Fidji Simo

Two years after assuming Instacart’s top post, Fidji Simo finally took the grocery-delivery company public in mid-September. Instacart’s long-delayed IPO raised $660 million and valued the company at $10 billion—only a quarter of its record-setting private valuation of $39 billion in 2021—and the company’s shares soon sank below their IPO price. But the fact that Simo pulled off Instacart’s public debut at all, after more than a year of frozen IPO markets, and turned the company profitable last year are major milestones in the CEO’s tenure. The former Facebook senior executive replaced founder Apoorva Mehta as chief executive with the goal of building Instacart into more than just a grocery-delivery app powered by low-paid gig-economy workers. The COVID pandemic had sent the startup’s delivery business soaring, but as lockdowns eased and customers stopped being willing to pay high delivery fees to have someone else shop on their behalf, Instacart needed to develop other ways to make money. Simo, a veteran marketer, laid out a strategy of building up Instacart’s advertising business and third-party tech services for the retailers that use its platform. And she succeeded: In 2022, advertising accounted for $740 million in sales, or nearly a third of Instacart’s $2.6 billion in total revenue. “When I took over as CEO, there was this big question about whether Instacart would be just a pandemic fad,” Simo told Fortune after Instacart’s IPO priced. “But the last two years gave us a chance to completely transform the business.”