Imagine that Netflix launched as a courier service that would take your order and then go to the video store and try to get it and bring it to you. That seems k

Imagine that Netflix launched as a courier service that would take your order and then go to the video store and try to get it and bring it to you. That seems kind of crazy even with the knowledge (in hindsight) that videos would later be digitized and Netflix would be in a position to move from middleman to market-maker. But I just don't see any opportunity for Instacart to get out of the middleman role. Maybe they can make a lot of money helping grocery conglomerates try to spend their way out of a technology deficit vis-a-vis Amazon. But if that were true they would they need hundreds of millions of VC dollars?