I remember walking through the Instacart office one day when the General Manager of our San Francisco region, the largest at the time, was hunched over his laptop staring intensely at our status page which showed all the status of all live orders.
”What are you doing man?” I asked quizzically.
“Oh just watching the batching algorithm and counting specific times where to messes up.”
“How long you been doing that for?”
“I don’t know, a while, it’s fine.”
I walked away wondering to myself: doesn’t he have a team for work like that (Yes.) But after staring at that page and taking notes for hours Sid Agarwal found key opportunities to improve our efficiency and save costs, helping our company effort to achieve gross margin profitability. Sid was eventually promoted to VP of Operations before taking a similar role at Airtable and now serves as CFO of Incredible Health. He’s also an incredible father of three and someone I regularly turn to for advice and am proud to call a friend.
I thought of this story recently when reading a blog post by former operator and current VC Nikunj Kothari. His post “Do Hard Things” resonated with me and he briefly discusses how comfort can be a barrier to greatness. I found myself nodding along, imaging myself in a lawn chair, socks up to knee-caps, bemoaning how the kids these days don’t work like they used to.
But as I though more about this idea, I was reminded of what Sid did and how rare actions like that are. I don’t know if what Sid did was “hard” per-se, but I do think it was weirdly obvious…he wanted to find efficiencies in our fulfillment, so he watched each order get fulfilled. Glamorous? No. Fun? Definitely not. A story to tell the kids one day? Only if you’re trying to put them to sleep. But obvious? Ya.
These types of tasks sit in front of us all the time.
Our new business win rate is lower than we’d like. Watch all the sales calls.
Our customers are not engaging with the product after purchase. Watch the onboardings or implementations, or review each customer’s first moments on platform.
Our margins aren’t where we want them to be. Go and calculate the margin for each deal or transaction or customer.
One of the interview questions we used to use at Instacart was, “a fridge in one of our in-store staging areas in our main San Francisco store stopped working, what do you do?” Answers ran the gamut from call the manufacturer, to reroute orders away from that location, to call the corporate office of the store to rent fridge space from them. All interesting but the right answer is the obvious one: go to the store and fix the fridge.
More recently I was investigating what led to a drop in our sales win rate. Our loss-data wasn’t as detailed as I would have liked, rendering it somewhat unhelpful. So I pulled a list of sales calls and I watched them, all of them. I took some breaks and needed some caffeine, but over a few days, I could clearly see that our pricing was confusing some customers and we were encountering some new competitive threats. We were able to move quick to adjust our pricing, fast track some features, build competitive battle cards and update our roadmap. We still have some items coming but our win rate is back where we need it to be.
I recognize that I’m over-simplifying a bit. Sometimes here are organizational barriers or truly complex problems that defy easy answers. But just as often we know what will get us the insight we need. It’s obvious. It’s just never pleasant, and it takes time that we don’t have as we balance dozens of other priorities. It might require some time-blocking or even some off-hours work, but next time you’re searching for an answer, don’t just do the hard thing, do the obvious thing.