22:40

Apoorva Mehta at Startup School NY 2014

Name: Apoorva Mehta at Startup School NY 2014
Uploaded: 2014-07-23T21:48:08.492Z
Duration: 22 min 40 s
Description: Apoorva Mehta, founder of Instacart, recounts his journey from quitting Amazon, building ~20 failed products, and finally solving his own pain point (grocery shopping). He emphasizes that persistence through failure, solving a problem you genuinely care about, and doing unscalable things early are critical.

From Y Combinator · Published Jul 23, 2014 · Watch on YouTube

TL;DR

Apoorva Mehta, founder of Instacart, recounts his journey from quitting Amazon, building ~20 failed products, and finally solving his own pain point (grocery shopping). He emphasizes that persistence through failure, solving a problem you genuinely care about, and doing unscalable things early are critical.

Key insights

The reason to start a company should be to solve a problem you truly care about, not to start a company for its own sake.
Immersing yourself in the startup ecosystem (talking to founders, investors, reading books) is essential to quickly learn terminology and concepts.
After repeated failures, questioning whether entrepreneurship is for you is a natural phase; resilience means going from failure to failure without losing steam.

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