FORTUNE OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021 85
WHEN SILICON VALLEY
went into lockdown in
March 2020, some tech
executives got pandemic
pets or expanded their Hawaiian
estates. Fidji Simo went looking for a
piece of home.
She found it in a $5 million
gated villa in Carmel Valley, Calif.,
complete with landscaped greens
and moss-covered roofs that seem
magicked over, wholesale, from
her native South of France. It’s a
90-minute drive south of the Menlo
Park headquarters of Facebook,
where Simo was a senior executive
until July, and even farther from
downtown San Francisco, home to
grocery-delivery startup Instacart,
where she’s the new CEO. But there’s
a certain brand awareness to this
pandemic splurge and its extensive
gardens. Simo walks visitors past
blackberry bushes, apple trees, and
even a plot of carrots, the vegetable
featured in her new company’s logo.
Simo—glamorously goth in a purple
and red dress, long black hair, and
elaborate eyeliner—laughs as she
waves at the patch: “They’re very ap-
propriate for Instacart, no?”
The business those vegetables
represent—Instacart’s fresh, fast
grocery delivery—is why Simo left
Facebook after a decade for a bigger
role at a smaller company. Insta-
cart, a third-party delivery service
that sends shoppers to buy grocer-
ies other people order, saw sales
volume quadruple and revenue hit
Shopping
Outside
the Aisle
Instacart is betting
that its new CEO,
Fidji Simo, a former
Facebook executive
and retail newcomer,
can push its business
beyond grocery
delivery and toward
an IPO. The native of
France is used to
big-time pressure—
and feeling a bit out
of place.
By Maria
Aspan
PHOTOGRAPH BY KELSEY MCCLELLAN
