Co-founder @Instacart🥕🛒, startup investor
San Francisco
Joined July 2007
- Tweets2.9K
- Following2.4K
- Followers288K
- Likes1.3K
Some personal news! Recently, I stepped back from the day-to-day at @Instacart to focus on investing full-time. I sat down with my friend @jaltma on Uncapped to talk about building Instacart and my philosophy on early-stage investing — check it out here!
For this episode of Uncapped I got to sit down with my close friend @Max, cofounder of Instacart 🥕
We talked about the key moments of Instacart...how it got started, critical wins, tough losses, competitive dynamics, earned insights, going public, and Instacart's future.
Max is also an awesome startup investor, and we talked about what he looks for in founders, consumer investing, and what he's building with Workshop.
He's one of the best people I know, hope you enjoy.
(0:00) Intro
(0:36) The inception of Instacart
(4:55) Finding product market fit
(7:20) Landing Trader Joe’s
(11:04) Big levers for growth
(13:36) Operationally complex businesses
(14:55) Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods
(17:50) COVID and Instacart’s IPO
(20:02) Prioritizing profitability
(23:21) Avoiding temptations
(24:59) The future of Instacart
(25:53) Investing in consumer
(28:21) Irrationally optimistic founders
(29:49) B2B vs consumer founders
(30:35) How to work with investors
(33:38) Building Workshop
Max Mullen retweeted
Today, we're excited to announce that we have raised $10 million in funding and officially launched Sava Trust Company, an AI-native, modern trust company chartered in Nevada, open to clients and their attorneys & advisors nationwide.
Our funding was led by @GradientVC, with participation from @ycombinator, @svangel, @Max, @orangecollectv and @SurgePointCap.
For too long, trust administration has relied on manual processes, disconnected systems, and complex fee structures. Establishing a trust can take weeks or months, with limited visibility for families and their advisors over the life of the trust.
With Sava, we're building a better way.
youtube.com/watch?v=yR2bV3KT…
Welcome to the $1B revenue club @mercury
Excited to announce @Mercury crossing $1bn/yr in revenue and 450k customers.
Just getting started! View article
What do people think is the most likely future for consumers:
1. Everyone uses one ai agent for everything
2. Every major vertical has an agent and we use multiple agents daily
3. We use one agent and it calls out to 3rd party agents when needed behind the scene (variant on 1)
Max Mullen retweeted
I had the chance to see this in person last week, and what was most amazing wasn't just the capability as of last Tuesday but the rate of improvement week over week. The Dyna team is on an exponential.
We are releasing Dyna-2.1, the first Physical Agent that achieves reliable super long-horizon whole-body autonomy. It combines our brand-new semi-humanoid hardware with an agentic system built around Dyna-2 to handle ultra-long real-world workflows.
Here is an uncut footage of Dyna-2.1 completing an entire hour-long laundry room workflow, just like a human does.
Every startup needs this
1/ Today, we're launching @Mercury Books.
AI-powered accounting software, for your bookkeeper or you, that categorizes and reconciles your transactions the moment they happen.
Everyone’s been asking what’s next after selling Cal AI.
Introducing Persona.
Others couldn’t figure out the interface, we did.
yourpersona.com/band
Max Mullen retweeted
Introducing Gumball
Model agnostic, proactive, self improving.
All in your company’s private cloud
So excited for this OG Instacart team to build the next great commerce marketplace! Congrats @camillevanhorne!
Beyond excited to share that @highstock_x has raised a $30M Series A led by @a16z with participation from @GreylockVC, @AbstractVC, @Daybreak_Fund, and angels.
We are doubling down on our mission of creating value for brands with unproductive inventory. With this raise, we are expanding our team and building on our success in beauty to unlock a new category: apparel.
@omooretweets, @venturetwins and @jeff_jordan are the right partners to take this company to new heights - they've invested in great marketplaces like Instacart (I may be biased :) ), and have studied how AI will scale marketplace models that were previously too labor intensive to be financially viable.
Thank you to our angels: @Max, @lennysan, JJ and John.
Most of all, thank you to our customers and team. We would not be here without you.
Read my reflections on our journey below.
There's a new version of this post
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Max Mullen retweeted
1/ The FDIC just approved @Mercury Bank, N.A.'s application for deposit insurance.
One step closer to opening Mercury Bank!. There is still work between here and opening Mercury Bank’s virtual doors, which should happen in 2027.
I started Mercury in 2017 because I wanted to build the bank I wished had existed when I was running my previous companies. Going from a fintech with bank partners to a tech company with an actual bank has been the vision from the beginning.
Max Mullen retweeted
THRILLED to share that Owner.com has raised a $240M Series D and is now valued at $2.3B! 🚀🦄
6 years ago, we set out on a mission to level the playing field for local business owners.
Why?
Because we believe local businesses are sacred. Each one reflects the unique DNA of its owner: their story, their spirit, their craft. They bring life and connection to our neighborhoods.
But they're being crushed by massive corporations with billions to spend on tech, AI, and marketing.
Running a local business is like being David facing an army of Goliaths. Owner exists to change that.
This round was led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, joined by Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, & Jack Altman.
We'll use the capital to keep building the only platform local business owners need to succeed.
· · ·
Special shoutout to one of my best friends and cofounder @adamguild. It's an absolute privilege to be building this company with you.
Shoutout to the outstanding Owner team. You deserve all of the credit for getting us here. It is a joy to build alongside each of you.
Special thanks to our investors and earliest supporters - @jaltma , @jasonlk, @alexbard, @zoink, Fidji Simo, Shalini Rao, @atkurland, @Harris_Pollack, Stephen Kerns, @JonnyNemo, @chughesjohnson, @dharmesh, @cory, @jaentwistle, @Joshuabrowder, @seanrad, @scottbelsky, @maxaltman, @Max, @braveben, @alexisohanian, @kippbodnar, @ankurnagpal, @parkerconrad, @justinmateen, @marcuslemonis, @ShaanVP, @thesamparr, @tanay_tandon, and @rauchg.
And finally, to our customers: You're the reason I get up every day excited to build. I feel like a kid in a candy shop. It is a privilege to serve you. ❤️
Every day we get closer and closer to the ChatGPT moment for robotics...
Today we are introducing Dyna-2, a world-action model pre-trained on one million hours of human video. At this scale, for the first time, we discovered several new scaling laws:
• world-action models exhibit scaling law on human data across four orders of magnitude, from 1000 to 1,000,000 hours,
• this human data scaling law implied a scaling law on never seen robot data,
• both data and objective matter; world modeling and scaling on video data are essential for cross-embodiment scaling transfer to emerge
🧵
We just solved the biggest UX problem in AI.
Today, we're releasing AI Autocomplete, a SDK that gives every text box a brain.
It boosts your conversions by 50%+ by guiding your users as they type with what your product can do, and 500+ companies have already signed up.
So check it out if you have a search box or assistant.
Add it in under 5 mins ↓
ai-autocomplete.com
(or comment your product name, and we'll reply with a demo of it working on your product)
@paraformtalent hit $100M in annualized revenue just two years after making our first dollar - doubling revenue in the past six months alone.
A huge thank you to the customers, recruiters, and teammates who believed in Paraform early and helped us get here.
We’re building the talent company of the future: where every company hires, every recruiter builds their business, and every candidate finds their dream role.
And we’re just getting started.
Read more here: paraform.com/blog/100m-annua…
Willow is a daily driver for me, and crushes the competition 🎤
to this day, @crosbylegal is in top 3 favorite AI products, alongside @gumloop and @Instacart
@ryanjdaniels built the Instacart for law and is going to be 100x bigger
Six weeks of legal work done in 12 hours.
Yes, you read that right.
When we met @gumloop , they were a team of under 50 closing clients like @tryramp, @Instacart and @Shopify . We couldn't believe it.
Most of the secret sauce was the magnificent product (which we use and love). But also, they approached everything from first principles and bet big on what they believed in – including with how they close deals.
One big bet was how they engaged @crosbylegal. No slow rollout, they went all in: made us a central part of their deal desk, accessible to every single AE from day one, sending us every single contract.
It's an honor to finally share the story with @lluismanrique 🚀
Finally a benchmark for long horizon learning…
Introducing Horizon from @0rinlabs: the first long-horizon learning benchmark made from real agent logs
- SOTA is 21% on the hardest section
- 7-35M tokens of real agent history per task
- Models are hardly getting better on the hardest tasks
- Humans can score 100%
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Max Mullen retweeted
Every generation inherits a new medium.
Ours is taking shape.
Introducing @_nellofficial.
Built in San Francisco. Backed by Danny Rimer and @IndexVentures, alongside @antonosika, @gokulr, @rauchg, Jason Citron, @joshm, @lennysan, @mati, @Max, @saradu, @soleio, @Thom_Wolf, and several others.
More soon. – at San Francisco, CA