Video & transcript: Apoorva Metha, founder & former CEO, Instacart

The strategy is largely out of the same playbook as other on-demand apps—capture customers, consolidate control over a high-frequency behavior, expand and cross-sell to other higher-margin categories. But their challenges are significant as well, from spoilage rates on grocery to hard-to-predict inventory requirements and building relationships wit... See more

Grubhub’s original model was a marketplace for consumers to order food from independent restaurants that already had their own delivery fleets. Though this was a game-changer for consumers, it constrained supply to only listing restaurants that could perform their own deliveries. This was a mistake.

The first? Selling things online. Bezos was a trader with some exposure to internet companies, but this wasn't a years-long journey of discovery and understanding. This was a dude who read a stat on some random website, and thought "there's something here." Early on, most of that skepticism came from an inability for a startup to compete with large... See more

Many investors saw the "death blow" to Amazon coming when the big established retailers started selling online. So while Amazon was born out of an initial appreciation for the growth of the internet, they stayed on top with execution. The ability to execute in an internet-native model vs. the transition big-box retailers were trying (and failing) t... See more