Instacart’s CFO Shuffle

It’s Friday. What did we learn this week, aside from the fact that Apple’s marketing department is overrun with philistines? Maybe the most interesting tech news was Instacart’s disclosure that Nick Giovanni, the onetime senior Goldman Sachs media-tech-telecom banker who jumped to the grocery-delivery firm to be chief financial officer in January 2021, is leaving. We don’t know why, although CEO Fidji Simo, in discussing his exit on the company’s earnings call, seemed to drop a clue. She said she “wanted someone with a depth of operating experience in a complex marketplace business similar to ours” to fill the job. So she hired Uber veteran Emily Reuter, who Simo described as “undoubtedly the best CFO to help drive Instacart’s future.”

Simo’s instinct to switch things up makes sense. Giovanni was ideally suited to take Instacart public but perhaps less suited to the nuts and bolts of operating, particularly at a business whose revenue grew just 8% in the first quarter. It’s not uncommon for companies to bring in new CFOs for different stages of their business’ evolution. When Spotify CEO Daniel Ek replaced his CFO in December, he also said he needed someone with a different set of experiences. Giovanni was surely happy to leave. After all, he joined a very different Instacart, one that was run by its founder, Apoorva Mehta, who departed as CEO a few months later and left the board last September. (For the inside dirt on Mehta’s departure as CEO, see here.) Giovanni also joined right before Instacart got a valuation of $39 billion in a funding round, a far cry from its current public market enterprise value of $7.8 billion.