Max Mullen on when to take advice from your investors

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Max Mullen co-founded Instacart in 2012 with Apoorva Mehta and Brandon Leonardo. Recently he stepped back from his day-to-day role at the company to invest in early-stage founders full time.

Max sat down before an audience of speedrun founders with a16z’s Fareed Mosavat, who Max once hired as a product leader at Instacart. The conversation covered which advice founders should take, which to ignore, and what he tells every co-founder who isn’t the CEO.

Watch our full conversation with Max above, or check out the highlights below:

1) Science, religion, or art

Fareed opened by pointing out that Max has likely gotten more than enough advice over the years. How should founders think about the advice they get? Max sorts it into three buckets:

“As a founder, I would find that we would get lots and lots of advice, and it would usually end up in one of three buckets: what I call science, religion, or art. Science decisions are ones that have a right answer. It’s something that every company has to deal with, and there’s a right answer. For science questions, great investors have the answer because they sit on boards and invest in a lot of companies. Other people have gone through what you’re about to go through, and they can just tell you, ‘hey, this is what will work. This won’t work.’ Think about some of the product things we’ve done: experiments that have been run before again and again. This will convert, that won’t convert. Getting advice on science questions is a big advantage. That’s why you want to have great investors.

“But then there’s these other two buckets, religion and art. Religion is your culture. There are many right answers to what your values should be, and how you should run your company, whether or not you should give people specific titles or general titles, whether or not you should require people to work in person. These are cultural decisions, and you should seek great examples, mainly from other founders. Probably less so investors. Seek lots of great data points, and then make your own decision on questions of religion.

“And then on questions of art and taste: this is the mission of your company, what you decide to do, what your strategy is. These things are your decision, and you should just tell everyone else to buzz off, because they really just shouldn’t be giving you advice on decisions of art. That’s why you’re a founder. That’s why your company is special. So the framework is just to think pretty hard about what kind of decision you’re trying to make, and only take advice from investors if it’s a science question.“

Fareed pushed on the religion bucket: what about founders whose convictions run against whatever everyone on X is telling them to do? Max says he hopes that describes everyone in the room:

“I certainly hope you have some differentiated beliefs. And by the way, just get off of Twitter. Post for your startup, but don’t read everyone else’s silly viral posts. Now that you know that the sausage is made this way, right? You know that they’re just making this stuff up and trying to go viral. There’s an inherent tension in good values, right? It’s not just ‘we want to go as fast as possible,’ but ‘we’re willing to prioritize speed over quality,’ or ‘we’re willing to prioritize speed over being right every single time.’ There has to be a trade-off, or else it’s not a real value.“

2) Product-market fit is a spectrum

Fareed asked when Max first felt Instacart had product-market fit: “Was it instant? You just knew it, and it was like lightning in a bottle? Or was there a path to getting there?” Max’s answer is a caution for anyone reading a growth chart:

“I see product-market fit as not a point in time. I think it’s important to say that it’s a spectrum. You get a little closer to it every day, hopefully. And to be honest, when we first launched the app, I thought we had product-market fit, because people would use it and tell their friends and reuse it, and we were growing forty percent week over week. But in retrospect, I realized we didn’t have anything close to product-market fit. What we had was product-customer fit. We had a fit with urban professionals who were single, who wanted to outsource groceries and didn’t care where they came from. Because at the time, when we started Instacart, we just delivered from whatever store we chose. You didn’t even choose the store.

“And then later on, we let the customer choose the store, but we didn’t have all of people’s favorite stores. Only when we became a marketplace, two years into the company, and started adding retailers like Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe’s and Costco… [that] was when we started to have real product-market fit. And even then, we weren’t all the way down the spectrum, right? I would say then we had product-market fit with coastal elites. And then at a certain point – maybe two years further than that – we started to have product-market fit with regular families who would order their entire weekly grocery shopping on Instacart from their favorite local retailer. And that was real product-market fit. And that took four or five years, actually.“

3) Don’t skip the part where you find a worthy problem

Fareed brought up Max’s recent essay, The Four Deadly Startup Sins. Max elaborated on the first “sin” listed in the essay, one he believes founders have to solve before moving on to other problems:

“The first sin is not solving a worthy problem. It’s like, of course you need to solve a worthy problem. But finding an unmet need that no one else in the market has found yet is really hard. A lot of times it’s so hard that people then do a half-assed job of finding a worthy problem, and then kind of move on to other things. Okay, now we’re going to name the company, and now we’re going to buy a domain, and now we’re going to hire people, and we’ll figure out this ‘what we’re doing’ thing later. But you actually can’t do that. You can’t skip the part where you actually find a problem that other people care enough about to work with you on.“

4) One number on the wall

“People talk about focus, but not a lot of people live it,” Fareed said. Founders at this stage often walk in with three, four, five things they want to set goals around; Instacart had one, from the first office on:

“I remember in our first office, we didn’t even have a TV on the wall. And so we were like, how are we going to have a metrics dashboard that’s always up there that everyone can see? And I was like, I’ll just print out the metrics every morning. Our goal was the number of deliveries per week… We wanted to grow one hundred percent week over week. And so everything everyone was doing in the company – only five or six people at the time – had to be oriented against that goal. At the end of the day, everybody knows that their job is to make that number move that way. And that’s very clarifying, very aligning.

“And the bigger the company gets, the harder it is to get everybody one hundred percent on the same page. And a singular goal and a singular metric really does that. You have to stand up in front of the company… and say, ‘this is the only thing that matters.’ And you have to get people to really be behind that single goal – or in some cases, two goals – that work together to achieve some outcome.”

Fareed, who lived through this at Instacart, noted the downside: it can feel thrashy.

“If you don’t like thrashy, don’t work at an early-stage startup, right? This is the business that we’re in. ... Better to work for founders that wake up one day and realize they’ve given the company the wrong goal and then change it, than the one that wakes up and realizes they’ve given the company the wrong goal and then waits a few weeks to change it.”

5) How to be the CEO’s co-founder

Fareed asked about the role of the co-founder who isn’t the CEO. Max’s advice for the job, which he held for thirteen years, starts with an uncomfortable fact:

“It is just a fact that 99.9 percent of the time, a company is, at the end of the day, run by one person. It is easier for one person to make decisions in their own head, especially hard one-way decisions, especially decisions when the company isn’t doing well.

“It’s easy to agree when the company is doing well; growth solves all problems. And it is rational for investors to want to talk to one person and do a deal with one person. That’s just how interpersonal dynamics work. And so as the CEO’s co-founders, you just have to understand, and put your ego aside at certain times, and realize you’re not in charge of the company. The CEO is.

“At the end of the day, you defer to the CEO, because the thing that kills companies is co-founder breakups and disagreements, particularly when they happen in front of the team. So if you’re going to disagree with your co-founder, just do it behind closed doors, and then present a united front when you go talk to the team. And again, the relationship you have with one another is really important, and you want to savor that and build that up over time, so that when you do have to disagree about something, there’s a lot of trust and goodwill, and it doesn’t end in somebody quitting.”

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