he asked me to come to the Y C headquarters the next day to meet the partners. So I arrive at the meeting location the next day I meet four partners and I get a barrage of questions about everything and anything about the product. We must have talked for about an hour but felt like just a few minutes and went when it was done. They told me to leave and they said that if they decided to fund me they\'d give me a call. This is standard practice but at the time it felt really really cold. It felt like the string of failures a string of rejections would just continue. Ten minutes later I got a call from Harge from Y C he said I cannot believe we\'re doing this. We have never let anyone in so late but if you\'re interested we\'d love to have you. That\'s how you go on to Y Combinator. I learnt two important lessons here. First and foremost Gary tand loves his beers laughter. And second lesson was that as a founder you have to be extremely resilient. You have to go from failure to failure without losing any steam because the next step the next product the next iteration that you build could make the difference it could be the step toward success after getting into Y Combinator. Things got really chaotic. Why he has these dinners where all the founders get together every Tuesday to share their progress in the last week and as I was going to one of these y dinners I got a call from one of my shoppers and she sounded extremely flustered and she said that she was going to quit. I asked her what had happened and she said look I know this is a startup and we\'re supposed to do everything but I just can\'t do this. Turns out what had happened was she had just received an order for 200 2 liter bottles of soda from the Y Combinator dinner. `[00:13:30]` Laughter. And there\'s just no way that she was going to build to carry it or fitter in the car. So I talked to her for a few minutes and I was able to calm her down and I told her I was going to meet up with her. And then we\'re gonna do this order together. So that\'s what we did we had to clear out three Safeway\'s yards of fairways here to find those drinks. This is actually us packing the carts. The trunk is already full at this point. So this is the back seat of the car. And then finally we get to Y Combinator and we unload all these all these bottles and then we go to Rene who would coordinated the dinner and ordered these drinks to let her know that hey we made the delivery and so we do that and she turns around and says Oh this was so convenient I\'m going to do this every week. Laughter. `[00:14:22]` Laughter. `[00:14:26]` In the early days of Instacart most of the customers that we had were were white founders and this was great because getting getting feedback was very easy. Every time they were just placed an order I would give them a call and ask them what they thought. And this allowed me to iterate on the product very very quickly. `[00:14:44]` One of the first orders that we had was from Dan another wise founder. `[00:14:49]` And and he is he placed to order our shop shopper delivered them. My shopper give me a call right after the delivery and said this customer was very odd because he had ordered these bananas but he would not accept the banana as a delivery. `[00:15:06]` So my shopper had all these bananas in her car. She\'d know what to do and I was confused too so I decided to email Dan and ask him if everything was OK with his order and especially with the bananas. `[00:15:20]` He replied thirty seconds later and he was extremely agitated. He said I ordered ten bananas onions to car and your shopper brought me ten bushels of bananas. What do you think this is a zoo laughter. `[00:15:38]` Turns out that the picture on Instacart for that for that item was a bushel of bananas and so there was some confusion between what the customer had ordered and with the shopper thought the customer ordered. So we ended up sending Dan a banana bread recipe and he was fine. `[00:15:55]` Laughter Why see encourages startups to do things unscalable me at the beginning and this is extremely important. I find that this is one of the biggest competitive advantages that a startup has or a larger company because there\'s no way that the larger company would be doing those things unscalable. And the idea is that once your product has demand you can figure out how to scale your product. We took this advice to heart when in the early days of Instacart you could place orders on on our service without there being any shoppers to fulfill those orders. Of course this meant that I would drop everything I was doing and fulfill the order myself. Now I don\'t have a car and getting a cab in San Francisco is next to impossible. So in the early days of Instacart there was a high likelihood that when you would place an order the order would arrive in the luxury of a Uber Black Car. `[00:17:02]` Laughter. `[00:17:06]` After going through Y Combinator my focus changed to two raising a seed round and raising a seed round is one of the hardest things that a founder does. You have the least amount of data about your company you have the least amount of traction in your company convincing investors that this is a good idea is actually very very difficult. And it was exceptionally difficult for us because of the space that we were operating in. There have been some spectacular failures in grocery delivery before like but Van Cosmo and many others. So investors were pretty reluctant to invest in stock early on. In fact I had one meeting with the venture capitalists when when suddenly he decided to to get up and leave the room and he came back with a floppy disk and he said you should go home and open this because this has the Web van business plan. Laughter. `[00:18:08]` I didn\'t really know how to find a floppy drive so I didn\'t really open it but. But we were able to close a seed round with some investors who believed in us and this was our revenue graph at the time so definitely by no means is it a rocket ship. `[00:18:27]` Even after even after raising the seed round the are our our approach towards unscalable unscalable doing things did not change and only thing that mattered to us was how fast we were growing and how fast we were executing. One example of this was when we decided to add Trader Joes to Instacarts offering when we had a store and store cart. The first thing we have to do is find the items that are available in the store and get that catalog and put them to Instacart dot com or tabs. Now there was no API or website which had the item catalog for it for Trader Joe\'s so the only way we could actually get all the item information was to buy one of every single item at Trader Joe\'s take it to a studio take pictures of all those things and then put them into our catalog. And so that\'s exactly what we did. Here\'s here\'s actually all the photos all the items being lined up before the before taking the picture. And you know many many of you may think this was a fool\'s errand but our team ain\'t like kings for the next two weeks. `[00:19:38]` Laughter. `[00:19:41]` Using the same unscalable techniques we we added whole foods Costco and many other stores and we realized that we had the best product in the market. We were growing so fast and our customers loved in-store heart after figuring this out in San Francisco. We decided that it was time to take this outside of the Bay Area to a to a city that represented United States accurately. So we decided to launch in Chicago. What we found there to our surprise was that in three weeks we were doing more deliveries than we had done in 33 weeks in the Bay Area. Then we launched Boston and Boston was growing even faster than Chicago did. Then we launched DC DC was growing even faster than Boston Chicago or the Bay Area. Then we continue to launch more and more cities. And today we\'re in 10 cities in the United States and our revenue is growing by 10 percent Reger a week and has been growing like that for 20 weeks. So far as we have grown as a company and as a team we have to now make everything scalable and this is exceptionally hard. We have customers who are placing orders for two items or for 60 item. We have customers replacing instant orders or scheduled orders. They could be from any part of the sea any time of the day and then we have crowdsourced shoppers who are working from any part of the city at any time of the day and some of them are slower some of them are faster then we have stores that are located on all parts of the city with different selection different inventory levels. So how do you create thisAmazon.com like experience when you don\'t have any warehouses when you don\'t have any trucks and we don\'t hold any inventory. This is a very very difficult computer science and operations research problem. But we believe this is a very important problem to solve because for the first time in history we have retailers all across the United States who are coming online for the first time for the first time in history. We have retailers were able to provide a one hour two hour and same day delivery experience to their customers and for the first time in history they\'re able to do that without having any infrastructure. Now I know this is somewhere where you want to be and were 1 percent of the way there but if there is something that I\'ve learned so far in my journey it\'s that there\'s going to be hundreds of failures and hopefully some successes. So if there is one thing that I\'d like you to take away from this chat it\'s the journey as the founder founders an extremely exciting one one that\'s filled with hundreds of failures but if you persist for long enough you may just get lucky. Best of luck. `[00:00:00]` 一位貧窮的 Matassa 的首席執行官從一家從你所在城市的商店里提供了很棒的購物的公司開始。幾個小時內全部裝在一個袋子里送到你家。所以你可以把從 Costco 運來的小孩和全食公司的有機甘藍一起運過來。我就會現身，最近他們宣布了一輪價值 4400 萬美元的重大融資，并將 Instraart 帶到了紐約市，它現在就在這里。如果你愿意的話，你可以點一份上面寫著凱勒和年輕人就在這里的戲院。但在此期間，當你計劃你的食譜時，請放棄投票。出來吧。`[00:00:51]` 嘿，伙計們。謝謝你讓我來這里。我很高興今天能和你在一起。因此，正如亞歷克西斯所說，我的名字是 Inascart 創始人和首席執行官的名字。那么，作為一種產品，您可以在車中訂購食品雜貨，并在 1 小時內將其送到您的門口。有趣的是我們是如何實現這一目標的。Car 完全是一家軟件公司，這意味著我們實際上沒有倉庫，沒有卡車，我們也沒有任何庫存。所以，當你訂購你的雜貨時，我們的網絡中有成千上萬的個人購物者。從全食、Costco、Safeway 等商店拿起你的雜貨，并在 1 小時內送到你的門口。我們已經存在兩年了，我們已經籌集了超過 5500 萬美元的資金。今天，我們每天的收入超過了幾十萬美元。今天，我想和大家分享一下英斯塔特的故事。希望這里有一些經驗教訓，可以對你的旅程有所幫助。Inascart 的故事始于我創辦公司的前兩年，當時我住在西雅圖，我在亞馬遜工作，我一直想創辦一家公司，但直到 2010 年 1 月這件事才變得嚴肅起來。我意識到，我在亞馬遜(Amazon)的學習正處于停滯狀態，我對那里緩慢而官僚主義的環境感到厭倦。所以我知道我必須做出改變才能開始。我開始去西雅圖的鑄造廠見面，每周他們都會有這些企業家來做一次演講，這很棒，但我意識到每次他們都會談論諸如可轉換票據與 A 系列或天使 sv 之類的話題。對 CS 和終端消費者。老實說，如果你說的是企業，我根本不知道他們在跟我說什么。我以為我們說的是一家租車公司，所以考慮到這一點，我知道我還有很多事情要做。我全神貫注于此。我開始和盡可能多的創始人交談。我開始與盡可能多的投資者交談，并開始閱讀盡可能多的關于初創公司的書籍。我也開始在業余時間提出和發展想法，這是很有趣的，盡管我喜歡我在亞馬遜的工作。我期待著回家工作的想法。甚至在工作的一天里，我都在研究我的想法。很快，我的同事們開始注意到有些地方不對勁。我是亞馬遜的后端物流工程師。所以我的同事會一直好奇為什么我總是在電腦上打開 X 代碼。所以我知道我對我的同事不公平，所以我決定辭職，全天專注于我的想法。事實上，今天是我辭去亞馬遜工作的四周年紀念日。當時我很害怕和不確定，但現在我知道這是我一生中做過的最好的決定。在放棄亞馬遜之后，我決定是留在西雅圖還是搬到舊金山。Ligia 說這不是一個非常困難的決定。笑聲。我收拾好行李，跟朋友們道別，搬到了舊金山，那里我只知道兩個人。`[00:04:46]` 對我來說幸運的是，那兩個人也有一張沙發。`[00:04:52]` 在我搬到舊金山后，我找到了一位聯合創始人，我們開始工作了。我們對一個特定的垂直或市場并不挑剔，所以我們對我們想嘗試的想法非常靈活。有一周，我們會為廣告商做一些類似分析平臺的工作。再過一周，我們會為食物做 Groupon，每一種產品，我們都會努力吸引顧客，而在這個時候，我們肯定已經生產了大約 20 種產品。但結果總是相同的失敗的產品，一個又一個失敗的產品。大約 12 個月后，離開亞馬遜，從事如此多不同的產品，并不斷失敗，這開始影響到我。此時，我們開始質疑，放棄亞馬遜對我來說是否是正確的決定，創業精神對我來說是否真的是正確的決定。大約在那個時候，我們一直在集思廣益地討論這個想法，我們認為值得一試。這個想法本身就是一個律師的社交網絡。并且是一種產品，讓律師能夠相互聯系，分享文章和有趣的意見。我記得當時我認為這個想法很棒，在經歷了所有這些失敗之后，我想我們可能忽略了一件事，那就是我們對律師一無所知。我們以前從來沒有和律師合作過，所以我們正在為人們設計一種產品，我們對解決一個我們不知道的問題知之甚少。在建立了產品、組建了團隊、籌集了資金并盡可能多地與律師交談之后，我終于意識到這是一個多么糟糕的想法。律師不喜歡科技，律師不喜歡分享，最重要的是，律師們特別不喜歡有人試圖讓他們注冊一項服務，因為他們根本就不需要這樣的服務。經過一年的迭代和轉向這個產品，我意識到這只是又一次的失敗添加到列表中。我告訴我的聯合創始人，我們需要分開，我放棄了我自己的創業。我在這里學到了一個非常重要的教訓，那就是創辦一家公司的理由永遠不應該是創辦一家公司。創建一家公司的原因應該是為了解決一個你真正關心的問題，而聯系律師絕對不是我關心的問題。據我所知，有一件事一直伴隨著我，那就是雜貨店購物帶來的痛苦，這是我真正關心的問題，我害怕一旦你到了那里，我就會去雜貨店。你必須繞著走道走進去，才能找到你要找的東西。你必須排隊結賬，然后把你的雜貨搬回你的公寓，結果卻發現你忘了商店里的一些東西。這是 2012 年，我們在網上購買了從書包到書籍到大屏幕電視的所有東西。但是，我們每個星期都必須做的一件事，我們仍然在以最低效的方式去做。從我記憶中的那一刻起，我就感受到了這種痛苦，所以我清楚地知道我需要在 2012 年春天建造什么。我開始為 Instraart 的第一個版本編寫代碼。我向自己保證，在產品準備好之前，我不會去雜貨店。`[00:08:54]` 和 2012 年 6 月 2 日。我第一次點了英斯塔，然后我當然去了雜貨店，拿起我的雜貨，然后把它們送到我自己手中。笑聲已經是一項有利可圖的生意了。笑聲。`[00:09:12]` 這是我發明的第一個版本，我在這里發現了一些非常有趣的東西，那就是我的朋友們也在使用 insta 汽車，我不需要強迫他們使用它。這是我從未體驗過的所有產品，在此之前，我所做的一切。所以我決定去 YCombinator，但是有一個小問題。`[00:09:37]` 申請截止日期兩個月前已經過了。`[00:09:43]` 但不知怎的，我知道如果 YC 的合伙人經歷了英斯塔，他們就必須讓我進去。所以我聯系了我網絡上所有的紐約校友，向他們介紹合作伙伴，在接下來的 24 小時里，我開始得到這些介紹。現在我要做的就是等待。所有的回答一個接一個地出現在那里，答案總是一樣的。`[00:10:14]` 不可能。已經太晚了。`[00:10:17]` 最后我得到了加里·丹格的回應，這給了我一些希望。他說你可以填一份遲交的申請表，但現在幾乎不可能了。所以這意味著這是可能的。`[00:10:36]` 笑聲。`[00:10:40]` 我意識到，在這一點上，沒有一個 Y 人看到真正體驗產品的伙伴，他們甚至都知道它是什么。他們知道這有多不同嗎。我知道我必須做最后一次嘗試。我打開了我的應用程序，訂購了 6 包啤酒，并在 YC 總部將其發給 Gary 10。`[00:11:04]` 我的一位司機約翰發短信給我，讓我知道事情已經辦妥了。半小時后，我接到加里 10 的電話。我不知道這是不是大談話，但他讓我第二天去 YC 總部見合伙人。所以，第二天我到達了會議地點，我遇到了四個合伙人，我收到了一大堆關于這個產品的所有問題。我們一定談了大約一個小時，但感覺只需要幾分鐘，當它完成時我們就走了。他們讓我離開，他們說，如果他們決定資助我，他們會給我打電話。這是標準做法，但當時感覺很冷。這感覺就像一連串的失敗，一連串的拒絕會繼續下去。十分鐘后，我接到了 YC 的 Harge 打來的電話，他說我不敢相信我們要這么做。我們從來沒有讓任何人進來這么晚，但如果你感興趣，我們會喜歡你。這就是你如何繼續 Y 組合。我在這里學到了兩條重要的課。首先也是最重要的，加里·坦德喜歡他的啤酒笑聲。第二個教訓是，作為一名創始人，你必須具有極強的彈性。你必須從失敗走向失敗，而不失去任何動力，因為下一個步驟，下一個產品，下一個迭代，你構建的下一個迭代，它可能是進入 Y 組合器之后走向成功的一步。事情變得很混亂。為什么他會有這樣的晚宴，每周二所有的創始人聚在一起分享他們在上周的進展，而當我要去參加這些晚宴的時候，我接到了我的一個購物者的電話，她聽起來非常慌張，她說她要辭職了。我問她發生了什么事，她說：“我知道這是一家初創公司，我們應該做所有的事情，但我就是不能這么做。”事實證明，她剛剛從 Y Combinator 的晚餐中收到了 200 升 2 升蘇打水的訂單。`[00:13:30]` 笑聲。她根本不可能把它搬起來，也不可能在車里裝得更好。所以我和她談了幾分鐘，我能讓她平靜下來，我告訴她我要和她見面。然后我們一起做這個命令。所以這就是我們所做的，我們必須在這里清理出三碼的安全通道，才能找到那些飲料。這實際上是我們打包的車。在這一點上，后備箱已經滿了。這是車的后座。最后，我們來到 Y Combinator，卸下所有這些瓶子，然后我們到 Rene 那里去，他會協調晚餐，點這些飲料讓她知道，嘿，我們做了送貨，所以我們做了，她轉過身說，哦，這太方便了，我每周都要這么做。笑聲。`[00:14:22]` 笑聲。`[00:14:26]` 在 Inascart 的早期，我們的大多數客戶都是白人創始人，這很好，因為獲得反饋很容易。每次他們剛下訂單，我就給他們打個電話，問他們怎么想。這使得我可以非常快地迭代產品。`[00:14:44]` 我們得到的第一批命令之一是丹，另一位明智的創立者。`[00:14:49]` 他被安排去訂購我們商店的購物者送貨。我的顧客在送貨后馬上給我打了個電話，說這個顧客很奇怪，因為他訂購了這些香蕉，但他不接受香蕉作為送貨上門。`[00:15:06]` 所以我的購物者把所有的香蕉都放在了她的車里。她知道該怎么做，我也很困惑，所以我決定給丹發電子郵件，問他的訂單是否還好，尤其是香蕉。`[00:15:20]` 30 秒后，他回答說，他非常激動。他說我叫了十個香蕉洋蔥到車上，你的購物者給我買了十蒲式耳的香蕉。你覺得這是動物園的笑聲嗎？`[00:15:38]` 原來那件物品的照片是一蒲式耳的香蕉，所以顧客點的東西和顧客點的東西有一些混淆。所以我們給丹送了一份香蕉面包配方，他很好。`[00:15:55]` 為什么 See 在一開始就鼓勵創業公司做一些我無法擴展的事情，這是非常重要的。我發現這是創業公司或大公司最大的競爭優勢之一，因為大公司不可能做那些無法擴展的事情。這個想法是，一旦你的產品有了需求，你就能想出如何擴大你的產品的規模。我們把這個建議牢記在心，因為在英斯塔卡特的早期，你可以在我們的服務上下訂單，而不會有任何購物者來完成這些訂單。當然，這意味著我會放棄我所做的一切，親自完成命令。現在我沒有車了，在舊金山打車幾乎是不可能的。因此，在 Inascart 的早期，很有可能當你下訂單的時候，訂單會以優步(Uber)黑色轎車的價格到達。`[00:17:02]` 笑聲。`[00:17:06]` 經過 Y 組合器后，我的注意力變成了兩個，一個種子圓，這是創建者做的最困難的事情之一。你對你的公司有最少的數據，在你的公司里有最少的牽引力，讓投資者相信這是一個好主意，實際上是非常困難的。這對我們來說是非常困難的，因為我們所處的空間很大。像范科斯莫和其他許多人一樣，在食品雜貨配送方面也有過一些驚人的失敗。因此，投資者很早就不愿意投資股票。事實上，我和風險投資家有一次會面，突然他決定起身離開房間，他拿著一張軟盤回來了，他說你應該回家打開這個，因為這是萬維網的商業計劃。笑聲。`[00:18:08]` 我不知道怎么找到軟盤驅動器，所以我沒有真正打開它，但是。但我們能夠與一些相信我們的投資者結清種子，這是當時我們的收入圖表，所以絕對不是一艘火箭飛船。`[00:18:27]` 即使在培育了種子之后，我們對不可伸縮的行為的做法也沒有改變，唯一重要的是我們增長的速度和執行的速度。這方面的一個例子是，當我們有一家商店和一輛購物車時，我們決定將 TraderJoes 添加到 In 閱覽服務中。我們必須做的第一件事是找到商店中可用的商品，并獲取目錄，并將它們放到 Inascart、com 或選項卡上。現在沒有 API 或網站為 Trader Joe 提供商品目錄，所以我們能夠真正獲得所有項目信息的唯一方法是在 TraderJoe‘s 購買每一件物品中的一件，把它帶到工作室，拍攝所有這些東西，然后把它們放到我們的目錄中。這正是我們所做的。這是所有的照片，在拍照前，所有的物品都排列好了。你知道，你們中的許多人可能會認為這是個愚蠢的差事，但是我們的球隊在接下來的兩周里不像國王。`[00:19:38]` 笑聲。`[00:19:41]` 使用同樣的不可伸縮的技術，我們加入了全食，Costco 和其他許多商店，我們意識到我們擁有市場上最好的產品。我們成長得太快了，我們的顧客在舊金山弄明白這一點后，喜歡商店里的心。我們決定，是時候把它帶到海灣地區以外的一個準確代表美國的城市。所以我們決定在芝加哥啟動。令我們驚訝的是，在三周內，我們在海灣地區的交貨量超過了 33 周。然后我們推出了波士頓，波士頓的增長速度甚至超過了芝加哥。然后我們推出了 DC，其增長速度甚至超過了波士頓、芝加哥或海灣地區。然后我們繼續推出越來越多的城市。今天，我們在美國的 10 個城市，收入以每周 10%的速度增長，20 周來一直保持著這樣的增長。就我們作為一個公司和一個團隊的發展而言，我們現在必須使每件事情都具有可伸縮性，這是非常困難的。我們有客戶正在訂購兩種產品或 60 種產品。我們有客戶代替即時訂單或預定訂單。他們可能在一天中的任何時候來自海洋的任何地方，然后我們有來自城市任何地方的眾包購物者，他們在一天中的任何時候都在工作，而其中一些人的速度更慢，有些人的速度比我們在城市各地的商店更快，他們有不同的選擇，不同的庫存水平。那么，當你沒有倉庫，沒有卡車，我們沒有庫存的時候，你是如何創建亞馬遜網站的呢？這是一個非常困難的計算機科學和運籌學問題。但我們認為這是一個非常重要的問題需要解決，因為歷史上第一次，美國各地的零售商第一次上線。我們的零售商能夠為他們的客戶提供一小時、兩小時和同一天的送貨體驗，這是歷史上他們第一次在沒有任何基礎設施的情況下做到這一點。現在，我知道這是你想去的地方，也是其中 1%的地方，但如果我在旅途中學到了什么，那就是，會有數以百計的失敗，希望會有一些成功。因此，如果有一件事我想讓你從這次聊天中解脫出來，那就是作為創始人的旅程-一段充滿了數百次失敗的極其令人興奮的旅程-但如果你堅持足夠長的時間，你可能就會幸運。祝你好運。