Instacart Wasn’t Ready to Become an Essential Service Overnight

For the first-ever Zoom call with all 1,200 of his full-time employees, Instacart Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Apoorva Mehta had an inspiring speech ready to go. It was all about coming together, noble missions, wartime footings, and Instacart’s sudden ascension from mere grocery delivery app to essential service for the human species. Then the fire alarm went off.

This was in late March, a couple of days after Californians had been ordered to shelter in place, and Mehta’s San Francisco landlord hadn’t thought to reschedule his apartment building’s routine safety test. The alarm, screeching over the Instacart team’s home-office ...