Fidji Simo - Creating Delightful Consumer Experiences - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS]
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Welcome to this classic episode. Classics are my favorite episodes from the past ten years published once a month. They're n of one conversations with n of one people. In the midst of our transition to OpenAI, we're spotlighting the force that is Fidgisimo. I hope you enjoy it. Here's a puzzle. What do OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, Vercel, Plaid, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? The answer is that they're powered by today's sponsor, Work OS. If you're building software for enterprises, you probably felt the pain of integrating SSO, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other fea
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My
guest this week is Fidji Simo, the CEO of Instacart. Fidji grew up in a small town in the South Of France and was the first person in her family to graduate from high school. Since then, she's had a dazzling career with stops at France's leading university, eBay, and Facebook. Fidji spent the better half of a decade at Facebook where she led the Facebook app before joining Instacart in mid twenty twenty one. We talk about Fidji's consumer product experiences, Instacart's role within the grocery ecosystem, and delve into her personal leadership philosophy. Please enjoy this wide ranging discuss
for having me, Patrick. My
pleasure.
I would say Facebook was the ride of a lifetime because it really taught me how to combine this long term vision with short term excellent execution because you never get through your long term mission and vision if you don't have this excellence in the short term. And it also taught me how to build great consumer products. And so I definitely brought that to Instacart. But to your point, it is a widely different business with many more constraints. Just to give you a funny anecdote, During my first week at Instacart, I remember joining our weekly business review and there was a team that had
mentioned that at Facebook, you learned what it meant to build great consumer products. What does that mean specifically? What's the dimensionality of those lessons?
I think it was a lot about understanding exactly what consumers wanted and also understanding latent demand. And what I mean by that is what was this? A playbook at Facebook was really understanding what users were already doing with a product that wasn't necessarily built for that use case as a sign that there was something there that you could productize and do something bigger with. And that has been the case at Facebook over and over again. If you look at Facebook Marketplace, people were already using the core Facebook product to try to exchange goods. So we built Facebook marketplace as
it's a great excuse since you've, in both cases, been out of business with just enormous amounts of data. First party customer data, interaction data, click stream data, just so much going on. And I think, obviously, that's an incredibly important ingredient for applying these new AI tools effectively to improve your business or improve your product. And I love this question, are you ready for AI? For every single business to be asking themselves that question feels quite critical because this appears to be maybe one of those platform shifts that everyone's always writing a
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