00:43:39 · Jordi Hays, Apoorva Mehta, John Coogan
[00:43:39] S0: Yeah. [00:43:40] S3: And, you know, everyone's like, okay, this company is done. Right? Whole Foods the largest partner that we had. Right? Like like, I don't know if it was majority, but like a lot of our sales, like like 50, 60% of our were were Whole Foods. Right? Yeah. And yeah, and then the company survived it. Alright? The company not only survived it, thrived it. And we we had... COVID happened. Alright? All of our competitors went down. Amazon shut down. Target shut down. You know, so many other companies I can't even remember shut down. Right? The team found a way to to not only, you know, stay stay stay online but actually sort of, double and triple our growth during that time, right? And then it survived post COVID as well, right? Like I mean, I like which was like, wow, like the all the growth, right? Like it was not COVID led at this point. It was just you know, purely organic growth that we were seeing, right? [00:44:41] S0: Yeah. [00:44:42] S3: And, you know, most recently, Chris Rogers, who's our current CEO, just, you know, you know, did an earnings announcement and this was the best quarter they've had as public company. Yeah. Growth is back, profitability is incredible. I mean, you know, honestly, this is just... It makes me so proud of the thousands of people who sort of, you know, could have easily said that like, look, this is, you know, the conventional wisdom, this is not going to work. Right? But they said no, this time is different, and actually made it happen. [00:45:15] S1: Yeah.
00:45:15 · John Coogan, Apoorva Mehta, Jordi Hays
[00:45:15] S1: Yeah. [00:45:16] S3: And, you know, big, big kudos to the team. [00:45:18] S1: It's amazing. It's amazing. Yeah. People were... [00:45:20] S0: I love when I love when love when a business like seemingly breaks logic [00:45:25] S1: Mhmm. [00:45:25] S0: But then establishes like some new sort of ground ground truth. Yeah. And it feels like feels like you guys... [00:45:33] S1: Yeah. The funniest part of the roller coaster is at the end when people try to kind of stuff you in the SaaS pocalypse narrative. I mean, I think DoorDash took like the brunt of it, but still it was like... Everyone's like, okay, that's not a great example. There's a bunch [00:45:46] S0: of Yeah. [00:45:46] S1: Legitimate discussions we can have about vibe coding your own SaaS, but the multisided marketplace is maybe a little bit further out on the agentic apocalypse curve, I think. But...
00:45:46 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[00:45:46] S1: Legitimate discussions we can have about vibe coding your own SaaS, but the multisided marketplace is maybe a little bit further out on the agentic apocalypse curve, I think. But... [00:45:56] S0: Yeah. It is so crazy to think back in 2012 if you could, you know, tell your younger self, you're gonna start this company in 2012. By 2026, you're gonna sell it for $17,000,000,000 and you're gonna be like, wow. So it was just up and to the right the whole way. Of course, it was in the fullness of time. I'm very curious how... What what is your what is your point of view on on agents? Whenever whenever like AI agent founders like start talking about how much time they're gonna save consumers, I always kind of chuckle a little bit because you guys, you know, the the Instacarts, the DoorDash, you know, these other marketplaces have like spent a decade like shaving off seconds like, you know, milliseconds every single day, making this process like slightly more convenient every single day. And the compounding effect is that it's, like, extremely fast and easy to get what you want now and seemingly very difficult for agents to, like, actually meaningfully, like, improve that experience. And so it still makes to integrate with them. That's right. But, yeah, what what's what's been your view? Well,
00:47:04 · Apoorva Mehta, Jordi Hays
[00:47:04] S3: I mean, like, if you think about what, you know, what Instacart does. Right? Instacart gives people time. Right? Instead of having to schlep your your groceries, you know, get... You know, find parking, find like, you know, wait at the checkout, right? It just makes that activity, which everyone has to do on a weekly basis, you know, you know, it just makes that, you know, a few taps on your phone, right? So it saves, you know, time, saves like hours for everyone every single week, right? And so now you think about what the agentic opportunity here is, right? Is that like, okay, now the agents can save you those taps, right? And, you know... But yeah, you [00:47:46] S0: already saved them like 99% of the time. Right? Right. And so it's like it's it's not that compelling. Like, if you were to pitch this for a VC, it's like, you're not giving me a 10 x improvement. Like, you guys, original the original pitch was like, if you're saving someone hours, like, that is like a 10 x improvement. Right? But saving somebody like 10 times...
00:47:46 · Jordi Hays, Apoorva Mehta
[00:47:46] S0: already saved them like 99% of the time. Right? Right. And so it's like it's it's not that compelling. Like, if you were to pitch this for a VC, it's like, you're not giving me a 10 x improvement. Like, you guys, original the original pitch was like, if you're saving someone hours, like, that is like a 10 x improvement. Right? But saving somebody like 10 times... [00:48:09] S3: No. I I I don't wanna I don't wanna completely sort of, you know, you know, say that agents don't add value. They obviously do and they they will, right? I'm very excited about the agents that, you know, Instacart is building and and what the agents that Instacart and DoorDash can build together, right? You know, just imagine, for example, if an agent sort of understands your whole family's dietary needs and, you know, and can reliably figure out what you want to eat and be proactive about that and make you, you know, more healthy and, you know, those things do add a lot of value as well and, you know, I don't think we've seen that so far. I don't think we're we're very early in that journey.
00:48:09 · Apoorva Mehta, Jordi Hays
[00:48:09] S3: No. I I I don't wanna I don't wanna completely sort of, you know, you know, say that agents don't add value. They obviously do and they they will, right? I'm very excited about the agents that, you know, Instacart is building and and what the agents that Instacart and DoorDash can build together, right? You know, just imagine, for example, if an agent sort of understands your whole family's dietary needs and, you know, and can reliably figure out what you want to eat and be proactive about that and make you, you know, more healthy and, you know, those things do add a lot of value as well and, you know, I don't think we've seen that so far. I don't think we're we're very early in that journey. [00:48:57] S0: I was telling... I was I was talking with some folks at a at a major, you know, financial institution and I was like, what you need to be pick... What the thing that you need to be focused on with agents right now is that people are trying to... Are sending their agents to your product because your product lacks something like very fundamental. I think that that's like why I am excited for individual applications to think like how can we make our own software a lot better? How can we make use natural language, understand what users want, make this whole process more convenient within the app? But I'm more bullish on that than I am, you know, the average, like, you know, go go shopping for me. Right? Mhmm. Just because...