FORTUNE OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021 87The daughter of a fisherman and a
clothing-boutique owner, Simo was
born in the Mediterranean coastal
town of Sète, near Montpellier. She
met her now-husband, Remy Mi-
ralles, on her first day of high school.
The couple began dating two years
later. As Simo became the first in her
family to graduate high school and
attend college, Miralles followed her:
first to Paris, where Simo attended
the elite HEC business school, then
to California, where she attended
UCLA for her final year of busi-
ness school, and eventually to eBay,
before Simo joined Facebook.
Now Miralles is a stay-at-home
father to their 6-year-old daughter,
Willow. And Simo credits his sup-
port with helping her break into the
male-dominated technical ranks of
Facebook, where only 24.8% of tech
employees are female. Simo started
at the company as a marketer in
2011 but soon wanted to move into
a product management role. At the
time, Facebook usually expected
product managers to have a com-puter science degree, 82% of which
are earned by men. But Simo wrote
product requirement documents to
prove that she could “learn wicked
fast,” says Asha Sharma, a former
Facebook vice president of product,
who’s now Instacart’s chief operat-
ing officer.
The next hurdle came after she
started the job and ran headlong into
less official product mandates: ditch
her high heels and fit into tech-bro
hoodie drag. One senior product
manager pulled Simo aside with a
warning: “Engineers are not going
to react well to you,” he told her. “Tie
up your hair, remove your makeup—
that’s the way you’re going to fit in.”
She came to work the next day in
jeans and a bare face. “I felt hor-
rible inside of my own skin—and
I realized I wouldn’t be able to do
the job if I’m not me,” she says. “So
I’m sorry, but the heels and makeup
were going to come back.” Eventually
Simo even bent the monoculture to
embrace her style: Facebook’s annual
internal product-manager awardsSupermarket
Sweepstakes
With a valuation of $39 billion and
$1.5 billion in 2020 revenue, Insta-
cart is competing in an increasingly
crowded grocery-delivery field.AMA ZON $1.7 T. MARKET CAPThe original everything store
got big into groceries—and stole
Instacart’s then-major partner—
when it bought Whole Foods in
2017.WALMART $399.2 B. MARKET CAPThe retail giant has its own de-
livery service, but it also partners
with third-party providers includ-
ing Instacart, which in August
announced a deal to deliver
Walmart groceries to parts of
New York City.UBER $87.9 B. MARKET CAPThe ride-share company intro-
duced grocery-delivery ser-
vices in July 2020. This summer it
landed a deal to deliver for 1,200
Albertsons grocery stores.DOORDASH $74.5 B. MARKET CAPIn Q2 of 2021, the onetime res-
taurant takeout specialist spent
more than $1.3 billion, which
included the costs of its grocery-
expansion efforts.GOPUFF $15 B. PRIVATE VALUATIONThe delivery startup backed
by SoftBank, Blackstone, and
Fidelity Management focuses on
speed by operating and stocking
mini-warehouses in 1,000 cities.SHIPT $550 M. SALE PRICE (2017The Target-owned service oper-
ates as an independent subsid-
iary and also provides same-day
delivery for customers of CVS,
Costco, H-E-B, and other food and
EVELYN HOCKSTEIN—WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES convenience retailers.