Mike Swartz spent nearly a decade at Amazon teaching and instituting processes to help its warehouses operate more efficiently. Now he’s facing the challenge of doing the same for a new kind of retail operation that doesn’t have any warehouses of its own.
Swartz recently joined Instacart, the $2 billion grocery delivery startup, as its first senior vice president of operations. He’ll report to CEO Apoorva Mehta and oversee the network of contractors and employees who do the personal shopping in partner grocery stores and deliver orders to customer doors. The startup’s customer service team will also fall under his purview.
“I have a ton of experience working inside large fulfillment centers,” Swartz said, “but when you think about the challenge of Instacart, you have this distributed network of people — it’s like an external warehouse or fulfillment operation.”
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