Learnings Scaling Instacart to $10+ Billion | Nilam Ganenthiran

Get Attio, the next generation of CRM: https://bit.ly/AttioThePeel Nilam Ganenthiran is the founder and CEO of Beacon Software. Previously, he was the 12th employee and President at Instacart. He takes us inside key moments from his 8+ year journey at Instacart scaling the company to over $10 billion. He also discusses strategies for customer research and building customer relationships, his new company Beacon Software, and more. Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (04:23) Inside Amazon acquiring Instacart’s biggest customer, Whole Foods (12:13) Lessons from quickly signing 8 of the top 10 grocers (13:06) Why grocers were slow to adopt ecommerce (15:29) Building “Shopify for grocers” (16:22) Sales = building relationships (19:05) Why Wegman’s is one of the best grocers in the world (20:43) Cold calling Wegman’s and signing them two years later (24:33) How to do customer research (26:59) Catching an Uber in suits on the highway (28:50) Why Instacart was possible back in 2013 (30:36) Launching Instacart’s advertising network (38:46) Growing 5x in 5 weeks during COVID (45:20) How Nilam started angel investing (47:56) Advice for sitting on boards (50:00) The roles and incentives of a board member (54:03) Deciding when to keep going and when to give up (56:02) Nilam’s framework around optionality (59:17) Seven years of weekly redeye flights (1:00:30) Almost running out of money 8 months after Instacart’s Series C (1:07:54) Why time is your scarcest resource & startups are default dead (1:10:00) Nilam’s new company, Beacon Software (1:11:28) Why he’s excited about AI (1:13:25) How AI makes human relationships more important (1:14:41) Turner’s investing lessons from family members Beacon Software: https://beaconsoftware.ca/ Where to find Nilam: Twitter: https://twitter.com/nilamg LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilamganenthiran/ Where to find Turner: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak/ Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it/