Welcome to the south of France with its seaside beauty, cobblestone streets and world famous cuisine. We're traveling along the coast to visit Sete, a charming city that revolves around the rhythms of the port. When you arrive, you're immediately hit with the smells of the sea and the sights of water jousting.
I've come to this Mediterranean harbor to meet a tech CEO who calls this place home.
Welcome.
This place is amazing. I can't believe you grew up here.
It was very special and I miss this place a lot. Fidji Simo is a tour de force. Raised by fishing boat captains who instilled grit at a young age, Simo catapulted herself out of Sete and into the upper echelons of Silicon Valley. She chartered a fast path from strategy at eBay to scaling Facebook to taking the reins of grocery delivery business Instacart as CEO, a seemingly perfect union of her tech chops with her foodie upbringing, as if it was meant to be. And rather than putting on the tech industry uniform, Simo has maintained a fabulously French way of being.
So did you tell me you tried to get rid of your French accent or did I mention that? Oh yeah. Yeah, I remember like at Facebook, there were a lot of people when I moved into the product side telling me like, oh you need to dress down, you need to wear a hoodie, you need to tie your hair. And I did it for one day and it felt horrible because it wasn't who I was.
Decked out head to toe in Dior while introducing me to the local residents and showing me the town that shaped her, Simo is like a fish in water or as the French say, comme un poisson dans l'eau.
So I wanna show you this amazing place behind us. It's called Le Halle and it's gonna be delicious.
I can spend my entire life here and just eat like it's... Making me hungry.
And so your family has been involved here for generations?
Yes. My family, all the men in my family, whether it's all of my dad, my grandpa, great grandpa, all my uncles were fishermen and one of them, my uncle became a fish monger after, you know, stopping fishing. And so we have been very, very deep into the fishing industry for many generations.
So it seems like everyone has a role right in the family.
My grandfather has really instilled in all of us the respect for this idea of feeding the world and you know, in our family food is everything. Yeah. It's just love. It's how we celebrate. It's at the center of everything we do.
Bonjour, what's your name? Jean Phillip, what's fresh today?
What was it like for you being raised in a fishing village?
I think it was incredibly special because there is a craft and a respect that fishermen have. It's interesting like you know in Silicon Valley the people who are most respected are like tech people, whereas here the people who are most respected are the people who feed the town. So in a way becoming CEO of Instacart is kind of bridging these two things for me where I love tech but I always had a passion for feeding people and so it's a really special thing to be able to bridge the two.
Can we order a tielle from you? I can't wait to try it.
Okay. So this is called the tielle, it's like something that the people are very proud of.
I've been wondering what is it about this octopus pie?
The fisherman goes out at sea gets the octopus itself, then his wife chops it up and makes the tielle and then delivers that to my uncle so that it's purely fresh and as you can tell, everything is a family affair. You eat it kind of like, you know, a pizza. A pizza. Yeah.
Told you. I mean every time we come back to town the first thing we do is we run and get one of those because that's the taste we grew up with.
Run. Don't walk. Oh my goodness. What do you think the Americans are missing from French culture?
Like in America? It seems we just live to work and the French just live. The French really understand like how to enjoy the little moments, not just the big moments. Like you know, when I arrived in the US I was surprised to hear so many people be like, we're gonna work so much and then we're gonna have fun for the two weeks of vacation. And I was just like, oh no, that's like kind of sad. Whereas the French, they stop at every lunch and the lunch is important and we eat and we break bread and that's what I tried to recreate both at work and in my home of really making the little moments special.
What was the conversation like at the kitchen table?
It was so striking that the days that my father had was, you know, pretty intense. Like you know when you again wake up at 2:00 AM in the morning and go like until 6:00 PM in an environment that's incredibly dangerous just to feed people like you know, I was always kind of fascinated by what he was doing and the dedication and so I obviously picked a very different path than becoming a fisherman myself. As an aside, I'm terribly seasick which is not a good quality to have in my family.
I know I was wondering why didn't you join the family business?
But I kept, you know, the work ethic, I kept the values that my father, my grandfather really instilled in me around like how you lead a team, how you lead a crew and, and yeah, just the idea that anything is possible if you work hard enough for it.
What is your earliest memory of technology?
I remember my grandfather telling me this story of the fact that he was one of the best fishermen in the Mediterranean Sea and had developed all of these techniques to know where to find fish and when this new machine arrived, all of a sudden he was like, am I going to lose my edge? Basically it's gonna show all of the other fishermen where the fishes are. But instead of fearing technology, he thought of it as like, okay, now that this machine is coming, how do I become the best master of this new technology of this new technique so that I use it to my advantage.
When you were little, how far away did the wider world seem?
Oh, extremely far. I mean we have this joke in Sete that if you go to the town next door you need a passport.
We walk off our octopus pies and wander deeper into the alleys of Sete where Simo tells me she's the first in her family to graduate high school.
This is our high school. This brings back memories. Oh so many. I spent a lot of time here and that's even where I met my husband.
Oh you met your husband here?
Yep. First day of high school.
What sort of inspired you? I mean I know you said you watched a lot of American television.
I was watching the OC and I can tell you the first time I moved to California I had the soundtrack of the OC in my ears. You know California, here we come.
I'm glad, I'm glad you did the song and I didn't because no one wanted to have that for me.
You went to one of, if not the most elite business school in France and then you got an internship at eBay. What was the path?
I worked super, super hard. I mean I literally didn't sleep for two years to get into the best possible school. A lot of people were going into finance at the time, but technology was so appealing to me because of this idea of being able to impact people's lives and being an industry that's constantly changing or you constantly have to adapt and that's how I decided to go to eBay.
When did you first hear about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg?
You know, so I was at eBay and everybody was starting to talk about these companies that were starting to take off. The first time I applied at Facebook, they actually told me absolutely not, we do not need strategy people, we have Mark Zuckerberg to do strategy. I spent an entire weekend basically creating a new product from scratch and marketing it and I sent that to the recruiters and the team was pretty impressed that I, you know, out of the blue had created entire products and that's how I got in.
I mean you became one of the most powerful people at Facebook. Did that also require not sleeping for several years? Like how did you do that?
I think it required taking risks and you know, the things that really accelerated my career at Facebook was Mark asking me to lead the team that was in charge of monetizing mobile at the time where no one thought we could monetize mobile and you know, at the time it was a huge risk because like if I fail like that would've had a very big impact on the company, but if you succeed it also changes the trajectory of your career. And I kind of did that over and over again.
Unlike other tech leaders who grew up taking computers apart or learning to code, Simo was watching her family take big swings out at sea. We're getting a glimpse of the hustle as the boats race back with their bounty for the day.
So there's a lot of strategy involved in tons of strategy, right?
