Max Mullen: How Instacart Solved the Problem of Grocery Delivery

When Max Mullen was a teenager, he used his mother’s credit card to order some candy and soda off the internet from the online company Kozmo.com. Less than an hour later his order arrived, and Mullen was hooked on grocery delivery as a breakthrough idea that could make people's lives easier. But by the time Mullen became a startup founder years later, Kozmo, Webvan, and their peers were buried in a Dot-Com graveyard, and investors were skeptical that grocery delivery would ever resonate beyond San Francisco. In this episode, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate speaks with Mullen about co-founding Instacart, lessons learned from the company’s early days, and why he divides startup decisions into three realms: science, religion, and art. Mullen also discusses why some of Instacart’s success traces back to the manager of a local Trader Joe’s, the moment he knew the company had found national product-market fit, and why he’s interested in robotic pets now that he’s a startup investor.