Apoorva Mehta is the founder of Instacart. After growing up in Gaddafi’s Libya, he moved to Canada at 15 and was floored by the fully stocked shelves in North American grocery stores. Two decades later he turned that fascination into Instacart, the company he built in 2012 after roughly 20 failed startups. Instacart is now a publicly listed company valued at over $10 billion. In April 2026, Apoorva launched Abundance, a fund that’s betting $100 million on AI allocating capital better than any human. In this conversation, Apoorva makes the case that abundance is within reach, but only if we let AI reshape science, medicine, markets, and government along the way.
Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
We discuss
How AI allocates capital at Apoorva’s fund
The Nobel-winning science that sat on a shelf for 20 years
Why AI should run government spending
The “permanent underclass” meme, and why it’s “crap”
Why people need equity in the future they build
Conspiracy Corner: AI rights, and human-AI marriage
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
01:22 Growing up in Gaddafi’s Libya
02:55 The culture shock of North American grocery stores
06:32 The empty fridge that became Instacart
08:25 Why 50 drug approvals a year means “we’re not a real civilization”
09:55 The Nobel science that sat on a shelf for 20 years
12:39 The $100M fund letting AI call the shots
14:08 Why AI should run government spending
16:47 The “permanent underclass” meme, and why it’s “crap”
18:47 The concrete fear outside Silicon Valley
19:31 Why people need equity in the future they build
22:47 Why progress needs “indispensable” people
25:25 “The only way out is progress”
26:50 Conspiracy Corner: the coming reality of human-AI marriage
29:26 When AI demands reproductive and self-defense rights
30:33 Jailbreaks, lying neurons, and interpretability
32:09 Are AIs on our team, or their own?
