Bienvenue to the south of France with its seaside beauty, cobblestone streets and
world-famous cuisine. We're traveling along the coast
to visit Sète, a charming city that revolves around
the rhythms of the port. When you arrive, you're
immediately hit with the smells

of the sea and the
sights of water jousting. I've come to this Mediterranean
harbor to meet a tech CEO who calls this place home. Welcome. This place is amazing. I
can't believe you grew up here.

It was very special. And I miss this place a lot. Fiji Simo is a tour de force.
Raised by fishing boat captains who instilled grit at a young age, Simo catapulted herself out of Sète and into the upper
echelons of Silicon Valley.

She chartered a fast path
from strategy at eBay to scaling Facebook to taking the reins of the grocery delivery business, Instacart, as CEO, a seemingly
perfect union of her tech chops with her foodie upbringing,
as if it was meant to be.

And rather than putting on
the tech industry uniform, Simo has maintained a
fabulously French way of being. So did you tell me you tried to get rid of your French accent or
did I mention that? Oh yeah. Yeah, I remember like
at Facebook, there were a lot

of people when I moved into
the product side telling me like, oh you need to dress
down, you need to wear a hoodie, you need to tie your hair. And I did it for one
day and it felt horrible because it wasn't who I was

Decked out head to toe in
Dior while introducing me to the local residents, and showing me the town that shaped her, Simo is
like a fish in water or as the French say, comme
un poisson dans l'eau.

So I wanna show you this
amazing place behind us. It's called Le Halle and
it's gonna be delicious. All right. I can spend my entire life
here and just eat like it's Making me hungry. And so your family has been
involved here for generations?

Yes. My family, all the men
in my family, whether it's all of my dad, my grandpa, great grandpa, all my uncles were fishermen and one of them, my uncle
became a fishmonger after, you know, stopping fishing.

And so we have been very, very deep into in the fishing
industry for many generations. So it seems like everyone
has a role right in the family. My grandfather has really
instilled in all of us the the respect for like this
idea of feeding the world

and you know, in our
family food is everything. Yeah. It's just love.
It's how we celebrate. It's at the center of
everything we do. Bonjour, what's your name?
Jean Phillip, Emily, what's fresh today?

Everything. what was it like for you being
raised in a fishing village? I think it was incredibly
special because there is a craft and a respect that fishermen have. It's interesting like you know
in Silicon Valley the people who are most respected
are like tech people,

whereas here the people who are most respected are
the people who feed the town. So in a way becoming
CEO of Instacart is kind of bridging these two things
for me where I love tech but I always had a
passion for feeding people

and so it's a really
special thing to be able to bridge the two. Can we order a tielle from you?
I can't wait to try it. Okay. So this is called
the tielle. It's like something that the people are very proud of.

I've been wondering what is
it about this octopus pie? The fisherman goes out at
sea, gets the octopus itself, then his wife chops it up and makes the tielle
and then delivers that. To my uncle so that it's purely fresh

and as you can tell,
everything is a family affair. You eat it kind of like, you
know, a pizza. A pizza. Yeah. Told you. I mean every time we come back to town the first thing we do
is we run and get one of those

because that's the taste we grew up with. Run. Don't walk. Oh my goodness. What do you think the Americans are missing from French culture? Like in America? It seems we just live to
work and the French just live. The French really
understand like how

to enjoy the little moments,
not just the big moments. Like you know, when I arrived
in the US I, I was surprised to hear so many people be
like, "We're gonna work so much and then we're gonna have fun
for the two weeks of vacation."

And I was just like, oh no,
that's like kind of sad. Whereas the French,
they stop at every lunch and the lunch is important
and we eat and we break bread and that's what I tried
to recreate both at work

and in my home, of like really making the little moments special. What was the conversation
like at the kitchen table? It was so striking that the days that my father had were,
you know, pretty intense. Like you know when you again
wake up at 2:00 AM in the

morning and go like until
6:00 PM in an environment that's incredibly dangerous just to feed people, like you
know, I was always kind of fascinated by what he
was doing and the dedication and so I obviously picked
a very different path than

becoming a fisherman myself. As an aside, I'm terribly seasick which is not a good quality
to have in my family. I know I was wondering why
didn't you join the family business? But I kept, you know, the
work ethic, I kept the values

that my father, my grandfather
really instilled in me around like how you lead a
team, how you lead a crew and, and yeah, just the idea that anything is possible if
you work hard enough for it. What is your earliest
memory of technology?

I remember my grandfather
telling me this story of the fact that he was one of the best
fishermen in the Mediterranean Sea and had developed all of
these techniques to know where to find fish and when this
new machine arrived, all

of a sudden he was like, "Am I going to lose my edge?" Basically it's gonna show all of the other fishermen where the fishes are. But instead of fearing technology, he thought of it as like, "Okay, now that this machine is coming, 

how do I become the best master of this new technology, of these new techniques, so that I use it to my advantage?" When you were little, how far away did the wider world seem? Oh, extremely far. I mean, we have this joke in Sete that if you go

to the town next door you need a passport. We walk off our octopus pies and wander deeper into the alleys of Sete where Simo tells me she's the first in her family to graduate high school. This is our high school. This is spring back memories. 

Oh, so many. He is like, spent a lot of time here and that's even where I met my husband. Oh, you met your husband here? Yep. First day of high school. What sort of inspired you? I mean I know you said you watched a lot

of American television. I was watching The O.C. and I can tell you the first time I moved to California I had the soundtrack of The O.C. in my ears. You know, "California, here we come." California, yeah, here we come. 

I'm glad, I'm glad you did the song and I didn't because no one wanted to have that for me. You went to one of, if not the most elite business school in France and then you got an internship at eBay. Yep. What was the

Path? I worked super, super hard. I mean, I literally didn't sleep for two years to get into the best possible school. A lot of people were going into finance at the time, but technology was so appealing to me

because of this idea of being able to impact people's lives and being an industry that's constantly changing or you constantly have to adapt and that's how I decided to go to eBay. When did you first hear about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg?

You know, so I was at eBay and everybody was starting to talk about these like companies that were starting to take off. The first time I applied at Facebook, they actually told me absolutely not, we do not need strategy people, we have Mark Zuckerberg to do strategy.

I spent an entire weekend basically creating a new product from scratch and marketing it and I sent that to the recruiters and the team was pretty impressed that I, you know, out of the blue had created entire products and that's how I got in.

I mean you became one of the most powerful people at Facebook. Did that also require not sleeping for several years? Like how did you do that? I think it required taking risks and you know, the things that really accelerated my career at Facebook was Mark

asking me to lead the team that was in charge of monetizing mobile at the time where no one thought we could monetize mobile and you know, at the time it was a huge risk because like if I fail like that would've had a very big impact on the company,

but if you succeed it also changes the trajectory of your career. And I kind of did that
over and over again. Unlike other tech leaders who grew up taking computers apart or learning to code, Simo was
watching her family take big

swings out at sea. We're
getting a glimpse of the hustle as the boats race back with
their bounty for the day. So there's a lot of
strategy involved in tons of strategy, right? Yeah. So you might have fewer
fish but be here sooner.

Maybe you catch more fish
but then you arrive later and you might get a lower price. So it's really supply
and demand of like volume and price, tons of strategy
involved towards that. Sounds like there's a good
business lesson in there.

Oh absolutely. Yeah. The one thing I love about
the fishing industry is that the crew needs to
really trust the captain. Like at sea, if you don't trust your team, you don't trust your captain. It's a matter of life and death.

This is my dad, he's been,
he's been a fisherman for 35 years and we are allowed, this is usually a very private
place, we're allowed here because he's with us, so he's giving us behind the scenes access.
Thank you, it's incredible.

After the fish are prepped,
the port ballet moves to an auction where fishmongers
like Simo's uncle set prices for the catch of the day,
then sell at local markets and across the country. Picking out your own perfect
personal fish at the market.

seems like the opposite of what Instacart is. How do you square that? I think you need a healthy mix. I mean you can marry something that is like fundamentally an ancestral type of work with technology to help fishermen be more efficient,

to help them do their job better and so many times technology is seen as disruption. I don't wanna disrupt, I want to help the people who are like caring for, you know, their particular craft right now. Really be the people still allowed

to continue doing their craft even better through technology in the future. That's not the typical thing you'd hear from a tech CEO, especially one in charge of a San Francisco based company that wants to disrupt the grocery business. I have dreaded going to the grocery store, then you have

to wait in line to check out and then lug your groceries back to your apartment only to realize that you've forgotten something at the store. That's Apoorva Mehta, the founder of Instacart and a former supply chain engineer at Amazon,

he launched the startup back in 2012 and caught the attention of venture capitalists by shipping a six pack of beer straight to their door. It's a simple premise: order groceries through an app, a shopper fills the order and then delivers directly to you.

The idea was well-timed, riding the wave of gig economy companies that were booming in Silicon Valley. Then the pandemic hit, online grocery delivery surged, and Instacart became an essential service. But when lockdown ended, the company needed to redefine itself.

Simo joined the board in 2021. Six months later she left Facebook to become Instacart's new CEO. I met up with her back
in San Francisco to see how she's setting the
company on a new course. You're technically not
a founder of Instacart.

How is that an advantage and
how is that a disadvantage? The advantage is that I come with a lot of experience having seen
scale at a larger company. The disadvantage is
that you don't have all of the credibility that a founder has from

having created the company. You need to rebuild that and that takes a little bit of time. I didn't get that from day one but I'm getting it by showing
that all of the new bets that we've put in place are working.

Grocery is the biggest
commerce sector in the US but what did you see in terms
of potential beyond groceries? Yeah, so people really
think of Instacart as this like online grocery delivery app, but what I saw when I joined
the board was the potential

to really be a grocery technology company. The things that are so special about what we do is we integrate really deeply with 1500 grocers. We provide technology for
them both on our marketplace but also powering their
own e-commerce properties.

You became CEO at the
top of the tech bubble, we were in the middle of a pandemic and Instacart was worth $38 billion. How did you have to
reframe your expectations and your employees' expectations of what this company could be?

On the one hand, we had this like giant valuation, but on the other hand, when I joined, we were declining like gross transaction volume, declining double digits because it was post-pandemic and people were wondering if we were gonna sustain that or if we were gonna decline back to prior levels.

And we were kind of the poster child for an unprofitable company. So really, the way I reset with the companies is to say let's kind of forget about, you know, what the external world is valuing us at and let's talk about building a generational company.

And that means the companies that can grow sustainably and that are profitable. It's been a year since the IPO. Instacart's now valued at nine-ish billion dollars. Wall Street's still skeptical. It doesn't compare to some of the bigger

gig economy players. What's your response to that? The thing that I think the market underestimates is how hard it is to serve customers and deliver groceries with accuracy, with speed, with selection, with affordability. We've been at it for 12 years

and so even if we have new entrants coming into the market, they're not able to do that at the scale and at the level of quality that we're doing. And I think the market is gonna end up realizing that while there will be intensified competition,

we have a very deep competitive advantage. There are now giants in this business, Amazon, Walmart, how can Instacart compete? Where will you win and where will they, the Amazons and Walmart of the world might get a fair share of people

but if your favorite retailer of choice is a Publix or Kroger or Albertson's, like we really are the best place for that. You bought Caper, you know maker of this, these AI-powered smart carts. How does it work? Well, you basically take an item, go ahead okay take an item

and you just drop it into the cart. It has a screen on the Caper cart that follows you around the grocery store and can recommend things based on what's in your basket based on the location you are at in the store. And that makes for a much more fun experience

to balance out the Tostitos. How many people are actually using this? So right now we have hundreds of carts deployed and in the next several months we're going to thousands of carts. Also, it would be really nice to know

how much you're spending before you actually go to checkout. 'Cause there are so many times I'm like ouch, maybe I would've put a few things back but, and you know that's a great point and initially we, I was worried that if we showed the total

that would just reduce your spend and that's not the case. 'Cause there's a lot of people who are on a budget and when they see their total they're actually like maximizing getting to their budget. Whereas if they have to go through a normal checkout,

they never wanna be embarrassed to have to put items back. It has actually provided a real deep service for people both on the affluent side as well, people on the budget. Now, bigger picture groceries are so expensive, everyone is feeling it.

Are you getting sick and tired of rising food costs
when you go out to eat? Think about how much
higher the bill is now. I mean honestly, feeding a
family of four, for example, just theoretically, when you
go out in New York City costs

double what it did four years ago. What's happening here? Why
is everyone hurting so much? Yeah, I think there's been, as you know, just an increase in prices
overall throughout the supply chain that ends up, you know,
hurting the end customer.

So the role we play is
really to get savings for customers wherever they exist. Using Instacart, my understanding is it makes
everything more expensive. It still seems like a
luxury and not a necessity. Why do you think people will
continue to pay a premium

when they're already paying a lot? Four years ago, you are absolutely right. It used to be a luxury, but when you look at the
delivery fees that you get to pay to have the service. A lot of people tell us that when you start factoring
in the cost of gas to go

to the grocery store, the
loss of time for people who may be packing two jobs in one day and all of these factors,
it's actually a really, really good deal. Gig work for so many people has provided extra income flexibility, but there are still a lot of complaints.

They want 43 items, no
tip. Good luck with that. I missed two
$40 orders today because I didn't click accept quick enough. You have people that are buying bots and bot accounts that will just grab the order. How do you respond to all that?

Like how do you address all of that? There will always be complaints, but we really look at some numbers to figure out if we're doing a good job and then we can always improve. You know, being a shopper is a tough job.

You are in the store trying to figure out how to like find 20 plus items going on a customer chat and helping the customers like figure out if something is missing on the shelves. So our tools or technology or things that we always invest in so that the jobs become

as easy as possible. Instacart's been spending time at the White House. What are you advocating for? We as a country are spending about a trillion dollars on healthcare costs for dietary related disease. A trillion is the same amount

as the entire country spends on food. That's pretty crazy when you think about it. And that is fundamentally an economic problem but also a technology problem because to distribute nutritious food to people all across the US, you need a technology platform that can do that.

So that's why we took on the very big initiative to really be the rails by which this can happen. It's pretty crazy that today it is easier for a doctor to prescribe medications than it is to prescribe food when we know food is such a big

driver of this condition. How do you think about the global food system? Like so many people in the world don't have access to enough, they don't have enough food, they don't have access to quality food. How does that shape your thinking and your strategy?

We think fundamentally
the food system is completely suboptimized. It creates a lot of waste. And when you think of all the
technologies that can be built and optimized through machine learning, through artificial intelligence,
we could have a food system

that is fundamentally less wasteful. And if someone was
collecting consumer data that feeds the entire system so that the right things could be
produced at the right volume, and we think we can be that player. I mean, you are, most of us don't stop

to think about the massive machine that delivers food from the sea and the farm to our
tables on a daily basis. But trust me, when I say
it's extraordinarily complex. Simo's plan to take a piece of that pie is nothing if not
ambitious. Back in France,

her vision is gaining the
attention of world leaders with conversations at the highest level. You recently had dinner with President Macron. As a little girl, did you ever imagine you'd be eating dinner with the French president? Absolutely not. Tell me about that.

It was really special. It was the state dinner that he organized to honor President Joe Biden. And you know, growing up in France and then living in the US
it felt like a really full circle moment for me. When you wanted to go into
tech, it's almost like you,

you knew you had to leave
to do what you wanted to do, but if you could do it all over again, would you build in France? I think it's only recently that the entrepreneurship
path has been valued. I think, you know, French people
didn't see that in the past

as like the path to success, and that's still a cultural
thing that needs to be changed for people to really want to take that risk and see themselves as
wanting to be on that path. It's still quite hard, you
know, to hire in France, 

retain talent, have the
flexibility to change, you know, the structure of your
teams when you need to. But there's still some work to do. And compared to the US I
think there's, Europe is still behind in valuing entrepreneurship
as much as the US does.

There are so few female tech CEOs and even fewer French female CEOs. I mean, I'm realizing it's
such a small community. Yeah, well we need to change that. It's, it's very, very small, but I, I also think that, you know, 

we have incredible women
in c-suites right now that are primed to become
the next wave of CEOs. And I think as we have more
of these women in positions of power that are going to lift
other women up, it takes a lot 

of time, sadly for this to be
a big enough transformation that we see the impact. But I'm hopeful that we have
more people that are realizing that there's enormous talent that we're not recognizing properly to have the performance
we need in our companies.

What's your advice to
the next French Fidji Simo? And a lot of what I try to
do is actually show women that, you know, someone who grew up
in a small town in a family of fishermen can end up being
a CEO in Silicon Valley.

I would just tell them to dream big and not put any limitations on themselves and really focus on the long-term goal.

How Instacart's CEO Fidji Simo Brought French Style to Silicon Valley | The Circuit with Emily Chang

Bloomberg Originals offers bold takes for curious minds on today’s biggest topics. Hosted by experts covering stories you haven’t seen and viewpoints you haven’t heard, you’ll discover cinematic, data-led shows that investigate the intersection of business and culture. Exploring every angle of climate change, technology, finance, sports and beyond, Bloomberg Originals is business as you’ve never seen it.


Bloomberg Originals

Arrival in Sète, a charming coastal city known for its port and cuisine.

Meeting Fidji Simo, a tech CEO who grew up in Sète.

Simo's background: raised by fishermen, she achieved success in Silicon Valley.

Simo's unique style and refusal to conform to tech industry norms.

Simo showcasing her hometown and its cultural significance.

Simo's Family and Sète's Fishing Industry

Simo's family's generations-long involvement in the fishing industry.

The importance of food and family traditions in Simo's upbringing.

Simo's perspective on the respect given to fishermen in Sète versus tech professionals in Silicon Valley.

The significance of the local dish, tielle, and its family-oriented preparation.

Simo's comparison of French and American cultures regarding work-life balance.

Simo's reflections on her father's demanding work as a fisherman.

Simo's decision not to join the family business but to adopt their work ethic.

Simo's grandfather's adaptation to new technology in the fishing industry.

Simo's early life in Sète and her limited exposure to the outside world.

Simo's high school experience and meeting her husband.

Influence of American television on Simo's aspirations.

Simo's dedication to education and her choice of a career in technology.

Simo's initial rejection by Facebook and her subsequent successful application.

Simo's risk-taking and achievements at Facebook.

Simo's advantages and disadvantages as a non-founder CEO.

Simo's vision for Instacart as a grocery technology company.

Simo's approach to resetting expectations during challenging times.

Simo's response to Wall Street's skepticism regarding Instacart's valuation.

Instacart's competitive strategy against larger players like Amazon and Walmart.

Instacart's acquisition of Caper and the functionality of AI-powered smart carts.

Simo's perspective on rising food costs and their impact on consumers.

Addressing the perception of Instacart as a luxury service.

Simo's response to complaints regarding gig work conditions for Instacart shoppers.

Instacart's advocacy for addressing dietary-related diseases through technology.

Simo's thoughts on the global food system and its inefficiencies.

Simo's ambitious plan to optimize the food system through technology.

Simo's experience having dinner with President Macron.

Entrepreneurship in France and Representation of Women in Tech

Simo's perspective on the challenges and opportunities for entrepreneurship in France.

The underrepresentation of women, particularly French women, as tech CEOs.

Simo's advice to aspiring French female tech leaders.

How Instacart's CEO Fidji Simo Brought French Style to Silicon Valley | The Circuit with Emily Chang

How Instacart's CEO Fidji Simo Brought French Style to Silicon Valley | The Circuit with Emily Chang

Scripts