DoorDash in Talks to Buy Instacart for $17B

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✶ TOP STORIES ✶ DELIVERY

Polymarket flagged it Monday afternoon: DoorDash is “reportedly in advanced talks to acquire Instacart” in a deal that could be worth $17 billion. The post passed 638K views in a day (Polymarket on X). Neither company has confirmed a deal.

The counterpoint: economist Jeremy Horpedahl notes that the median U.S. household in every age group spends $0 a year on food delivery, per the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances (Jeremy Horpedahl on X). One company owning both restaurant and grocery delivery would control most of that last-mile shelf space for brands.

✶ HEALTH

Superpower mapped 152 peptides, from approved drugs to compounds still in trials, each with a cited page on evidence strength, FDA status and human studies. Its example: semaglutide is approved, while BPC-157 isn’t, and 35 of 36 studies in one review were animal or lab work. The launch post passed 970K views (Superpower on X).

✶ BRAND AWARENESS

The Sixers’ jersey sponsor is Bloom Energy, not Greg Lavecchia’s Bloom drink brand, but his inbox didn’t know that. “The number of messages I got from people who thought I’d just signed the 76ers is the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me,” he said, calling it free brand awareness that sells at 7-Eleven (Mikli on X).

✶ PREDICTION MARKETS

The league gets final say over which markets are offered and access to trading data to spot suspicious activity. Single-play bets, like the opening tip, are banned, and so are unders on players expected to log fewer than 12 minutes. The NBA also signed a cooperation agreement with the CFTC (Morning Brew).

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McCafé is adding cookie butter to its seasonal lineup in a Frappe, a hot or iced latte and an iced coffee. Snackolator, who got an early taste, says the Frappe, topped with vanilla whipped cream and cookie butter crumbles, might be his favorite seasonal drink they’ve done. The preview passed 190K views (Snackolator on X).

The iPhone Duo has only been out since Friday, yet one case for it already shows 85,000 Amazon reviews. Matt Paulson asked whether Amazon reviews are “totally fake now,” and the post hit 1M views. The likely culprit is reviews carried over from older listings, which makes review counts worth less as a trust signal (Matt Paulson on X).

Pujji’s scenario: two founders who raise under $2M and reach $5M in EBIT exit for about $20M each. Raise to $30M ARR, stall and sell for $30M, and after investors take $23M, the founders split $7M. He was reacting to a new paper finding that 88% of VC-backed founders get zero exit value (Jesse Pujji on X, Callum Williams on X).

f*ckgrowth launched darkugc.com, a free database meant to collect every viral UGC video, the creators behind them and the brands running them, with new viral videos added the next day. He says he went back and forth on releasing it because it puts brands’ creative playbooks in the open, and promises a bigger version soon (f*ckgrowth on X).