“I think viewing your board as an audience to be ‘sold’ to instead of a partner in your journey will orient your board to be less trusting and collaborative.” Five Questions with Nilam Ganenthiran, Former President of Instacart

For startups, a good Board is better than no Board, but a bad Board is worse than anything. One component of a good Board is a high value add Independent Board Member, which in my experience, often doesn’t get added early enough (for a variety of reasons). But sometimes the CEO takes the initiative to recruit an absolute gem and that was the case with ResQ, a software startup servicing the hospitality owners and service/repair vendors. It was serving on that Board where I first met Nilam Ganenthiran, back while he was an executive at Instacart. He brought relevant operating experience and a great perspective into the room, representing not the CEO, not the investors, but *the company,* which is exactly what you want from an Independent. We developed a friendship as part of our Board service and a recent blog post of his made me think I wanted to learn a bit more about his Instacart experience. So what follows are Five Question with Nilam.

Hunter Walk: You started at Instacart in 2013, just a year after it was founded, which obviously turned out to be an epic decision. Was it a case where you already knew folks there and had confidence in them, or some other aspect which gave you reason to join?

Nilam Ganenthiran: The story of me joining Instacart in 2013, is actually rooted in an epic bad decision. I was introduced to Apoorva, the founder of Instacart, in the spring of 2013 by my close friend/business school neighbor Rafael Corrales. Rafa runs Background Capital, and is one of the best partners for early company builders I know. Apoorva was ideating on his next project and was delving deep into the grocery sector. I was a consultant who had spent my career, starting at the age of 16 and working as a cashier in a grocery store, in and around the grocery industry. We started ideating on the concept of Instacart, which originally was going to be an e-commerce first grocery service with small micro-fulfillment centers in dense urban centers (think of the original concept as being similar to the quick-commerce industry which…