- Instacart founder's empty fridge was the "lightbulb moment" for coming up with the idea for the delivery startup, he said.
- Apoorva Mehta walked away with over $1.1 billion in net worth after the delivery startup's IPO on Wednesday.
Apoorva Mehta, the founder and former CEO of Instacart, credited his constantly empty fridge as the "lightbulb moment" behind his delivery startup.
"More than a decade ago, I was sitting in my apartment in San Francisco bemoaning the fact that the only thing I had in my refrigerator was hot sauce," Mehta wrote in a post on X on Wednesday.
"Don't get me wrong, I love hot sauce, but you can't exactly make it a meal," he added in the post that's been viewed over 500,000 times since being posted.
—Apoorva Mehta (@apoorva_mehta) September 19, 2023
The realization that he could shop for everything online except for groceries inspired him to code the first version of Instacart, he added.
Mehta walked away with a fortune of over $1.1 billion after his delivery startup's IPO on Tuesday. He stepped down as the CEO in 2021 and left the company's board on Tuesday.
In the lead-up to his handing over the reins as CEO to former Meta executive Fidji Simo, Mehta was involved in a dispute with key investors who were pushing for the company to go public — at a time when the company's valuation peaked at $39 billion.
For context, Instacart's IPO valued the company at $9.9 billion on Tuesday. And Mehta's net worth now represents a stark contrast from a peak of $3.5 billion in 2021, per Bloomberg. Before going public, the company's SEC filings stated that the company had delivered over 900 million orders since it began in 2012.
Shares of Instacart — which went public on Tuesday at $30 a share — slumped 11% a day after the IPO. The company's shares were at $30.00 apiece at Friday's close.
One expert — Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business — had a dim view of the company's prospects. In an analysis published Tuesday, Damodaran wrote, "This IPO represents vastly downgraded expectations for the company's future."
Before starting the company, Mehta quit his job at Amazon in 2010 and moved to San Francisco to become an entrepreneur. During this time, he said he founded twenty failed startups.
He told CNBC Squawk Box in an interview on Tuesday that these failed ideas included a social network for lawyers and an advertising company aimed at gaming companies.
During the early stages of Instacart, Mehta also said he missed the application deadline for the startup accelerator YCombinator by over two months. He used his app to order a six-pack of beers for YCombinator's headquarters, a stunt which earned him an interview with the company — and eventually led to them becoming the startup's first investors.
Mehta and Instacart did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider, sent outside regular business hours.