DoorDash tells staff: no LinkedIn requests to Instacart workers until 2028

DoorDash is spending $17 billion to buy Instacart — and its own employees aren't allowed to say hello to their future colleagues on LinkedIn until the paperwork is signed. An internal Q&A DoorDash filed with the SEC on Oct. 29, the same day the deal went public, tells staffers not to send new connection requests to Instacart workers or accept theirs. That holds even if they already know each other. If an Instacart employee does reach out, DoorDash has a script ready: congratulate them, say you look forward to connecting once the deal closes, and nothing more. Anything past that needs a nod from the legal team.

The freeze could stretch a long way. DoorDash expects the acquisition to close at the end of 2027 or in the first half of 2028, pending Instacart shareholder approval and antitrust reviews in the U.S., Canada and Israel. That's as much as 20 months of awkward silence. Throughout the document, DoorDash repeats the same line: the two companies keep operating independently until closing day.

Blame antitrust law, not corporate coldness. Regulators call it “gun-jumping” when merging companies start coordinating before the deal officially closes, and the FTC has warned that competitively sensitive material — pricing, costs, business strategy — has to stay walled off. Share it early and a company can run afoul of antitrust law before a single regulator rules on the merger. They can still block the thing anyway. In 2024, a federal judge sided with the FTC and blocked Kroger's $24.6 billion bid for Albertsons over grocery prices; the companies walked away.

Contact bans between merging workforces aren't new — defense contractor SAIC told employees in 2018 to route any Engility conversations through its integration team. What's new is LinkedIn specifically. Several M&A experts told Business Insider they'd never seen a rule aimed at connection requests, and with the platform claiming more than 1.4 billion members, it's never been easier to map who works where. Chris Selland, a lecturer at Northeastern University, told Fortune the restriction could shield both sides from “poaching and org-chart mapping in case the deal is ultimately blocked,” leaving them as rivals. He called it “less of a heavy-handed ban and more of a clearly-worded guardrail,” while noting a single connection “likely won't blow up a deal on its own.”

For employees, the stakes are personal. Mergers raise blunt questions about who they'll report to and whether their jobs survive — a review of 190 publications on the topic found announcements can spark real anxiety and send workers hunting for information. Selland has warned that casual chats can turn into recruitment, with one company poaching staff who carry customer contacts. DoorDash staff can still apply for Instacart jobs, but only “in the same manner as any other external applicant.”

The money makes the caution understandable. DoorDash, a Fortune 500 company, pulled in $13.7 billion in revenue last year — the Instacart price tag tops a full year of sales. And the messy part hasn't even started. CEO Tony Xu, who has digested acquisitions including Finland's Wolt, put it plainly at Fortune Brainstorm Tech last year: “M&A is very easy to get right on a sheet of paper; it's very hard to get right in practice.”