Apologies, as folks are finding their seats. I'm excited to have the team from Instacart here. We've got Chris Rogers, now CEO of Instacart. Before we get started, I'm going to read a safe harbor. Some of the statements made today by Instacart may be considered forward-looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today, and Instacart undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to Instacart's most recent Form 10-Q for discussion of the risk factors that may impact actual results. Chris may also reference certain non-GAAP financial metrics, and reconciliations are included in Instacart's shareholder letters, which are available on Instacart's Investor Relations website. Thank you for sticking with me through the safe harbor. Chris, welcome to your first communication technology conference. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Yeah, thank you. Okay. First, Chris, congrats on the new role. You are Instacart's CEO. You were elevated in that role from Chief Business Officer. Why don't you level set for those who don't know you in the audience? Give us a little of your background and your history with Instacart. Sure. First of all, thank you, Eric. Thank you for the congrats. Thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here. Building a strong relationship with the investor community is important to me, so I do appreciate this opportunity. I'll start with a little bit of my background prior to Instacart, and then I'll talk about my Instacart journey and then a little bit on my approach. I started my career at Procter & Gamble, leading relationships with large national retailers and local regional retailers, really learning how to build a business at one of the largest CPGs. I moved to Apple, and I spent 11 years at Apple, first leading the consumer business in Canada and then the iPhone business in Canada, in an intensely competitive market. Ultimately, I went on to be the Managing Director for Canada, leading the team and the business there. In 2019, I made the decision to leave Apple and join Instacart. I was really drawn in by just the massive market opportunity and the ability to transform and innovate this trillion-dollar industry. I started with a focus on retailers with a mandate of deepening our retailer relationships and expanding our retailer relationships, which I was able to do from 300 when I started to 1,800 retailers today. Perhaps more importantly, we were able to grow our enterprise platform from being, I would say, very nascent when I started in 2019 to what I would consider to be one of our most critical advantages today. Also, I've been leading our ads platform, our retail media network, including R&D, product and engineering and sales and operations on the ad side, putting multiple irons in the fire there to make sure that we're a top five retail media network, which we are, and we expect to continue to be in the future. I also led our partnerships team, so think partnerships like our partnership with Uber Eats as an example on our platform. M&A, which is we've been buying companies like WinShop, which is a grocery technology company. We bought Rosie, Eversight, Caper, as you probably know. I also led corporate strategy, some of our longer-term bets like Instacart for Business. That's been my journey at Instacart. I think looking ahead with me in this role, what you can expect is, on the one hand, continuity in our strategy and our vision and a real commitment to ongoing profitable growth. I believe in our strategy. I helped to craft this strategy with the leadership team, and clearly it's working. On the other hand, and I want you to hear this from me, I am not here for just the status quo. My objective is to really extend our lead in online grocery and continue to win disproportionately as I come in. Chris, maybe building on that answer, what do you see as the most compelling opportunities in front of you that can result in that level of accelerating growth you're aiming for? Yeah, there's really three things you're going to see me double down on. One is affordability. Affordability is probably the biggest unlock to online grocery adoption. We know that it's the number one reason that people churn off of Instacart. That's going to be a large focus. We're doing quite a bit in that space. We're doing loyalty integrations. We are doing weekly flyer integrations. We've integrated with SNAP, PBT. I want to be much more aggressive in the space. For us, that includes working with retailers on their pricing strategies. Retailers decide how to price up on Instacart. We want to work with them to price at or just above in-store prices. It makes sense for the retailers because we see price parity retailers outperform marked-up retailers on the platform. We're going to come at this a couple of different ways. One is we're going to really show the business case to retailers and show them the compelling reasons why they should do this. Also, just make sure that we're educating them on the broader digital landscape. The second thing we're doing is we're going to continue to test and iterate directly in our app different merchandising mechanisms for us to highlight price parity retailers, things like stores that help you save and those types of banners. That's one is affordability, and you'll see us lean in in that area. The second is our enterprise platform. This is where we actually build the technologies for retailers on their owned and operated sites. It's a growing part of the industry, and it's an area that we really excel as a company. We have best-in-class technology, including Storefront Pro, Storefront. We do fulfillment of pretty much any flavor for retailers, pick and deliver, pick only, deliver only. We have an app, a picking app that many of our retailers use. We have Instacart Ads. This is where we extend our ad tech and our ad demand onto retailer sites, Caper Carts, Carrot Tags, and in-store suite of solutions. This has been going really well. We have momentum, but I just see so much opportunity for us to do more in the enterprise space. It kind of comes in a couple of different forms. One is signing and launching new retailers. We've built our tech stack in a way that we can now launch quickly with retailers. We launched 40 retailers in the first half of this year. That's more than we launched in all of 2024. We are also very strong at what we call land and expand, where we cross-sell our products, our enterprise suite of products to multiple retailers that we're already working with. The final thing I just would want to call out on the enterprise side is I see an opportunity for us to expand beyond North America for the first time. When we bought this company, WinShop, it kind of exposed the fact that there is real product-market fit for our enterprise suite of products beyond. They operate in Ireland. They operate in Australia. We've been in Europe, and we see that as an opportunity area for us. The last one that I'll touch on quickly is just accelerating our ads and data revenue. We're building an ads ecosystem for our brand partners. We're really trying to unlock value for brands. We have a best-in-class technology on platform, including with our performance and our measurement capabilities. We've been diversifying our demand, working with the largest CPGs, of course, but also working with the long-tail, mid, and long-term brands. We've been building out this off-platform portfolio to really extend our scale and reach. We're at 240 Carrot Tags ad partners now. We've gone off-platform in partnerships with The Trade Desk and Meta and Google and Roku and NBCUniversal, and we just announced Pinterest. You are going to see us extend our reach in that way. I mentioned data earlier. We haven't really monetized our data up until now, and we've just recently launched our consumer insights portal, which we call SIP, which is giving brands access to some of our first-party data on the marketplace for them to inform their business. We see that as an interesting zero-to-one bet. Those are the three areas that you're going to see me accelerating. Okay. Good stuff. I think we're going to come back to a couple of those topics because I just want to mine them a little bit deeper as we get through the conversation. I think as you get to know the investment community better, you're going to find that most people have an acknowledgment that there's a big market opportunity out there as delivery moves more into these ecosystems. You guys have a unique leadership position with respect to this category as well. How do you think about the unique and durable position you sit in today, and how much room is there for competitive density against the market opportunity? Yeah. It's a great question. You're absolutely right. It's a $1.2 trillion market, and it's only penetrated at 13%. That's only the U.S., so it's massive. We are the category leader when you look at share of sales. In fact, we're three times larger than the next digital-first partner, a player in the space. For us, our objective is to really drive online grocery adoption. We want to do that by meeting all of the customers' grocery needs. That includes really nailing big baskets, which is so important. 75% of the sales in grocery and even more of the profits exist in large baskets. That's baskets over $75. This is where we really excel. These are the types of shops that have over a dozen items in it. It It has meat and seafood and produce and dairy. It's what shoppers go to, consumers go to, to stock up their fridge and stock their pantry for the week. This is where we're so strong. To get to your question of why we are so strong in large baskets and what makes us unique and durable, we focus on the things that we believe matter to consumers the most. That's one, selection. Retailers have been building their brand and building trust with consumers for sometimes generations. We have 1,800 of these retailers on our platform. We know that this matters because the average consumer on Instacart shops on average from five retailers. Our Instacart Plus members shop at almost twice as many. Also, the 1,800 retailers that we have have a compounding effect because so many grocers have tens of thousands of SKUs. We have 1,800 times tens of thousands. You can get pretty much anything that you want when you visit Instacart for grocery. That's kind of the first area of selection. The second one is quality. We are maniacal about quality. We're obsessed with making sure that customers get exactly what they order for the best possible replacement. We have multiple workstreams on quality, including in very close partnership with retailers. We leverage the fact that we have this scale. We've done 1.5 billion orders to date. If you look at how often we're sending shoppers into some of our largest stores, we're sending them on average 14 times per day. We know what's in stock. We learn from that, and we drive that scale. I'll also add that quality matters so much when it comes to perishables specifically because I think you need to trust your shopper to pick your produce and your meat and your seafood, and customers trust us. It's because we have this amazing shopper fleet. We have, on median, our shoppers that have done over 1,000 shops are now doing almost two-thirds of our shops on Instacart. Quality matters a ton, and we are nailing quality. The third one is speed. Convenience is the number one reason why consumers come to Instacart. We know that we are fast. 75% of the orders now, the delivery orders on Instacart, are on demand, which means that they're delivered on median under 90 minutes. 25% of our priority orders are now delivered under 30 minutes. We are fast. When it comes to perishables, we know that predictability matters quite a bit, knowing exactly when your order is going to land. We know that's important. I don't think people want their meat and seafood sitting on their front porch because it happens to get delivered when you're not home. The fourth one, the other thing that makes us durable, is all of the work that we're doing in affordability. I touched on this a little bit, but loyalty integrations as an example. This unlocks so much value for consumers because consumers get loyalty pricing in some cases. They get loyalty rewards. They get sometimes fuel points. There's a win for the consumer. Retailers love it as well because loyalty-engaged consumers actually spend more. They have higher AOVs. They have more items in the basket. You're going to continue to see us double down in that area as well. Those are the big differentiators for us. Okay. Building on the competitive theme, Amazon obviously made some announcements recently about same-day delivery and perishables. Can you help share your take on what you're seeing in some of those pilot markets, how you might respond to that competitively, how it might change the landscape? Yeah. First of all, we weren't surprised by this at all. We've been busy building our business, and we know that competitors are trying to break into grocery. To the first part of your question, what we've seen, we've studied the pilot markets closely. What we've seen is that our GTV growth in the three pilot markets is in line with our growth in the overall U.S. Also, our Instacart Plus activations, our Instacart Plus engagement, our Instacart Plus churn is all in line in the three pilot markets as the balance of the U.S. When we look at this experience and going off what we've studied, but also what they've said, it looks like there's a few thousand perishable SKUs. It looks like delivery windows, four to five hours, which you could believe would be conducive to add-on orders or small baskets. We feel very differentiated because of our strength in large baskets. Things like coming back to our selection, a few thousand SKUs at Amazon relative to, I mean, we have 17 million unique SKUs now on Instacart. We know that matters because 70% of our customers have at least one dietary preference. They trust us because of our speed and our quality. To the question of what are we going to do differently, we are going to use this as a rallying cry with our retailers. In fact, I think with a lot of our retail partners, I was their first call when that announcement happened. They were trying to understand, okay, how do we react competitively? We are very tight with so many retailers in the balance of the market. What you're going to see is us use this as an opportunity to get deeper, to use our technology in more ways to help retailers compete. We have a little bit of pattern recognition when it comes to this because when Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, that was an accelerant for the overall industry, but also our technology on both the marketplace side and on the enterprise side. You can expect us to continue to use that as a rallying cry with the rest of the retail partners that we have. Okay. You talked earlier about affordability. Reflect a little bit on how you view the Instacart consumer, what you're seeing in trends from that consumer today, and how affordability might evolve that consumer in the years ahead. Yeah, it's a great question. I think this might surprise people that believe that our consumer is more affluent when actually we are in line with the U.S. in terms of things like income bands and urbanicity. Sorry, what was the second part of your question? I was saying the Instacart consumer today trends around that consumer and how affordability can change the consumer for the longer term. Yeah. When we look at consumer trends, we aren't seeing anything that's unexpected there. The way that we gauge this is we look at our operating metrics, and our operating foundation is super strong. We're looking at cohorts in 2025, larger than pre-pandemic cohorts. Our retention is up year to date, year on year. In fact, it's especially up for our new 2025 customers. Customers that are coming to our platform in 2025 are retaining better than in the past. We're driving order growth. Users are up. Order frequency is up. Instacart Plus engagement and rep paid members are up. When we look at kind of our core fundamentals, they are very strong. When it comes to can we retain more, can we resurrect more consumers, can we retain more consumers, you're right that affordability is going to be a key lever. You're going to see us just do everything in our power to continue to lead into this, the initiative that I talked about. We're going to also have, I would say, more delivery options like no rush and next-day delivery. We're going to continue to really work with retailers on price parity because we know how important that is. In the past 12 months, on average, price parity retailers have grown 10% faster than marked-up retailers. We're also seeing on our platform that users that are shopping on price parity retailers are retaining better. The data is suggesting that this is a strategic move for our retail partners, and we're seeing retailers move. In Q2, we announced that Schnucks went to price parity, Heritage Grocers. We launched Patterson Group in Canada at price parity. Walmart Canada lowered their markup. Costco in Canada, or Costco same day, lowered their markup. We have momentum, and you're going to see a big focus on continuing to build on that momentum. Okay. You referenced earlier the enterprise side of the house, which I, in my own opinion, doesn't get enough attention. We write about it, but it doesn't get as much attention from investors. I think laying out your key strategic priorities on the enterprise side will be pretty critical to this conversation. One in particular, talk a little bit about what the learnings have been from Caper Carts in terms of what that might do to the business over the long term. First of all, I'm so glad you're asking about enterprise because I agree. I feel like this is the most underappreciated part of our business, and this is just very core to who we are. We are a retail enablement platform. In fact, our stated vision is to power every grocery transaction in-store and online using our technology. That's not just on our marketplace. That is in partnership with retailers to build for the future. This is just so highly strategic as well because we're innovating on the marketplace side where we're doing hundreds of millions of orders, and then we're taking that tech and we're providing it to retailers. It's very difficult for retailers to build this without that kind of scale. We're taking all of our learnings and our fulfillment efficiencies and all of the various elements of that experience, and we are giving it to retailers to use. It's highly strategic. If you were to break down the core areas and how to think about the enterprise platform overall, we have our storefront technology. We're up to 350 e-commerce storefronts that we power, and that's not just small and long-tail retailers. That's Publix and Costco same day and Sprouts and then hundreds more. For those retailers, in almost all cases, we're doing fulfillment. Our shoppers will go in and they'll do the pick and deliver, or they'll just do the delivery only, or they'll do just the pick only. Lots of retailers use our picking app. If a retailer happens to have built their own front end, their own e-commerce experience, then we can also power the fulfillment only with our shopper network. Take Kroger as an example. They built Seamless, and we do the same-day delivery for Kroger. We go in, we do the pick and deliver for them on their owned and operated property. Same with Aldi. Aldi uses our picking app. It goes on and on. When you start talking about the fact that we're partnering with retailers on the core part of their e-commerce, it unlocks so much strategically and operationally for us. We have first seat at the table. I have multiple talk to talks. We do QBRs. We have joint OKRs, joint roadmaps. We have access to a growing part of the market. Imagine you live in Florida and you've been shopping at Publix your whole life, and then you want to place your first online order. You might go to publix.com. That's us that powers that. It drives order density for us across marketplace and enterprise. Of course, a really big unlock for us is this ads concept where we can launch Carrot Ads on these sites. Almost all of our new retail partners that are lighting up storefronts with us are enabling our ads platform, and they love it. I had a retailer recently tell me that the amount that I'm writing them a check for for the ads business is larger than the SaaS fee that they're paying us for storefronts. It is a major unlock. As we get deeper in the tech stack and we have vertical integrations and POS integrations, coming back to our ability to cross-sell, it's really powerful for us to be able to then go and sell things like FoodStorm, which is our catering software. We now have hundreds of catering.coms, which is powering consumer experience for delis and bakeries and floral and catering overall. Last week, we announced a partnership with Ahold Delhaize, where they're going to be using FoodStorm for Food Lion and The Giant Company and Giant Foods. We are going to continue to cross-sell our products in that way. Caper, which you touched on, we're really pleased with the progress on Caper. We're now in 100 cities in 15 states, including internationally. We have Coles in Australia. This morning, we announced a pilot with Morrisons in the UK, and it's going well. I think some of the learnings, to your question, would be consumers love it. Consumers love the product and love the experience. Retailers also love it because it can help digitize their consumers. There are not a lot of mechanisms to do that. It can provide advanced personalization. There is an ad surface area for them, so they're happy about the idea of monetization. There is the potential to grow the basket. Retailers are really excited about it as well. The final thing I'll just say on the enterprise business, I know I'm going on on this because I just, again, I feel like it's such a strategic part of our overall business, is we've built all of this in a way that it's modular and it all just works together. Retailers can pick and choose the items that they want to meet their needs as they're coming online and as they're digitizing their consumers. We've built it in a way that really allows us to scale in a way that's tailored to retailers. Yeah, I really appreciate it, Chris. I think that I agree with you on that. I think it's important to get into that level of detail. Maybe a quick two-parter on advertising. The shorter-term question is we live in a volatile macro environment. You're exposed to advertising dollars. You have a mixture of large and emerging brands advertising. What are you seeing in the macro environment with respect to ads right now? I'll come back to a longer-term question on that. Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. As a reminder, I've been leading our ads platform for some time. I talk to CPGs, large, small, including small brands. What I'll say is pretty consistent with the path. I think there was a lot of optimism. The tone was very positive coming into 2025. In around, I want to say, March timing, quite a bit of uncertainty was introduced into the market. Tariffs, obviously, but also regulation changes around food dyes and SNAP and all of that created quite a bit of pressure for CPGs to navigate whether or not they were going to hit their profitability targets. In addition, there are also consumer shifts, consumer trend shifts in the market. For example, high protein breakfast foods are in, high protein snacks are in, low sugar, everything, natural sodas. There's been a general shift away from ultra-processed foods as an example. All of that is basically putting brands in a bit of a wait-and-see approach. We were very happy in Q2 that we were able to hit our 12% year-over-year on ads and other, despite the fact that one of our largest brands pulled back in that quarter, even though there was all that uncertainty. In Q3, we're guiding to in line with our anticipated GTV, despite some of the macro uncertainty and the volatility. We're pleased with that. Okay. Building on the short term and aiming our direction towards the long term, what do you see as some of the critical priorities to build and scale the advertising business in the years ahead? Yeah, so we think about this as building momentum across a portfolio of key initiatives. Our ultimate goal, as I mentioned earlier, is to build an ads ecosystem that really unlocks value for brands across multiple surfaces. It all starts with performance and measurement, especially given the macro I just described. Brands need to really feel like their next dollar is working for them, that it's performance. We are highly performant. We have, on average, a 15% sales lift. We have leading rollouts, leading click-through rates. That's because on our platform, we are really innovating, including with AI. We're constantly using AI to improve the experience for our brand partners. As an example, we've launched AI landing pages. We just launched a new recommendation engine directly in our ads manager. We have what's called universal campaigns, where you can take one budget in one campaign, and we'll automatically extend that across multiple formats, like sponsored product and display. We're continuing to innovate. We've recently launched a new sales velocity metric, which is a new-to-shelf, where you can drive awareness and sales on brands that are new to shelf. We're seeing really exciting results coming out of our pilot at 6.5 times lift of that product. The first thing is innovate, drive performance, drive industry-leading measurement. What you do, what we're trying to do is diversify as much as possible, work with as many brands as we can. We're up to 7,500 brands that we're working with today. That's the largest brands, all of the large CPGs that you would expect, all the way down to emerging brands on the platform. We are a great solution for them. From there, it's about extending your scale and reach to collect more budgets, but also just to unlock more value for brands going forward. This is where Instacart Ads play a significant role. Again, 240 retailers use Instacart Ads today. This is going very well. We recently launched with Uber Eats in the U.S. on their grocery and retail experience. We launched with Thrive Market. We recently announced that we're working with Hy-Vee on web media. I think this week we actually announced that we're going to be launching that within a week. That's continuing to go well. With our off-platform partnerships, we're just continuing to do more, expand our partnerships, and go deeper. For example, with The Trade Desk, we're the first and only retail media network that's embedded their grocery selection directly into their self-service tools to drive more value for brands. We recently announced Pinterest, where you can now go to Pinterest and use our first-party data to plan your campaign. Soon it'll be shoppable directly back on Instacart. The final piece of this kind of build here is the data that we're sitting on, which again I've already touched on. We have digital-first, robust, very valuable data. We're launching this in modules that unlock quite a bit of value and leverage our uniqueness. To give you a sense of some of the uniqueness that we offer here, we have a module that talks about substitutability. If you're out of stock, is your product substituted? Brands can take that data to retailers. We talk about the impact of price and promotion on growth. We talk about the purchase. We have basket affinity, all of the types of things that we think are really going to appeal to brands, especially with an AI future when the brands with the best data are going to win. Okay. We only have a few minutes left, but I do want to hit upon a couple of topics quickly. I'm contractually obligated to ask about AI because I'm running a technology conference. With AI, just give us a few examples of how you're implementing AI in the company and how you think about AI as part of your broader strategic priorities. Yeah. I think it's fair to say that AI is part of our DNA at this point. Being AI-first is fundamentally changing how we're operating as a company. We're using it throughout the organization. In Q2, we cited the fact that 80% of our code was AI-assisted. This is just increasing the velocity for our engineers. What we're seeing is mergers are up 30%. This is allowing us to move faster, launch products faster. On the tech side, it's been a key enabler for us to accelerate our output there. We're using it everywhere. We're using it in operations and support. We're using it in sales and marketing. The sales team is using it actually to generate outbound emails to the sales teams. We're using it in G&A. The legal team is using it on inbound email. We're using it throughout. What all of that unlocks, when you're AI-first, we're really focused on the consumer experience and what that can unlock. We launched SmartShop, which is an AI-powered personalization engine, which looks at customers' habits, what do they order, do they have a dietary preference, and we're tuning the relevancy for those consumers in real time. Just to give you one example, we launched last quarter virtual aisles. We're looking at the household needs, like do you have a baby? Do you have a dog or a cat? Do you have dietary preferences in the house? We're tailoring the aisles for that specific consumer. What we're seeing is that consumers are engaging with this, and they're fast to take items off this virtual shelf because we're nailing that experience. On the ad side, we're using it to unlock value for brands in so many different ways. To go one layer deeper on this recommendation engine that I mentioned that unlocks value for brands, brands can go in, and it will automatically optimize their campaign performance for their objectives. It'll find things like, okay, you don't have images for certain items in your catalog. We're just using it in so many places. It's core to our DNA, and we're excited about what it's going to unlock for us. Okay. We only have a few minutes left. Maybe a bigger picture question just to bring us home as you move into the CEO role, as you partner with the CFO, and as you bring these messages back to the board, maybe the balance you want to strike. We've talked a lot in this conversation about growth initiatives, where you want to take product, where you want to take platform. How should we be thinking about your philosophy around balancing growth investments, incremental margins, and capital allocation broadly as a company? Just to end on a big picture. Yeah, it's a great question. I think with me in the role, you can expect I'm making a commitment to long-term profitable growth, annual progression of adjusted EBIT. That said, we are the category leader in this massive underpenetrated category. We're not rushing to hit our long-term profitability targets because we want the flexibility to be able to reinvest in growth. When you look up and down our P&L, we have lots of levers that allow us to take a portfolio approach. For example, we can drive efficiencies throughout the organization, and then we can reinvest that in short, medium, and long-term growth. For me, it is a balance. I am committed to long-term profitable growth in annual EBITDA progression, but I also want the flexibility to be able to invest in growth to capture the massive opportunity. On your capital allocation question, our continuity in our strategy here. There are kind of three things that we think about on capital allocation. One is, again, reinvesting in the business and having the flexibility to do that. Two is maintaining some firepower for strategic M&A. That could be complementing our existing products, but it could also be bringing in a new product and using our enterprise machinery to sell that product. There are various M&A opportunities, we think, and we want the flexibility to go after that. Finally, it's going to be saving some further firepower to opportunistically repurchase shares, which we've been doing. In the first half, we repurchased $205 million of Instacart stock. That's how we're thinking about that. Yeah. Super consistent with what I think investors have heard from the team, especially over the last 12 months. I appreciate you putting your view on that. Chris, thank you so much for being part of the conference. Really appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation. Please join me in thanking Instacart for being part of the conference.