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Comment by nwenzel | Hacker News Reader

Congrats Apoorva and team! Wow.

Instacart wasn't first. Webvan was around over a decade ago. More proof that ideas aren't worth much. Execution is everything.

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I'd say the lesson here isn't just execution, it's timing.

To provide some figures for your point, Webvan was founded in 1999 when there were ~100M internet users in the US. Instacart was founded in 2012, when there were over 250M internet users. The success of these services is definitely a question of achieving sufficient scale to break even, which is much easier with a nearly 3x larger market.

http://i.imgur.com/44lkXHa.png

Edit: Clearly it's not the only reason they've succeeded, they've smartly avoided all the capital infrastructure that Webvan relied on and mobile devices have improved tremendously but when you're talking about tenths of a percentage points in penetration, tripling your TAM is huge.

...or, GPS enabled phones.

The major difference is not the size of the market. The major difference is that Instacart piggybacks on the existing grocery store network, meaning that they don't have to pay for the overhead of a big warehouse. That lets them scale up with their user base instead of having to invest a lot of money up front in warehouses.

So does Safeway. The trouble with doing this out of grocery stores is that the order system doesn't know what's in inventory, and some fraction of your items won't show up.

Amazon Fresh is doing this with their own warehouses and robots. They know their own inventory, and will probably crush these manual-picking operations.

Amazon has never had to deal with their own delivery fleets before, or perishable goods in their warehouses. While it's true Amazon has other revenue streams, Fresh is still just an experiment at this point.

It's a race to see who can take the market, and Amazon is taking a slower, infrastructure based approach. It will be interesting to see if they will see it through to the end.

Smartphones with GPS's have fueled Instacart to success. They have a great service btw. I love not going to Whole Foods anymore.

Not really.

Webvan had a ton of CapEx spending on infrastructure.

I don't think Instacart has to worry about B&M warehouses or fleets of delivery trucks.

How can you say that without knowing Instacart's financials?

Without that, can you really say this funding announcement is different from Webvan's funding announcements 15 years ago?

I worked at a company that had many dot-com boom and bust companies as customers. 1-800-flowers changed their name to 1-800-flowers.com to increase the value of their brand. Barron's published some research in March (I think) of 2001 from Pegasus Research showing a list of publicly traded companies who, by their own optimistic estimates, would run out of cash and how many quarters of cash they had remaining. I remember because I identified the balance owed by each of those companies to us and gave the Controller and CFO the bad news,

Yes, the funding environment is different.

I was using Peapod in 1994, 5 years after it was founded, over a modem and their proprietary software:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peapod

It massively increased in size during the dotcom boom along with Webvan and Kozma, after it burst it retreated.

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