# 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]` 一位贫穷的 Matassa 的首席执行官从一家从你所在城市的商店里提供了很棒的购物的公司开始。几个小时内全部装在一个袋子里送到你家。所以你可以把从 Costco 运来的小孩和全食公司的有机甘蓝一起运过来。我就会现身，最近他们宣布了一轮价值 4400 万美元的重大融资，并将 Instraart 带到了纽约市，它现在就在这里。如果你愿意的话，你可以点一份上面写着凯勒和年轻人就在这里的戏院。但在此期间，当你计划你的食谱时，请放弃投票。出来吧。`[00:00:51]` 嘿，伙计们。谢谢你让我来这里。我很高兴今天能和你在一起。因此，正如亚历克西斯所说，我的名字是 Inascart 创始人和首席执行官的名字。那么，作为一种产品，您可以在车中订购食品杂货，并在 1 小时内将其送到您的门口。有趣的是我们是如何实现这一目标的。Car 完全是一家软件公司，这意味着我们实际上没有仓库，没有卡车，我们也没有任何库存。所以，当你订购你的杂货时，我们的网络中有成千上万的个人购物者。从全食、Costco、Safeway 等商店拿起你的杂货，并在 1 小时内送到你的门口。我们已经存在两年了，我们已经筹集了超过 5500 万美元的资金。今天，我们每天的收入超过了几十万美元。今天，我想和大家分享一下英斯塔特的故事。希望这里有一些经验教训，可以对你的旅程有所帮助。Inascart 的故事始于我创办公司的前两年，当时我住在西雅图，我在亚马逊工作，我一直想创办一家公司，但直到 2010 年 1 月这件事才变得严肃起来。我意识到，我在亚马逊(Amazon)的学习正处于停滞状态，我对那里缓慢而官僚主义的环境感到厌倦。所以我知道我必须做出改变才能开始。我开始去西雅图的铸造厂见面，每周他们都会有这些企业家来做一次演讲，这很棒，但我意识到每次他们都会谈论诸如可转换票据与 A 系列或天使 sv 之类的话题。对 CS 和终端消费者。老实说，如果你说的是企业，我根本不知道他们在跟我说什么。我以为我们说的是一家租车公司，所以考虑到这一点，我知道我还有很多事情要做。我全神贯注于此。我开始和尽可能多的创始人交谈。我开始与尽可能多的投资者交谈，并开始阅读尽可能多的关于初创公司的书籍。我也开始在业余时间提出和发展想法，这是很有趣的，尽管我喜欢我在亚马逊的工作。我期待着回家工作的想法。甚至在工作的一天里，我都在研究我的想法。很快，我的同事们开始注意到有些地方不对劲。我是亚马逊的后端物流工程师。所以我的同事会一直好奇为什么我总是在电脑上打开 X 代码。所以我知道我对我的同事不公平，所以我决定辞职，全天专注于我的想法。事实上，今天是我辞去亚马逊工作的四周年纪念日。当时我很害怕和不确定，但现在我知道这是我一生中做过的最好的决定。在放弃亚马逊之后，我决定是留在西雅图还是搬到旧金山。Ligia 说这不是一个非常困难的决定。笑声。我收拾好行李，跟朋友们道别，搬到了旧金山，那里我只知道两个人。`[00:04:46]` 对我来说幸运的是，那两个人也有一张沙发。`[00:04:52]` 在我搬到旧金山后，我找到了一位联合创始人，我们开始工作了。我们对一个特定的垂直或市场并不挑剔，所以我们对我们想尝试的想法非常灵活。有一周，我们会为广告商做一些类似分析平台的工作。再过一周，我们会为食物做 Groupon，每一种产品，我们都会努力吸引顾客，而在这个时候，我们肯定已经生产了大约 20 种产品。但结果总是相同的失败的产品，一个又一个失败的产品。大约 12 个月后，离开亚马逊，从事如此多不同的产品，并不断失败，这开始影响到我。此时，我们开始质疑，放弃亚马逊对我来说是否是正确的决定，创业精神对我来说是否真的是正确的决定。大约在那个时候，我们一直在集思广益地讨论这个想法，我们认为值得一试。这个想法本身就是一个律师的社交网络。并且是一种产品，让律师能够相互联系，分享文章和有趣的意见。我记得当时我认为这个想法很棒，在经历了所有这些失败之后，我想我们可能忽略了一件事，那就是我们对律师一无所知。我们以前从来没有和律师合作过，所以我们正在为人们设计一种产品，我们对解决一个我们不知道的问题知之甚少。在建立了产品、组建了团队、筹集了资金并尽可能多地与律师交谈之后，我终于意识到这是一个多么糟糕的想法。律师不喜欢科技，律师不喜欢分享，最重要的是，律师们特别不喜欢有人试图让他们注册一项服务，因为他们根本就不需要这样的服务。经过一年的迭代和转向这个产品，我意识到这只是又一次的失败添加到列表中。我告诉我的联合创始人，我们需要分开，我放弃了我自己的创业。我在这里学到了一个非常重要的教训，那就是创办一家公司的理由永远不应该是创办一家公司。创建一家公司的原因应该是为了解决一个你真正关心的问题，而联系律师绝对不是我关心的问题。据我所知，有一件事一直伴随着我，那就是杂货店购物带来的痛苦，这是我真正关心的问题，我害怕一旦你到了那里，我就会去杂货店。你必须绕着走道走进去，才能找到你要找的东西。你必须排队结账，然后把你的杂货搬回你的公寓，结果却发现你忘了商店里的一些东西。这是 2012 年，我们在网上购买了从书包到书籍到大屏幕电视的所有东西。但是，我们每个星期都必须做的一件事，我们仍然在以最低效的方式去做。从我记忆中的那一刻起，我就感受到了这种痛苦，所以我清楚地知道我需要在 2012 年春天建造什么。我开始为 Instraart 的第一个版本编写代码。我向自己保证，在产品准备好之前，我不会去杂货店。`[00:08:54]` 和 2012 年 6 月 2 日。我第一次点了英斯塔，然后我当然去了杂货店，拿起我的杂货，然后把它们送到我自己手中。笑声已经是一项有利可图的生意了。笑声。`[00:09:12]` 这是我发明的第一个版本，我在这里发现了一些非常有趣的东西，那就是我的朋友们也在使用 insta 汽车，我不需要强迫他们使用它。这是我从未体验过的所有产品，在此之前，我所做的一切。所以我决定去 YCombinator，但是有一个小问题。`[00:09:37]` 申请截止日期两个月前已经过了。`[00:09:43]` 但不知怎的，我知道如果 YC 的合伙人经历了英斯塔，他们就必须让我进去。所以我联系了我网络上所有的纽约校友，向他们介绍合作伙伴，在接下来的 24 小时里，我开始得到这些介绍。现在我要做的就是等待。所有的回答一个接一个地出现在那里，答案总是一样的。`[00:10:14]` 不可能。已经太晚了。`[00:10:17]` 最后我得到了加里·丹格的回应，这给了我一些希望。他说你可以填一份迟交的申请表，但现在几乎不可能了。所以这意味着这是可能的。`[00:10:36]` 笑声。`[00:10:40]` 我意识到，在这一点上，没有一个 Y 人看到真正体验产品的伙伴，他们甚至都知道它是什么。他们知道这有多不同吗。我知道我必须做最后一次尝试。我打开了我的应用程序，订购了 6 包啤酒，并在 YC 总部将其发给 Gary 10。`[00:11:04]` 我的一位司机约翰发短信给我，让我知道事情已经办妥了。半小时后，我接到加里 10 的电话。我不知道这是不是大谈话，但他让我第二天去 YC 总部见合伙人。所以，第二天我到达了会议地点，我遇到了四个合伙人，我收到了一大堆关于这个产品的所有问题。我们一定谈了大约一个小时，但感觉只需要几分钟，当它完成时我们就走了。他们让我离开，他们说，如果他们决定资助我，他们会给我打电话。这是标准做法，但当时感觉很冷。这感觉就像一连串的失败，一连串的拒绝会继续下去。十分钟后，我接到了 YC 的 Harge 打来的电话，他说我不敢相信我们要这么做。我们从来没有让任何人进来这么晚，但如果你感兴趣，我们会喜欢你。这就是你如何继续 Y 组合。我在这里学到了两条重要的课。首先也是最重要的，加里·坦德喜欢他的啤酒笑声。第二个教训是，作为一名创始人，你必须具有极强的弹性。你必须从失败走向失败，而不失去任何动力，因为下一个步骤，下一个产品，下一个迭代，你构建的下一个迭代，它可能是进入 Y 组合器之后走向成功的一步。事情变得很混乱。为什么他会有这样的晚宴，每周二所有的创始人聚在一起分享他们在上周的进展，而当我要去参加这些晚宴的时候，我接到了我的一个购物者的电话，她听起来非常慌张，她说她要辞职了。我问她发生了什么事，她说：“我知道这是一家初创公司，我们应该做所有的事情，但我就是不能这么做。”事实证明，她刚刚从 Y Combinator 的晚餐中收到了 200 升 2 升苏打水的订单。`[00:13:30]` 笑声。她根本不可能把它搬起来，也不可能在车里装得更好。所以我和她谈了几分钟，我能让她平静下来，我告诉她我要和她见面。然后我们一起做这个命令。所以这就是我们所做的，我们必须在这里清理出三码的安全通道，才能找到那些饮料。这实际上是我们打包的车。在这一点上，后备箱已经满了。这是车的后座。最后，我们来到 Y Combinator，卸下所有这些瓶子，然后我们到 Rene 那里去，他会协调晚餐，点这些饮料让她知道，嘿，我们做了送货，所以我们做了，她转过身说，哦，这太方便了，我每周都要这么做。笑声。`[00:14:22]` 笑声。`[00:14:26]` 在 Inascart 的早期，我们的大多数客户都是白人创始人，这很好，因为获得反馈很容易。每次他们刚下订单，我就给他们打个电话，问他们怎么想。这使得我可以非常快地迭代产品。`[00:14:44]` 我们得到的第一批命令之一是丹，另一位明智的创立者。`[00:14:49]` 他被安排去订购我们商店的购物者送货。我的顾客在送货后马上给我打了个电话，说这个顾客很奇怪，因为他订购了这些香蕉，但他不接受香蕉作为送货上门。`[00:15:06]` 所以我的购物者把所有的香蕉都放在了她的车里。她知道该怎么做，我也很困惑，所以我决定给丹发电子邮件，问他的订单是否还好，尤其是香蕉。`[00:15:20]` 30 秒后，他回答说，他非常激动。他说我叫了十个香蕉洋葱到车上，你的购物者给我买了十蒲式耳的香蕉。你觉得这是动物园的笑声吗？`[00:15:38]` 原来那件物品的照片是一蒲式耳的香蕉，所以顾客点的东西和顾客点的东西有一些混淆。所以我们给丹送了一份香蕉面包配方，他很好。`[00:15:55]` 为什么 See 在一开始就鼓励创业公司做一些我无法扩展的事情，这是非常重要的。我发现这是创业公司或大公司最大的竞争优势之一，因为大公司不可能做那些无法扩展的事情。这个想法是，一旦你的产品有了需求，你就能想出如何扩大你的产品的规模。我们把这个建议牢记在心，因为在英斯塔卡特的早期，你可以在我们的服务上下订单，而不会有任何购物者来完成这些订单。当然，这意味着我会放弃我所做的一切，亲自完成命令。现在我没有车了，在旧金山打车几乎是不可能的。因此，在 Inascart 的早期，很有可能当你下订单的时候，订单会以优步(Uber)黑色轿车的价格到达。`[00:17:02]` 笑声。`[00:17:06]` 经过 Y 组合器后，我的注意力变成了两个，一个种子圆，这是创建者做的最困难的事情之一。你对你的公司有最少的数据，在你的公司里有最少的牵引力，让投资者相信这是一个好主意，实际上是非常困难的。这对我们来说是非常困难的，因为我们所处的空间很大。像范科斯莫和其他许多人一样，在食品杂货配送方面也有过一些惊人的失败。因此，投资者很早就不愿意投资股票。事实上，我和风险投资家有一次会面，突然他决定起身离开房间，他拿着一张软盘回来了，他说你应该回家打开这个，因为这是万维网的商业计划。笑声。`[00:18:08]` 我不知道怎么找到软盘驱动器，所以我没有真正打开它，但是。但我们能够与一些相信我们的投资者结清种子，这是当时我们的收入图表，所以绝对不是一艘火箭飞船。`[00:18:27]` 即使在培育了种子之后，我们对不可伸缩的行为的做法也没有改变，唯一重要的是我们增长的速度和执行的速度。这方面的一个例子是，当我们有一家商店和一辆购物车时，我们决定将 TraderJoes 添加到 In 阅览服务中。我们必须做的第一件事是找到商店中可用的商品，并获取目录，并将它们放到 Inascart、com 或选项卡上。现在没有 API 或网站为 Trader Joe 提供商品目录，所以我们能够真正获得所有项目信息的唯一方法是在 TraderJoe‘s 购买每一件物品中的一件，把它带到工作室，拍摄所有这些东西，然后把它们放到我们的目录中。这正是我们所做的。这是所有的照片，在拍照前，所有的物品都排列好了。你知道，你们中的许多人可能会认为这是个愚蠢的差事，但是我们的球队在接下来的两周里不像国王。`[00:19:38]` 笑声。`[00:19:41]` 使用同样的不可伸缩的技术，我们加入了全食，Costco 和其他许多商店，我们意识到我们拥有市场上最好的产品。我们成长得太快了，我们的顾客在旧金山弄明白这一点后，喜欢商店里的心。我们决定，是时候把它带到海湾地区以外的一个准确代表美国的城市。所以我们决定在芝加哥启动。令我们惊讶的是，在三周内，我们在海湾地区的交货量超过了 33 周。然后我们推出了波士顿，波士顿的增长速度甚至超过了芝加哥。然后我们推出了 DC，其增长速度甚至超过了波士顿、芝加哥或海湾地区。然后我们继续推出越来越多的城市。今天，我们在美国的 10 个城市，收入以每周 10%的速度增长，20 周来一直保持着这样的增长。就我们作为一个公司和一个团队的发展而言，我们现在必须使每件事情都具有可伸缩性，这是非常困难的。我们有客户正在订购两种产品或 60 种产品。我们有客户代替即时订单或预定订单。他们可能在一天中的任何时候来自海洋的任何地方，然后我们有来自城市任何地方的众包购物者，他们在一天中的任何时候都在工作，而其中一些人的速度更慢，有些人的速度比我们在城市各地的商店更快，他们有不同的选择，不同的库存水平。那么，当你没有仓库，没有卡车，我们没有库存的时候，你是如何创建亚马逊网站的呢？这是一个非常困难的计算机科学和运筹学问题。但我们认为这是一个非常重要的问题需要解决，因为历史上第一次，美国各地的零售商第一次上线。我们的零售商能够为他们的客户提供一小时、两小时和同一天的送货体验，这是历史上他们第一次在没有任何基础设施的情况下做到这一点。现在，我知道这是你想去的地方，也是其中 1%的地方，但如果我在旅途中学到了什么，那就是，会有数以百计的失败，希望会有一些成功。因此，如果有一件事我想让你从这次聊天中解脱出来，那就是作为创始人的旅程-一段充满了数百次失败的极其令人兴奋的旅程-但如果你坚持足够长的时间，你可能就会幸运。祝你好运。

