What Instacart’s IPO Means for Tech
Slate Technology
Slate
4.6 • 636 Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2023
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
As other tech companies that rode the pandemic to success started sinking, Instacart managed to stay above water—they turned a profit and even made it to an IPO. But a stubbornly static stock price has some asking if Instacart—and the whole gig economy—hasn’t already peaked.
Guest: Erin Griffith, who reports on tech startups and venture capital for the New York Times
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I made you think you was real. |
| 0:02.0 | My name is Caden Sinclair. |
| 0:04.0 | Some people call us American royalty. |
| 0:06.0 | We were Liars. |
| 0:08.0 | A new series on Prime Video. |
| 0:10.0 | We were happy. We wanted for nothing. |
| 0:12.0 | Based on the best-selling novel. |
| 0:15.0 | Something terrible happened last summer, |
| 0:17.0 | and I have no memory of what or who hurt me. |
| 0:20.0 | No one in my family will tell me. |
| 0:22.7 | When you're left for dead, you want answers. We were liars. New series, watch now, only on |
| 0:28.9 | Prime Video. Remember back in 2020 when Noam was leaving the house and everyone who could afford to was ordering their groceries online? |
| 0:43.4 | Well, that was Instacart's moment. Use of the online grocery delivery app soared. And a lot of people thought it would never end. |
| 0:51.8 | Investors thought that the pandemic growth that a lot of these online companies |
| 0:56.9 | were experiencing was going to last forever. This was a fundamental change to consumer behaviors, |
| 1:03.3 | you know, this accelerated five years of tech growth. That's what a lot of them believed. And we've |
| 1:09.1 | seen this over and over and over with these quote unquote pandemic |
| 1:12.4 | winners like, you know, Zoom or Etsy or Peloton. That growth comes down almost as fast as it |
| 1:21.9 | spiked when people get back out there in the world and resume to the kinds of behaviors that |
| 1:26.3 | they did before the pandemic. |
| 1:27.7 | And so Instacart experienced that as well. |
| 1:30.8 | That's Erin Griffith, who reports on tech startups and venture capital for the New York Times. |
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