The second unicorn company I'll be talking about is Instacart. To give a brief background of the company, Instacart was founded in 2012 in San Francisco. It is an internet-based grocery delivery service. Users can select items from local grocery stores and a driver will pick them up and deliver them.
Instacart's IP portfolio is extremely small -- it has 0 patents. They seem to be in a unique position in that they're operating in an increasingly on-demand economy, where there are many successful on-demand services like Postmates, Uber, Lyft, SpoonRocket, TaskRabbit, etc. So perhaps the reason their portfolio is so small is because there really isn't anything to patent.
The first competitor is the on-demand food delivery service, Postmates. Postmates started by delivering food from restaurants, but just recently started expanding to grocery stores. However, they actually do not own any patents as well.
The second competitor is TaskRabbit, which is an online freelance labor service, where you can hire people to run errands and do chores. However, the interesting thing is that they also, do not own any patents. There seems to be a correlation between on-demand services and small (or non-existent) IP portfolios.
The third competitor is Envoy, which is another online grocery delivery service. However, they also do not own any patents. Now I can see a clear correlation between small IP portfolios and on-demand delivery services.
My recommendation would have been to patent a specific way of delivering the groceries to the user, but now that I see there are 0 patents held by any of its competitors, I'm not sure if there really is anything that Instacart could patent. Nothing they are doing is really proprietary, unless they could find some unique way to engage their drivers with the users, so they could patent it.'
Hi Shauray,
ReplyDeleteI really liked your post. I liked how you focused your competitors to a specific type of market being on-demand services and not just grocery delivery services. That was actually something that I also did. I agree with your recommendation about Instacart's IP portfolio, but I still think that they should consider other grocery delivery services such as Amazon fresh which are bigger and have more patents and could potentially block them if they try to go public.
But overall, I really liked your post and thought that you did a great job.
Hi Shauray,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your unicorn, Instacart. I actually didn't know Instacart was a unicorn until I saw this blog post. I also didn't know Instacart started in 2012 in SF. I think it's very surprising that Instacart has 0 patents. Great post!