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]

Every day we get closer and closer to the ChatGPT moment for robotics...

[Dyna Robotics @DynaRobotics]

Today we are introducing Dyna-2, a world-action model pre-trained on one million hours of human video. At this scale, for the first time, we discovered several new scaling laws:

• world-action models exhibit scaling law on human data across four orders of magnitude, from 1000 to 1,000,000 hours,
• this human data scaling law implied a scaling law on never seen robot data,
• both data and objective matter; world modeling and scaling on video data are essential for cross-embodiment scaling transfer to emerge

🧵

[Max Mullen @Max]

@bradkowalk the search bar of every PM's dreams

[Max Mullen @Max]

@0xjohnkim @paraformtalent such a special company!

[Max Mullen @Max]

Willow is a daily driver for me, and crushes the competition 🎤

[Willow @WillowVoiceAI]

Introducing Willow Frontier Mini and Willow Frontier Pro.

Frontier Mini gives everyone free, unlimited dictation.

Frontier Pro is our most accurate model yet, built for power users and teams who want the fastest and best dictation experience.

[Max Mullen @Max]

@ryanjdaniels @lluismanrique @crosbylegal @gumloop @Instacart top 3 best companies of all time 🍌

[Max Mullen @Max]

Finally a benchmark for long horizon learning…

[Bryan @bryan_houlton]

Introducing Horizon from @0rinlabs: the first long-horizon learning benchmark made from real agent logs

- SOTA is 21% on the hardest section
- 7-35M tokens of real agent history per task
- Models are hardly getting better on the hardest tasks
- Humans can score 100%

(1/7)

[Eric Quidenus-Wahlforss @ericw]

Every generation inherits a new medium.

Ours is taking shape.

Introducing @_nellofficial.

Built in San Francisco. Backed by Danny Rimer and @IndexVentures, alongside @antonosika, @gokulr, @rauchg, Jason Citron, @joshm, @lennysan, @mati, @Max, @saradu, @soleio, @Thom_Wolf, and several others.

More soon.

[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