HN user

mmmmax

240 karma

Co-Founder at Instacart

Posts13
Comments60
View on HN

Another interesting new trend I’ve seen a few times recently: second-time founders who are not raising at all! Instead they are choosing to bootstrap to Series A or, use their profitability to defer raising inevitably.

Hey, I co-founded Instacart and can offer some thoughts on this.

In most cases we are helping retailers create a new delivery experience for their customers, not replacing one that exists. It's actually quite complicated to operate our business and there are economies of scale that retailers benefit from by being part of a marketplace.

Also, when we talk to our customers about why they use Instacart, many of them do need groceries urgently, which is one of the reasons they use Instacart over alternatives. Most orders are delivered within 1-3 hours of being placed.

TL;DR: This bill attempts to disband The National Technical Information Service (NTIS), which collects and sells information and research. The bill asserts that the agency is no longer important, since you can basically just Google it now.

You need to send an email with the barcode and 25 minutes after that sweep the funds back...I've tried to use this twice and not seen my code.

Update: refreshing the page seems to help

Update 2: I just used my code and it worked great! Nice work guys!

What happened is that we made a mistake querying for the email addresses, causing us to miss a group of the first people to sign up for Instacart Express. This skewed heavily towards HN members. We knew a few people had been missed (because they emailed us after seeing the charge, and said they didn't get an email) but not why or how many.

Actually, no one paid for Instacart Express until March, 2013. And when we made changes to the plan, we intended to notify everyone first and give them time to decide whether to continue or cancel.

That's actually really good advice. At Instacart we try to go out of our way to make sure our customer experience is top notch. Giving people what they ask for is always the best way to do that.

Startup = Growth 14 years ago

If this essay had an abstract, this would be it:

"If you want to understand startups, understand growth. Growth drives everything in this world. Growth is why startups usually work on technology—because ideas for fast growing companies are so rare that the best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change, and technology is the best source of rapid change. Growth is why it's a rational choice economically for so many founders to try starting a startup: growth makes the successful companies so valuable that the expected value is high even though the risk is too. Growth is why VCs want to invest in startups: not just because the returns are high but also because generating returns from capital gains is easier to manage than generating returns from dividends. Growth explains why the most successful startups take VC money even if they don't need to: it lets them choose their growth rate. And growth explains why successful startups almost invariably get acquisition offers. To acquirers a fast-growing company is not merely valuable but dangerous too."

Take my money, HBO 14 years ago

Love it. Pre-fill the field with hint text like "10" and you will increase the number of tweets posted.