So long, and thanks for all the carrots

This week marks my final week at Instacart after 4.5+ exciting and fulfilling years with the company. I am lucky to have had the opportunity to work on some fascinating challenges during my time at Instacart, and I will always value the passionate, driven folks I’ve partnered with, many of whom I consider true friends.

While I could wax poetic about the various projects and people I’ve worked on/with over the years, I’m finding myself particularly appreciative about the role Instacart has played during a really notable 4.5 year stretch in my personal life. Here are a few things I’ve been reflecting on as I wrap up my time at Instacart.

Parenthood: Emma Huntington and I both started new jobs on the same day in Jan 2019 (she at Lyft, I at Instacart) and we both wanted to get settled in our new gigs before we grew our family. Fast forward to September 2023 and we are now the parents of 2 children who have joined us since we started at our respective companies. I am so appreciative of the generous leave that Instacart offers new parents–it gave me ~7 months to focus on diaper changing, sleep deprivation and marveling at some insanely cute babies (*they have their mother’s looks) without the need to worry about my day job. My colleagues at Instacart were extremely supportive of me taking time to bond with our newborns, and they gave me the space to be fully present during the leave. Instacart is very thoughtful in providing groceries and supplies for new parents–my kids will be wearing carrot-adorned clothing for years to come <3. I will always have a deep association between working at Instacart and becoming a father.

Health: My LinkedIn profile somewhat hides the ball on how I spent the 2.5 years between Meta and Instacart–it’s true that I traveled a bunch during that time, but the travel was secondary to all the time I spent managing my health. 3 months after I left Meta I was involved in an accident that resulted in a brain injury that prevented me from working for 2 years. Anything that resembled working made my persistent head pain worse–I couldn’t read, I couldn’t look at screens, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t focus on conversations. 

When I finally got to the point in my recovery that I was cautiously ready to start interviewing, I wasn’t sure if I was healthy enough for a new job but I figured it was time to try. Getting the offer from Instacart in December 2018 felt like an incredible validation of 2 years of hard rehabilitation to return to a ‘normal’ life. After I joined the company, I always felt deeply supported when I shared my health journey with my coworkers. Now as I’m preparing to leave Instacart I realize that I will always associate this job with putting a particularly dark part of my life behind me and reclaiming my career.

Loss: During the 9.5 years I spent at Meta, my parents were deeply supportive of the career shift I made from the mental health field into tech (outside of being horrified by the X-rated joke I told at my FB interview #IYKYK). While they were excited as both the company and my career grew, they had differential levels of enthusiasm for Facebook as a product. While my father has been a power user for well over a decade, my mother never really connected with Facebook. She made a profile that somehow got phished/impersonated several times (facepalm) but otherwise she left responding to inane polls and posting boomer memes to my dad.

She similarly was not super engaged with Instacart during my 1st year, but that changed in 2020 once COVID-19 hit. My mother became an enthusiastic Instacart customer, and would call me to proudly describe the orders she had placed while also giving feedback on issues she found with our apps (including the fact that she had somehow managed to enter her address 13 separate times). When travel restrictions eased up in 2021, I spent the final month of my 1st parental leave on the East Coast with my parents, and my mother showed me in person how adept she had become at using Instacart the 1st night we arrived. When our shopper arrived with our order, I walked her through a feature my team had built that enabled shoppers to receive a stipend for receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. After the shopper left, I saw a look on my mother’s face that was more than just the pride she’d always shown in me–it was that, for the 1st time, she really understood in a visceral way what I’ve been doing with my career. For years I struggled to explain what product management was and how the products I built had worked, but it took her seeing someone use one of those products (that she also enjoyed) in the wild for something to really click for her.

My mother passed away last year, and I am fortunate to have years of amazing memories with her. As my time at Instacart comes to an end I find that I have been reflecting on how rewarding it was to see how she connected with Instacart. It is such a gift to have worked on a product that she enjoyed, and I am indebted to this company for giving me that gift.

To those who have made it this far, thank you for reading about the past few years of my life. I’ll share more about what’s next for me in the coming weeks, but I want to take this time to acknowledge how important my time at Instacart has been and thank everyone who has made the company (and my time there) so special.