Uncapped #47 | Max Mullen from Instacart

Max Mullen is the co-founder of Instacart and an active investor having invested in 100+ companies including Gumloop, Mercury, Owner among others. He also runs a founder community in San Francisco called Workshop. We discussed the full arc of building Instacart from a contrarian idea that investors rejected to a $10B consumer marketplace. Max highlighted the scrappy early days, marketplace product-market fit, and key inflection points like retailer partnerships and the Amazon–Whole Foods moment. We also explored what makes great consumer founders, why the best ideas look wrong at first, and how to build and scale in “hard mode” markets. Finally, the conversation touched on investing, decision-making frameworks, and what it takes to win in consumer over the long term. --- Timestamps: (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 --- Links: https://x.com/Max https://x.com/jaltma https://maxmullen.com/ https://uncappedpod.com/ --- friends@uncappedpod.com

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Episoder(55)

Uncapped #55 | Tony Xu from DoorDash

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28 Jul 47min

Uncapped #54 | Sam Blond from Monaco

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14 Jul 1h 9min

Uncapped #53 | Trae and Delian from Founders Fund

Trae Stephens is a Partner at Founders Fund and co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, a defense technology company building autonomous systems for the U.S. military and its allies. ...

30 Jun 1h 11min

Uncapped #52 | Mike Volpi from Hanabi Capital

Mike Volpi is a General Partner at Hanabi Capital, with a background that spans senior operating roles and nearly two decades of investing. Mike currently sits on the boards of several innovative comp...

10 Jun 56min

Uncapped #51 | Joe Lonsdale from 8VC

Joe Lonsdale is the Founder and Managing Partner at 8VC, an early-stage venture capital firm managing over $6 billion in capital. In 2003, he founded Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR), a global software company ...

27 Mai 43min

Uncapped #50 | Tobi Lütke from Shopify

Tobi Lütke is the co-founder of Shopify, where he has served as the company's CEO since 2008. Under his leadership, Shopify grew from an online snowboard shop in Ottawa, Canada in 2004 to the world'...

20 Mai 58min

Uncapped #49 | Kevin Hartz & Bennett Siegel from A*

Kevin Hartz and Bennett Siegel are co-founders and GPs at A*, a five year old early-stage venture capital firm with $1B in AUM. A* has invested in companies like Notion, Cape, Whop, Paraform, Simile, ...

12 Mai 36min

Uncapped #48 | Tarek Mansour from Kalshi

Tarek Mansour is the co-founder and CEO of Kalshi. Kalshi is a regulated prediction market exchange valued at $22B in 2026 where people trade on the outcomes of real-world events – things like inflat...

29 Apr 47min