Apoorva
Mehta
34 • RETHINKING
HOME DELIVERY
In the early days of the COVID-19
pandemic, Instacart faced a
tidal wave of orders, as people
with means opted en masse
to pay the service’s workers to
buy groceries for them. Apoorva
Mehta, the company’s 34-year-old
founder and CEO, calls that period
a “wartime moment”: “We just
didn’t have enough shoppers.”
Instacart went on a hiring binge in
March 2020, bringing on 300,000
gig workers in a matter of weeks;
the next month, it announced it
would hire a quarter-million more.
But as usage soared, Instacart
faced new criticism about
the way it treated its workers,
including labyrinthine sick-pay
policies, frequent rule changes
for shoppers and demanding
performance metrics. And after
pouring more than $20 million into
a controversial ballot initiative in
California, Instacart—alongside
other firms such as Uber and
Lyft—decisively won that bid
last fall to avoid classifying their
workers as employees under state
law. Mehta says, “This is going
to be a conversation that we’re
going to have as a society over
the next decade or so,” about the
gig economy: “The ecosystem
that we want to build is one
that recognizes that flexibility is
going to be an important part of
people’s work.”
In the meantime, Instacart—
which raised more than
$500 million in venture- capital
funding last year—continues
to expand. “The smartphone is
the supermarket of the future,”
Mehta says. “We are going to help
co-create that.”
—Alejandro de la Garza
CHIANG: RITCHIE B. TONGO—EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK; NAKATE: ABUBAKER LUBOWA—REUTERS