By 
Instacart Inc. doesn’t plan to raise much capital in its initial public offering and instead plans to have most of the listing come from the sale of employees’ shares, said people familiar with its thinking.
In meetings with prospective investors in recent weeks, Instacart executives said they didn’t plan to issue many new shares in their IPO, the people said. The sale of mostly employee shares would allow Instacart’s staff, including some of its earliest hires, to at last cash out of some of the shares they have been accumulating.
The move could help Instacart, which was founded in 2012, retain talent by allowing employees more ways to benefit from their shares. Listed shares could also make Instacart more attractive to new employees than startups that have decided to wait for a better market to list.
The decision shows the pressure on some of Silicon Valley’s oldest startups to go public even as technology stocks slump. Until recently, a large amount of investment available through the private market allowed startups to put off public offerings if they wanted to, delaying payouts to their employees.
An expanded version of this report appears at WSJ.com.
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