Scaling Instacart to $10+ Billion | Nilam Ganenthiran, Co-founder of Beacon Software
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 14 June 2024
⏱️ 77 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
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.
We talk tactics for customer research, building customer relationships, balancing strategy and execution, how to serve on and manage a board, what happened when Amazon bought Instacart’s biggest customer Whole Foods, inside its COVID response, surviving eight months of runway in 2015, 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/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We grew five-ax in five weeks. |
| 0:02.8 | We had to go from 100,000 folks picking and delivering groceries to 600,000 in four weeks. |
| 0:10.5 | From accounting for 5% of a grocery store sales to, in some cases, all of their sales. |
| 0:17.6 | When COVID hit, we quickly realized we needed to stop everything else everyone was doing |
| 0:23.7 | in the company and enter what we described as wartime. The only two other times the company had |
| 0:30.3 | been in wartime was one when Amazon bought Whole Foods and two, a couple of years earlier to that |
| 0:35.7 | when the third and probably biggest lever was we realized you could build a massive advertising business that was highly relevant to the CPG advertiser. |
| 0:46.5 | What was the strategy? |
| 0:48.5 | That's the moat, right? You do the hard work to serve customers and then you figure out who else benefits from you serving |
| 0:56.0 | those customers and then find a way to have win-win commercial relationships with them. |
| 1:01.0 | So that framework of do the hard work, who's benefiting from that hard work, and how can I then |
| 1:08.0 | participate in that. |
| 1:09.0 | When we talked about the role of the board member, I mentioned it's different depending on what hat you're wearing. |
| 1:14.6 | The best thing we all can do in a boardroom is assume that everyone else is really smart. |
| 1:19.6 | In terms of building for the long term, how do you do something to kind of give yourself optionality? |
| 1:25.6 | Personally, what I've found is optionality is overrated, because chances are, we raised our |
| 1:33.4 | series C, which was at a $2 billion valuation, and we felt like we were kings of the world. |
| 1:39.6 | Forbes magazine named us the most promising company in America. |
| 1:44.8 | Eight months later, we went from being top of the world to really being in a pretty |
| 1:51.1 | difficult financial situation. |
| 1:53.4 | We were losing north of $15 of delivery. |
| 1:57.9 | We might as well have been stapling $15 to that bag of groceries. How did that |
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