Instacart CEO Fidji Simo was raised in the French fishing port town of Sète, and from an early age she had big dreams.
“Growing up in a small town, it’s media that connects you to the world,” Simo told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in a recent interview ahead of the launch of the 2025 CNBC Changemakers list on Feb. 24. “American TV and the American Dream. It was the American Dream on TV every night.”
Simo has clearly succeeded in reaching her version of it.
After a successful run at Facebook, now Meta, taking Instacart public as its CEO, and adding an OpenAI board position to her duties, the 2024 CNBC Changemaker has continued to excel in a tech industry and market where change is constant.
The model for success that Simo has developed relies on lessons learned from childhood to learnings on the job in tech, and sometimes being forced to push back against the expected.
She had to navigate the end of the Covid boom for Instacart, the largest online grocery marketplace in North America, and push into new revenue areas, such as advertising.
Since its 2023 IPO, Instacart shares have gained over 70%.
In her recent interview with CNBC, Simo spoke about pushing ahead in tech, and the role of gender in success.
When new tech threatens your business, the only option is to master it
The first innovator that Simo had access to in life, she says, was her grandfather, a fisherman who had complex maps of local waters he devised to beat the competition at finding schools of fish. But in an early life instance of tech disruption, his business world changed with the introduction of sonar, allowing any fisherman to locate schools without intricate knowledge of waters or highly developed personal systems.
With pencils and maps, “he was an absolute expert” Simo told CNBC. But with sonar, he could have easily given up and accepted that like many other businesses, technology was about to make him extinct. He did the opposite.
“His entire competitive advantage against other fishermen was gone, but instead of thinking ‘Oh, I’m gonna rail against technology,’ he said, ‘No, I am really interested in this new machine.'”
Simo says her grandfather spent a lot of time with the technician who built the sonar machine other fishermen were using “to understand it better than anyone else and build an even bigger competitive advantage.”
That was “such a profound lesson,” she now says.
“It’s not just about your current skillset but having a growth mindset where you can integrate technology to always maintain your advantage,” Simo said.
Ditch the hoodie. Looking the part in tech won’t get the job done
Simo, known for an immaculate fashion sense (not necessarily a surprise for someone from France whose mother had a boutique), had to make her way up the ranks of an industry and, at Meta specifically, tech culture where the hoodie was “the look.”
She was pressured to play the part on the surface, and at first, she gave in.
“There were times in my career people have said ‘Well if you really want to bond with engineers, you need to tone it down and wear hoodies,’ and I did that for a day, and I didn’t feel like myself whatsoever,” Simo said. “I tried it not for long,” she added.
She told CNBC at one point she even took foreign accent reduction courses — “Clearly did not work,” she said.
Ultimately, she came to both a short and long version of why she should not wear a hoodie and why she should forget about her strong French accent.
“I don’t know how not to be me,” she said.
“At some point, I realized I can put all of my energy into trying to be someone else, or I can be myself and pour all of that energy into what I can create,” she said. “And when you think of it that way, the answer becomes pretty obvious. It’s not that I am trying to make a statement.”
Why women should embrace Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘masculine energy’
Right now, there is considerable blowback against diversity efforts in the market, including from her own former boss Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, where DEI programs have been scrapped and Zuckerberg has recently called for more “masculine energy” in the workplace.
As a well-known woman leader in male-dominated tech, you might think that’s something Simo would rail against. But she has a different view on striking the right gender balance, which correlates to her view that people should ultimately be their best selves.
“I’m not in Mark’s head, but what I can tell you is I think there needs to be a balance, a need for both. I think women need masculine energy too to be able to lead,” Simo said. “I have to make very hard decisions day in and day out, and sometimes that requires some of that more masculine energy, some of that aggression. That’s ok, but I balance that with a lot of the values we talked about that are more feminine energy.”
She did have a message to consider placing in Mark’s head. “I think that’s true of men too. I think they benefit from being able to express their masculine energy, and I also think balancing that out with some of their feminine energy is great.”
The most important thing, according to Simo, “is that we let people use all of these different tools and styles so that we can achieve great outcomes.”
Watch Julia Boorstin’s full video interview with Simo.
