Max Mullen

Co-founder @Instacart🥕🛒, startup investor

[Max Mullen @Max]

Some personal news! Recently, I stepped back from the day-to-day at @Instacart to focus on investing full-time. I sat down with my friend @jaltma on Uncapped to talk about building Instacart and my philosophy on early-stage investing — check it out here!

[Jack Altman @jaltma]

For this episode of Uncapped I got to sit down with my close friend @Max, cofounder of Instacart 🥕

We talked about the key moments of Instacart...how it got started, critical wins, tough losses, competitive dynamics, earned insights, going public, and Instacart's future.

Max is also an awesome startup investor, and we talked about what he looks for in founders, consumer investing, and what he's building with Workshop.

He's one of the best people I know, hope you enjoy.

(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

[Max Mullen @Max]

@brettberson @grosen 💐 💐 💐

[Max Mullen @Max]

These guys are the reason we could scale ops through some of the craziest growth periods I've ever seen. I couldn’t be more excited to back @champ_hq. Check them out if you want to automate the most complex processes in your business

[Jagannath Putrevu @jputrevu]

🚀 After a year of quiet building, I’m excited to officially announce @champ_hq out of stealth. We're also announcing our $8.5M Seed round led by @Redpoint with participation from @defyvc , @Max , @svangel, and a great group of angels. Watch the quick launch video below

[Max Mullen @Max]

This is really cool

[Matt Van Horn @mvanhorn]

Introducing the Printing Press, a CLI-factory and a CLI-library. Built with @trevin. 🏭🖨📚

Most APIs suck for agents. Most MCPs suck for agents. Most official CLIs suck for agents. They waste tokens and time. @steipete started making his own because of this.

📚 A Library of agent-native CLIs you install today (Linear, ESPN, Flight GOAT (Google Flights + Kayak nonstop), Contact Goat (LinkedIn + Happenstance + Deepline more) +30+ more)
🏭 A factory that prints new ones for any service - just type /printing-press <product name>

CLIs are fast, local, SQLite-backed. Work in Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes.

🌐 https://t.co/GjnN9E9yTH

[Max Mullen @Max]

In 2012, @shiftb , @apoorva_mehta and I shared a vision for the future: that we could make grocery shopping effortless.

Almost everyone thought the idea was crazy. They said it had been tried before and failed — that we’d be squashed by the biggest ecommerce companies in the world. But we knew they were wrong. We saw a future others didn't and had the courage to try to build it.

Today, @Instacart helps millions of households get their groceries delivered each week. With the strength of our business, a clear vision, and a world-class leadership team in place, I’m moving into an advisory role at Instacart with complete confidence in the company’s future.

To all of our partners, shoppers and customers: thank you for putting your trust in us.

To the Instacart team, past and present: thank you for rolling up your sleeves alongside me to build an epic company!

Building Instacart has been the privilege of a lifetime and I'm incredibly energized to use my experience to help the next generation of founders as an early stage investor. 🥕

[Max Mullen @Max]

Congrats! @crosbylegal is successful because @ryanjdaniels and @jsarihan created a culture of intensity and urgency that delivers for customers better than anyone else can

[Ryan Daniels @ryanjdaniels]

📣 Update: we raised our $60m Series B from @Lux_Capital, @IndexVentures and @01Advisors, with participation from @sequoia, @eladgil and @BainCapVC .

When we came out of stealth 283 days ago, we had negotiated contracts worth $30m for our clients. As of last month, that number is over $1 billion.

We work with the most ambitious companies in the world, including @tryramp, @clay and @RogoAI. Today, we want you to hear from some of them directly.

Contracts are the rails of commerce. @crosbylegal is a hybrid AI law firm that gets them signed 80% faster. We’re announcing our Series B to keep scaling the dream law firm.

[Max Mullen @Max]

@ZackKanter is the most dedicated and principled founder/ceo of this era. If you love fast-growing API businesses, you’ve gotta check out @Stedi!

[Zack Kanter @zackkanter]

I'm thrilled to announce @Stedi's $50m Series C, led by Lee Fixel from Addition with participation from @Stripe, @RibbitCapital, @USV, @FirstRound, @BoxGroup, and @BloombergBeta, along with angel investors including @tobi, Charlie Songhurst, @rauchg, @karimatiyeh, @Max, and more. This latest round brings our total funding to $142 million.

We’ve grown enormously over the past year. Our number of paying customers has increased by 6x year over year, and our number of billed transactions has increased by over 7x. We’re now processing more than a billion claims and eligibility transactions annually – to frame this on a relative basis, we processed more transactions in February alone than we did in the first half of 2025 combined. This month, Stedi was named one of @TryRamp's fastest-growing vendors – across all categories, not just healthcare – for the second time in ten months; we’re the first non-AI company to make the list in five months.

We’ve done all this while offering a level of support that (allegedly) doesn’t scale. We offer dedicated Slack and Teams channels to every customer and now have over 1,500 shared channels. Over the past 12 months, our median support ticket response time has decreased from 18.3 minutes to just 6.7 minutes, all while handling a 6.4x increase in support volume – with 100% of tickets answered by humans.

Our customers send us thousands and thousands of questions and suggestions every month, day and night, and the learnings we get from this firehose of real-time feedback are the engine that turns our business. It is this process that has made us the fastest-growing clearinghouse by a wide margin.

This latest round of funding allows us to continue to accelerate development across our platform and to continue to serve customers with a first-rate support experience.

One key to that is continuing to build a world-class team – to that end, we are hiring for dozens of roles across engineering, product, design, operations, GTM, and more. If building the transactional layer for the future of healthcare sounds interesting to you, drop me a note.

[Max Mullen @Max]

@samlambert @Instacart it’s just following our policies but I’ll make sure you don’t get charged a cancellation fee @samlambert!

[Max Mullen @Max]

Great deal! Mercury is such a wonderful product on both the personal and business side!

[immad @immad]

1/ Mercury Personal is now free (normally $240/yr) for active Mercury Business users**

Personal comes with:
* Free wires
* 3.25% APY
* Mercury Invest for s&amp;p and t-bills funds
* Joint accounts and auto transfer rules
* All in the same powerful app you love

[Max Mullen @Max]

So proud of you Jack! You show up for people in a way that’s rare — @benchmark and the founders you back are so lucky to have you

[Jack Altman @jaltma]

I’m really excited to share that I’m joining Benchmark.

The past two years as a full time investor have been the most rewarding of my career. I really love venture capital, which is not something I ever imagined I’d say when I was kid, but here we are.

I love new ideas and being part of a team with a mission. I love getting to be there for people who are struggling towards goals they really care about. I love learning from people who are better CEOs than I ever was. I love the texture of the work, the competition, and the way the job lets you invest in relationships.

I love it so much that I’ve even turned into a little venture nerd with a podcast who goes around harassing great investors and founders, trying to learn as much as I can as fast as possible. I’ve certainly learned what I care most about, and what kind of investor I want to be.

What I’ve realized is that I love investing at the Series A, when there’s enough going on that an investor can be useful but not so much that you can’t have an impact. I think there are many amazing ways to practice venture, it’s just the way that most speaks to me. And as I came to realize that, I started to think about how to best set myself up to do that craft as well as possible. It became clear to me there is nowhere better for this than Benchmark; the way they’re structured, their principles, their overall approach to investing, and their track record all create an environment that I believe will let me do my best work as an investor and help founders the most I possibly can.

As I’ve gotten to know the team at Benchmark I’ve come to admire so much about each of them. Peter is truly playing his own game. A lot of what he says sounds like poetry at first, but as the ideas roll around in your head for a while you realize how much depth they have. I first heard about Eric many years ago from my friend Saji at Benchling while I was building Lattice, who described him as the most amazing board member and attributed him with a lot of the company’s success. That’s the kind of partner I want to be one day. Chetan is brilliant and truly thinks for himself; I’ve realized over time what a courageous guy he is. And then there’s my friend Ev, whose skills complement mine and who I just love to be around. I can’t wait to have him as a partner in crime.

When given the chance to work with this group I just knew I had to go.

One of my motivating north stars with Alt Capital was to build a firm and be a partner that I most would have wanted as an entrepreneur. Although I haven’t gotten everywhere I want to be yet, I’m proud of the work so far. And now I’m excited to build on that work at Benchmark, where I hope to increase my rate of learning and get armed with the power of a partnership so I can help founders reach their dreams even more.

Thank you to the companies who’ve let me invest with them at Alt Cap. I’m keeping all my board seats and supporting everyone just the same as before.

Thank you to the LPs who’ve backed me as well. I am so excited about the portfolio we have and am grateful I can stick with all those companies.

And finally thank you to my teammates, Bala, Vivek, and Nate. Bala took a bet on me and started investing with me before it was remotely obvious, and we’ve been able to grow so much figuring it out together as investors. I credit Nate with helping Alt start feeling like a firm. He joined us from First Round over a year ago and made everything run smoothly. And while Vivek joined just a little while ago, even in the short time we’ve worked together he’s had a meaningful impact on how we think and invest. They’re all joining Benchmark with me.

So pumped for this chapter.

[Max Mullen @Max]

@apoorva_mehta If you're not starting your day with claude code, that's a *terminal* issue💻

[Max Mullen @Max]

How fast is AI changing the software landscape?

We recorded this podcast just under 3 weeks ago and what I said about orchestrating AI agents for every profession sounded pretty crazy then…and now it’s become consensus!

[Rajat Suri @rajatsuri]

In this special live event, @FoundersInArms brings together a room full of founders at Mercury's San Francisco headquarters for an intimate conversation about building, investing, and the future of AI.

Max Mullen is co-founder at Instacart, where he led product and grew it from a contrarian idea into the leader in online grocery delivery and eventually a publicly traded company.

Now @max is an active investor and runs a founder community in San Francisco called Workshop. Max shares lessons from over a decade of building and his perspective on AI's transformative potential.

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Welcome to the first live Founders in Arms event at Mercury HQ
(00:43) Introduction to Max Mullen and his early investment in Mercury
(03:58) Max's origin story and first startup at Startup Weekend
(04:36) Building a social network and getting acquihired
(05:39) The path from acquihire to founding Instacart
(06:19) Why Max wanted to solve real-world operational problems
(07:17) Starting Instacart when there was no gig economy
(09:15) Overcoming the "grocery delivery is dead" narrative
(11:48) Market timing and why Webvan was too early
(14:37) Being a non-technical co-founder in a technical role
(17:45) The PARE framework for building company culture
(22:09) Max's approach to M&A at Instacart
(24:00) The Caper smart shopping cart acquisition story
(25:31) How founders can position for acquisition
(28:26) Why product-market fit attracts acquirers
(29:46) Evaluating investments: market size vs. founder quality
(32:54) Max and Immad's differing investment philosophies
(35:39) The current state of VC funding and AI companies
(36:51) The three best times to raise money as a founder
(39:15) Instacart's seasonal business patterns and fundraising timing
(39:59) The most interesting opportunities in AI right now
(40:24) Why every profession will have AI agent co-pilots
(41:44) What AI-native companies will look like for the next generation

[Max Mullen @Max]

@jaltma marketplaces and companies that deal with physical goods

[Max Mullen @Max]

@brettberson Just wait until SHE starts making YOU the sandwiches :)

[Max Mullen @Max]

👀 if you want to learn from the best and level up as an investor, you should look at this special opportunity with Josh…

[Josh Kopelman @joshk]

In 20+ years of building @firstround, I’ve never hired for this specific role before.

I’m kicking off a search to hire an Investor who will work directly alongside me. They will share my obsession to meet with the highest potential founders as early as possible, often before they even have a clear “imagine if” yet.

Although the role itself is still being defined, my commitment is to work closely with this person to help them build the foundation of their investing career.

Here’s what’s probably true about you if you’re the right fit:

- You’re enthusiastic and obsessive. Following your curiosity has taken you down often weird and winding paths.

- You already know a lot of brilliant builders — and more importantly, they enjoy spending time with you. You have a unique ability to generate followership, likely because you give more than you take.

- You actually enjoy the work of building relationships from scratch: the cold emails, the endless events, the persistent follow-ups, the months of coffee chats. It requires relentless execution, and that excites you. You go about this work in an authentic way that isn’t conventional “networking.” If you’re looking for a role where the title does all the heavy lifting for you, this isn’t it.

- You don’t find it difficult to put unreasonable hours into your work because it doesn’t feel like work to you. You’d call yourself a “work enthusiast.”

- You’ve been immersed in the startup world long enough to have real context. What matters most is you’ve been close enough to startups to understand how they actually work and what great looks like.

- You obsess over markets, customers, and why some businesses work while others don’t, but you can also hang when a conversation goes deep into technical choices.

- You’re an exceptional communicator who tends to be more of a “simplifier” than a “complexifier.”

- We’ll work together incredibly closely, but you aren’t someone who needs to be managed. You learn best by watching, by doing, by asking well-calibrated questions — preferring to “take the wheel” instead of being a passenger. You’d rather shape a role than fill one.

If you want to spend your time with builders at the very beginning — and learn this craft of early-stage investing alongside someone who’s been at it for two decades and still thinks it’s the best job in the world — I’d love to meet you.

SF or NYC only, with long days and lots of travel in both directions. Apply below.

https://t.co/wV9Ns4fUE7

[Max Mullen @Max]

Mercury is an incredible product for personal banking — imagine if your bank was...a modern tech company!

[immad @immad]

1/ @Mercury Personal launching publicly today!

Its been my primary account for a while and changed my financial life:

Joint account with my wife, cards+controls for my nanny. Auto transfer money between high-yield-savings + Invest* + checking. Easy+free wires

[Max Mullen @Max]

Welcome to the future: frictionless commerce! Just tell your agent what you want from Instacart and confirm.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Stripe is partnering with @Instacart to enable direct checkout in ChatGPT.

This new AI commerce experience is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) that we launched with @OpenAI a few months ago. Behind the scenes, it uses @Stripe Shared Payment Tokens to securely handle payment credentials.

Live today on web! (Mobile soon.)

[Max Mullen @Max]

Tesla's latest FSD software update + soon to come "Unsupervised" mode will be an iPhone moment for self-driving cars

[green @greentheonly]

2025.44 brings in a curiously named geofence region:
Bay Unsupervised CA DMV

Seem to encompass entire bay area.

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

Willow’s voice keyboard lets you type across all your iOS apps — and actually edit what you said https://t.co/OS400NaCoc

[Max Mullen @Max]

Imagine if you could just speak aloud and your device did exactly what you intended...

[Willow @WillowVoiceAI]

Introducing the next phase of Willow.

A world powered by voice.