Instacart: Breaking New Ground in Online Grocery Delivery

The co-founder and chief executive of the grocery delivery start-up, Apoorva Mehta (Mehta), grew up in Canada. Since his childhood, Mehta had always been curious about how technology worked. As he put it, “Everything from atoms to all the way to what you see on a computer when you go to Google.com, I wanted to learn everything in between.” After completing college, Mehta had no idea what he wanted to do, but he enrolled in an electrical engineering course at the University of Waterloo. During his post-college years, Mehta decided that his primary objective was to figure out what he really wanted to do. Therefore, he tried a little bit of everything – from working for technology companies such as Qualcomm and BlackBerry, to doing a shift at a steel factory. Eventually, Mehta moved to Seattle and became a supply chain engineer at Amazon by 2008, developing fulfillment systems to get packages from Amazon’s warehouses to customers’ doors. He worked there for two years, after which he realized that there was no challenging task for him in the company and so quit this job..