Speaker A
Welcome to the south of France with its seaside beauty, cobblestone streets, and world-famous cuisine.
Instacart CEO Fidji Simo blends French heritage with Silicon Valley tech leadership, sharing her journey from a fishing village to leading a major grocery delivery company.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
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Key Takeaways
- Fidji Simo successfully merges her French cultural roots with Silicon Valley tech leadership.
- Her leadership style values authenticity, hard work, and respect for food and community.
- Technology can enhance traditional industries like fishing rather than replace them.
- Work-life balance and savoring small moments are key cultural differences between France and the US.
- Women leaders are increasingly shaping the future of tech companies like Instacart.
What the video covers
- Fidji Simo grew up in Sète, a fishing village in the south of France, deeply influenced by her family's multi-generational involvement in the fishing industry.
- She transitioned from a traditional upbringing to a successful tech career, starting at eBay, then scaling Facebook, before becoming CEO of Instacart.
- Simo embraces her French identity and style, resisting Silicon Valley norms like dressing down and losing her accent.
- Her upbringing instilled values of hard work, leadership, and respect for food and community, which she integrates into her leadership style.
- She highlights the cultural differences between France and the US, especially around work-life balance and the importance of enjoying small moments.
- Simo shares stories of her family's fishing craft and how technology can complement traditional industries rather than disrupt them.
- She discusses the challenges and opportunities in scaling Instacart, including the use of AI and machine learning to reduce food waste and improve efficiency.
- The video explores her educational path through elite French business school and her determination to enter the tech world despite initial setbacks.
- Simo reflects on the significance of bridging her passion for food and technology in her role as Instacart CEO.
- She advocates for more women in tech leadership and the evolving landscape of CEOs in Silicon Valley.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Sète and Fidji Simo's background
- 01:17Career journey: eBay, Facebook, and Instacart CEO role
- 02:11Exploring local cuisine and family fishing heritage
- 03:31Cultural reflections on French lifestyle and work ethic
- 04:42Early memories of technology and education
- 07:23Tech industry challenges and leadership insights
- 11:42Instacart's business model and technology innovations
- 16:01Future outlook: food waste, AI, and women in tech leadership
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
We're traveling along the coast to visit Sète, a charming city that revolves around the rhythms of the port.
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When you arrive, you're immediately hit with the smells of the sea and the sights of water jousting.
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I've come to this Mediterranean harbor to meet a tech CEO who calls this place home.
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Welcome. This place is amazing. I can't believe you grew up here. It was very special, and I miss this place a lot.
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Fiji Simo is a tour de force. Raised by fishing boat captains who instilled grit at a young age, Simo catapulted herself out of Sète and into the upper echelons of Silicon Valley.
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She chartered a fast path from strategy at eBay to scaling Facebook to taking the reins of grocery delivery business Instacart as CEO, a seemingly perfect union of her tech chops with her foodie upbringing, as if it was meant to be.
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And rather than putting on the tech industry uniform, Simo has maintained a fabulously French way of being.
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So did you tell me you tried to get rid of your French accent or did I mention that? Oh yeah.
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Yeah, I remember like at Facebook, there were a lot of people when I moved into the product side telling me like, oh you need to dress down, you need to wear a hoodie, you need to tie your hair.
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And I did it for one day and it felt horrible because it wasn't who I was. Decked out head to toe in Dior while introducing me to the local residents and showing me the town that shaped her, Simo is like a fish in water
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or as the French say, comme un poisson dans l'eau. So I want to show you this amazing place behind us.
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It's called Le Halle and it's going to be delicious. All right. I can spend my entire life here and just eat like it's making me hungry.
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And so your family has been involved here for generations? Yes. My family, all the men in my family, whether it's all of my dad, my grandpa, great grandpa, all my uncles were fishermen and one of them, my uncle became a fishmonger
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after, you know, stopping fishing. And so we have been very, very deep into the fishing industry for many generations.
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So it seems like everyone has a role, right, in the family. My grandfather has really instilled in all of us the respect for this idea of feeding the world and, you know, in our family food is everything.
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Yeah. It's just love. It's how we celebrate. It's at the center of everything we do.
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Bonjour, what's your name? Jean-Phillip. Emily, what's fresh today? Everything. What was it like for you being raised in a fishing village?
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I think it was incredibly special because there is a craft and a respect that fishermen have.
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It's interesting, like you know in Silicon Valley the people who are most respected are like tech people, whereas here the people who are most respected are the people who feed the town.
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So in a way becoming CEO of Instacart is kind of bridging these two things for me where I love tech but I always had a passion for feeding people and so it's a really special thing to be able
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to bridge the two. Can we order a tielle from you? I can't wait to try it.
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Okay. So this is called the tielle. It's like something that the people are very proud of.
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I've been wondering what is it about this octopus pie? The fisherman goes out at sea, gets the octopus itself, then his wife chops it up and makes the tielle and then delivers that
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to my uncle so that it's purely fresh and as you can tell, everything is a family affair.
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You eat it kind of like, you know, a pizza. A pizza. Yeah. Told you. I mean every time we come back to town the first thing we do is we run and get one of those because that's the taste we grew up with.
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Run, don't walk. Oh my goodness. What do you think the Americans are missing from French culture?
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Like in America? It seems we just live to work and the French just live. The French really understand how to enjoy the little moments, not just the big moments.
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Like, you know, when I arrived in the US I was surprised to hear so many people be like, we're gonna work so much and then we're gonna have fun for the two weeks of vacation.
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And I was just like, oh no, that's kind of sad. Whereas the French, they stop at every lunch and the lunch is important and we eat and we break bread and that's what I tried to recreate both at work
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and in my home of like really making the little moments special. What was the conversation like at the kitchen table?
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It was so striking that the days that my father had was, you know, pretty intense.
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Like, you know, when you again wake up at 2:00 a.m. in the morning and go like until 6:00 p.m. in an environment that's incredibly dangerous just to feed people. Like, you know, I was always kind of fascinated by what he was doing and the dedication
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and so I obviously picked a very different path than becoming a fisherman myself. As an aside, I'm terribly seasick which is not a good quality to have in my family.
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I know. I was wondering why didn't you join the family business? But I kept, you know, the work ethic, I kept the values that my father, my grandfather really instilled in me around like how you lead a team, how you lead a crew and,
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and yeah, just the idea that anything is possible if you work hard enough for it.
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What is your earliest memory of technology? I remember my grandfather telling me this story of the fact that he was one of the best fishermen in the Mediterranean Sea and had developed all of these techniques to know where
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to find fish and when this new machine arrived, all of a sudden he was like, am I going to lose my edge?
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Basically it's going to show all of the other fishermen where the fishes are. But instead of fearing technology, he thought of it as like, okay, now that this machine is coming, how do I become the best master of this new technology
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of this new technique so that I use it to my advantage? When you were little, how far away did the wider world seem?
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Oh, extremely far. I mean we have this joke in Sète that if you go to the town next door you need a passport.
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We walk off our octopus pies and wander deeper into the alleys of Sète where Simo tells me she's the first in her family to graduate high school.
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This is our high school. This is spring back memories. Oh, so many. He is like spent a lot of time here and that's even where I met my husband.
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Oh, you met your husband here? Yep. First day of high school. What sort of inspired you?
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I mean I know you said you watched a lot of American television. I was watching The OC and I can tell you the first time I moved to California I had the soundtrack of The OC in my ears.
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You know California, here we come. California, yeah, here we come. I'm glad, I'm glad you did the song and I didn't because no one wanted to have that for me.
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You went to one of, if not the most elite business schools in France and then you got an internship at eBay. Yep. What was the path?
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I worked super, super hard. I mean I literally didn't sleep for two years to get into the best possible school.
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A lot of people were going into finance at the time, but technology was so appealing to me because of this idea of being able to impact people's lives and being an industry that's constantly changing or you constantly have to adapt
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and that's how I decided to go to eBay. When did you first hear about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg?
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You know, so I was at eBay and everybody was starting to talk about these companies that were starting to take off.
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The first time I applied at Facebook, they actually told me absolutely not, we do not need strategy people, we have Mark Zuckerberg to do strategy.
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I spent an entire weekend basically creating a new product from scratch and marketing it and I sent that to the recruiters and the team was pretty impressed that I, you know, out of the blue had created entire products and that's how I got in.
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I mean you became one of the most powerful people at Facebook. Did that also require not sleeping for several years?
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Like how did you do that? I think it re...
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Like how did you do that? I think it required taking risks and you know, the things that really accelerated my career at Facebook was Mark asking me to lead the team that was in charge of monetizing mobile at the time
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where no one thought we could monetize mobile and you know, at the time it was a huge risk because like if I fail like that would've had a very big impact on the company, but if you succeed it also changes the
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trajectory of your career. And I kind of did that over and over again. Unlike other tech leaders who grew up taking computers apart or learning to code, Simo was watching her family take big swings out at sea we're getting a glimpse of the hustle
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as the boats race back with their bounty for the day. So there's a lot of strategy involved in tons Of strategy, right?
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Yeah. So you might have fewer fish but be here sooner. Maybe you catch more fish but then you arrive later and you might get a lower price.
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So it's really supply and demand of like volume and price, tons of strategy involved towards that.
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Sounds like there's a good business lesson in there. Oh absolutely. Yeah. The one thing I love about the fishing industry is that the crew needs to really trust the captain.
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Like at sea, if you don't trust your team, you don't trust your captain. It's a matter of life and death.
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This is my dad, he's been, he's been a fisherman for 35 years and we are allowed, this is usually a very private place we're allowed here because he's with us so he's giving us behind the scenes access. Thank you, it's incredible
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After the fish are prepped, the port ballet moves to an auction where fish mongers like Simo's uncle set prices for the catch of the day, then sell at local markets and across the country Picking out your own perfect personal fish at the market
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seems like the opposite of what Instacart is. How do you square that? I think you need a healthy mix.
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I mean you can marry something that is like fundamentally an ancestral like type of work with technology to help fishermen be more efficient, to help them do their job better and so many times technology is seen as disruption.
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I don't wanna disrupt, I want to help the people who are like caring for you know, their particular craft right now.
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Really be the people still allowed to continue doing their craft even better through technology in the future.
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That's not the typical thing you'd hear from a tech CEO, especially one in charge of a San Francisco based company that wants to disrupt the grocery business.
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I have dreaded going to the grocery store then you have to wait in line to check out and then lug your groceries back to your apartment only to realize that you've forgotten something at the store.
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That's Apoorva Mehta The founder of Instacart and a former supply chain engineer at Amazon, he launched the startup back in 2012 and caught the attention of venture capitalists by shipping a six pack of beer straight to their door.
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It's a simple premise order groceries through an app, a shopper fills the order and then delivers directly to you.
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The idea was well timed riding the wave of gig economy companies that were booming in Silicon Valley.
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Then the pandemic hit online grocery delivery, surged and Instacart became an essential service. But when lockdown ended, the company needed to redefine itself.
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Simo joined the board in 2021. Six months later she left Facebook to become Instacart's new CEO.
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I met up with her back in San Francisco to see how she's setting the company on a new course.
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You're technically not a founder of Instacart. How is that an advantage and how is that a disadvantage?
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The advantage is that I come with a lot of experience having seen scale at a larger company.
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The disadvantage is that you don't have all of the credibility that a founder has from having created the company.
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You need to rebuild that and that takes a little bit of time. I didn't get that from day one but I'm getting it by showing that all of the new bets that have put in place are not working.
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Grocery is the biggest commerce sector in the US but what did you see in terms of potential beyond groceries?
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Yeah, so people really think of Instacart as this like online grocery delivery app, but what I saw when I joined the board was the potential to really be a grocery technology company.
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The things that are so special about what we do is we integrate really deeply with 1500 grocers.
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We provide technology for them both on our marketplace but also powering their own e-commerce properties.
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You became CEO at the top of the tech bubble, we were in the middle of a pandemic and Instacart was worth $38 billion.
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How did you have to reframe your expectations and your employees expectations of what this company could be?
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On the one hand we had this like giant valuation, but on the other hand when I joined we were declining like gross transaction volume, declining double digits because it was post pandemic and people were wondering if we were gonna sustain that
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or if we were gonna decline back to prior levels and we were kind of the poster child for an unprofitable company.
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So really the way I reset with the companies to say let's kind of forget about you know, what the external world is valuing us at and let's talk about building a generational company and that means the companies that can grow sustainably
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and that is profitable. It's been a year since the IPO Instacart's now valued at nine ish billion dollars.
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Wall Street's still skeptical. It doesn't compare to some of the bigger gig economy players.
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What's your response to that? The thing that I think the market underestimates is how hard it is to serve customers and deliver groceries with accuracy, with speed, with selection, with affordability.
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We've been at it for 12 years and so even if we have new entrants coming into the market, they're not able to do that at the scale and at the level of quality that we're doing.
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And I think the market is gonna end up realizing that while there will be intensified competition, we have a very deep competitive advantage.
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There are now giants in this business, Amazon, Walmart, how can Instacart compete? Where will you win and where will they, The Amazons and Walmart of the world might get a fair share of people but if your favorite retailer of choice is a Publix
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so Kroger Albertson like we really are the best place for that. You bought caper, you know maker of this, these AI powered smart carts. How does it work?
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Well you basically take an item, go ahead okay take an item and you just drop it into the cart has a screen on caper cart that follows you around the grocery store and can recommend things based on what's in your basket
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based on the location you are at in the store. And that makes for a much more fun experience to balance out the Tostitos.
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How many people are actually using this? So right now we have hundreds of carts deployed and in the next several months we're going to thousands of carts.
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Also, it would be really nice to know how much you're spending before you actually go to checkout.
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'cause there are so many times I'm like Ouch, maybe I would've put a few things back but, and you know that's a great point and initially we, I was worried that if we showed the total that would just reduce your spend and that's not the case.
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'cause there's a lot of people who are on a budget and when they see their total they're actually like maximizing getting to their budget.
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Whereas if they have to go through a normal checkout, they never wanna be embarrassed to have to put items back it.
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It has actually provided a real deep service for people both on the affluent side as well, people on the budget Now, bigger picture groceries are so expensive, everyone is feeling it.
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Are you getting sick and tired of rising food costs when you go out to eat?
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Think about how much higher the bill is now. I mean honestly feeding a family of four for example, just theoretically when you go out in New York City costs double what it did four years ago.
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What's happening here? Why is everyone hurting so much? Yeah, I think there's been, as you know, just an increase in prices overall throughout the supply chain that ends up, you know, hurting the end customer.
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So role that we play is really to get savings for customers wherever they exist Using Instacart.
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My understanding is it makes everything more expensive. It still seems like a luxury and not a necessity.
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Why do you think people will continue to pay a premium when they're already paying a lot Four years ago you are absolutely right.
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It used to be a luxury but when you look at the delivery fees that you get to pay of your to to have the service.
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A lot of people tell us that when you start factoring in the cost of gas to go to the grocery store, the loss of time for people who may be packing two jobs in one day and all of these factors, it's actually a really,
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really good deal. Gig work for so many people has provided extra income flexibility but there are still a lot of complaints They want 43 items, no tip. Good luck with that.
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I missed two $40 orders today Because I didn't click except Quick enough. You have people that are buying bots and bot accounts that will Just grab the order.
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How do you respond to all that? Like how do you address all of that?
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There will always be complaints, but we really look at some numbers to figure out if we're doing a good job and then we can always improve.
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You know, being a shopper is a tough job. You are in the store trying to figure out how to like find 20 plus items going on a customer chat and helping the customers like figure out if something is missing on the shelves.
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So our tools or technology or things that we always invest in so that the jobs becomes as easy as possible.
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Instacart's been spending time at the White House. What are you advocating for? We as a country are spending about a trillion dollars on healthcare costs for dietary related disease.
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A trillion is the same amount as the entire country spends on food. That's pretty crazy when you think about it.
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And that is fundamentally an economic problem but also a technology problem because to distribute nutritious food to people all across the US, you need a technology platform that can do that.
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So that's why we took on the very big initiative to really be the rails by which this can happen.
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It's pretty crazy that today it is easier for a doctor to prescribe medications than it is to prescribe food when we know food is such a big driver of this condition.
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How do you think about the global food system? Like so many people in the world don't have access to enough, they don't have enough food, they don't have access to quality food.
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How does that shape your thinking and your strategy? We think fundamentally the food system is completely suboptimized.
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It creates a lot of waste. And when you think of all the technologies that can be built and optimized through machine learning, through artificial intelligence, we could have a food system that is fundamentally less wasteful.
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And if someone was collecting consumer data that feeds the entire system so that the right things could be produced at the right volume and we think we can be that player.
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I mean you are, most of us don't stop to think about the massive machine that delivers food from the sea and the farm to our tables on a daily basis.
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But trust me, when I say it's extraordinarily complex, Simo's plan to take a piece of that pie is nothing if not ambitious. Back in France, her vision is gaining the attention of world leaders with conversations at the highest level.
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You recently had dinner with President Macron. As a little girl, did you ever imagine you'd be eating dinner with the French president?
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Absolutely not. Tell me about that. It was really special. It was the state dinner that he organized to honor President Joe Biden.
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And you know, growing up in France and then living in the US it felt like a really full circle moment for me When you wanted to go into tech, it's almost like you, you knew you had to leave to do what you wanted to do,
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but if you could do it all over again, would you build in France? I think it's only recently that the entrepreneurship path has been valued.
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I think, you know, French people didn't see that in the past as like the path to success and that's still a cultural thing that needs to be changed for people to really wanna take that risk and see themselves as wanting to be on that path.
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It's still quite hard, you know, to hire in France, retain talent, have the flexibility to change, you know, the structure of your teams when you need to.
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But there's still some work to do. And compared to the US I think there's, Europe is still behind in valuing entrepreneurship as much as the US does.
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There are so few female tech CEOs and even fewer French female CEOs. I mean, I'm realizing it's such a small community.
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Yeah, well we need to change that. It's, it's very, very small, but I, I also think that, you know, we have incredible women in c-suites right now that are primed to become the next wave of CEOs.
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And I think as we have more of these women in position of power that are gonna lift other women up, it takes a lot of time, sadly for this to be a big enough transformation that we see the impact.
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But I'm hopeful that we have more people that are realizing that there's enormous talent that we're not recognizing properly to have the performance we need in our companies.
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What's your advice to the next French Fidji Simo? And a lot of what I try to do is actually show women that, you know, someone who grew up in a small town in a family of fishermen can end up being a CEO in Silicon Valley.
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I would just tell them to dream big and not put any limitations on themselves and really focus on on the long term goal.
Topics:Fidji SimoInstacartSilicon ValleyFrench culturetech leadershipgrocery deliveryfood industrywomen in techtechnology and traditionwork-life balance
