SAN FRANCISCO — Instacart, the nation’s leading supermarket delivery service, announced Meredith Kopit Levien and Lily Sarafan are joining the company’s Board of Directors.
Kopit Levien (photo above) is the President and CEO of The New York Times Company, where she directs the overall business strategy of one of the nation’s top newspapers and leads its global operations. She joined The Times in 2013, and helped lead its transformation to become a fast-growing, digital business. She is a seasoned executive who brings deep experience building and leading cross-functional teams to scale subscriptions and create engaging direct-to-consumer products.
Kopit Levien also spent five years at Forbes, where she held various roles including Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer. Instacart says it will tap into her deep expertise in launching and scaling digital products with leading subscription models, particularly as the company looks to enhance its service and deliver more value to customers through its own membership offering, Instacart Express.
“I’m excited to join Instacart’s Board of Directors,” said Kopit Levien. “With more than 20 years working on the business of journalism, I’ve had a first-hand look at the digital evolution of an industry that’s been essential in people’s daily lives for centuries. Similarly, grocery is in the midst of an important evolution of its own, and I believe Instacart can play a critical role in the digital transformation of their industry. I look forward to joining the Board and working with Fidji and the rest of the leadership team.”
Sarafan is a Co-Founder, former CEO, and now Executive Chair of Home Care Assistance. She led Home Care Assistance from its earliest days as a startup to its current position as an industry leader in senior care with more than 10,000 frontline workers. Lily brings a deep passion for building consumer marketplaces that infuse technology into everyday tasks to make them more accessible and affordable, as well as invaluable experience supporting a community of thousands of frontline workers. She’s done this at Home Care Assistance, which was recently recognized as one of the 50 fastest-growing women-owned companies in the world.
Sarafan currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors at Thumbtack and Kyo. She also serves on the Stanford University Board of Trustees and is a Founding Partner of Project BIG: The Stanford Brain Immune Gut Initiative.
Instacart has partnered with over 700 national, regional and local retailers, to deliver food and other items from more than 65,000 stores in more than 5,500 cities in North America. The company is privately held and expected to go public next year.
Kopit Levien and Sarafan join Instacart’s Board of Directors, which also includes Instacart CEO Fidji Simo; Instacart Founder and Executive Chairman Apoorva Mehta; Barry McCarthy, former Chief Financial Officer of both Spotify and Netflix; Daniel Sundheim, Founder and CIO of D1 Capital Partners; Frank Slootman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Snowflake; Michael Moritz, Managing Member at Sequoia Capital; and Jeff Jordan, Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
