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

Over the next year, the Instacart team turned the company around. We went from losing $15 an order to making $3 an order. Without raising additional capital we built a cash buffer that was good for another year plus. We accomplished more in that 12-month period than I ever thought possible.

The grocery value chain is highly fragmented and new players operate on a variety of segments: restaurant delivery (Deliveroo), multi-product delivery (Glovo), grocery personal shopper (Instacart), and instant delivery shopping (GoPuff or Gorillas). Such actors can be both competitors and partners for traditional retailers. Faced with such disrupti... See more

If ultrafast delivery services flame out, it will most likely be because despite their popularity and value proposition, they cannot make the unit economics sustainable. What will happen instead is that existing players in grocery will leverage their existing infrastructure of stores and warehouses or acquiring an ultrafast player at a discount to ... 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.