Part IThe Story
Five Point One Five
Before Marc Lore raced Jerry Rice, he raced a spreadsheet of Jerry Rice.
The idea had come out of Lore's mouth on Rich Eisen's set in Los Angeles. Lore was 48 years old, roughly five-foot-ten, and the president and CEO of Walmart's U.S. e-commerce business. He was sitting in the guest chair and telling a sportscaster, without visible irony, that he wanted to run the 40-yard dash against the greatest wide receiver who ever lived. The year before, at Eisen's annual "Run Rich Run" fundraiser for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Lore had donated $100,000 and run a 5.37 in jeans and a blazer, which is the kind of thing a wealthy man does once for a laugh. Now he wanted the event to be bigger. He wanted Rice. Rice was 57, fifteen years retired, and still regarded as one of the most ferocious competitors to put on an NFL uniform. "I told him, Marc, you want no piece of that man," Eisen recalled. On air, Eisen warned him about "that bull that's got some serious horns." Lore chuckled and said he'd been doing some sprints. "So we'll see."
Michael Rubin, the sports-apparel magnate and co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, bet him $250,000, payable to St. Jude, that he would be embarrassed.
What Rubin didn't see was the model. Over the preceding months Lore had worked through the problem with Vinit Bharara, his friend since grade school and his partner in more ventures than either could have predicted when they were teenagers. Lore had been the New Jersey prep champion in the 55-meter dash in 1989 and a sprinter at Bucknell. That was three decades gone. But Rice's prime was gone too, and decay, unlike competitive fire, can be estimated. "He knew what Jerry Rice had run and modeled out how speed degrades over time as you age," Bharara said later. "It might sound crazy, but we would talk about it in advance over time. And we would just go over the numbers. 'OK, he ran this at that age, I'm running this right now. I know he's going to be in this range, I have to beat that range.'"
— Vinit Bharara, on preparing for the Jerry Rice raceHe knew what Jerry Rice had run and modeled out how speed degrades over time as you age. It might sound crazy, but we would talk about it in advance over time. And we would just go over the numbers.
On race day at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, during the 2020 NFL Combine, Lore arrived in a form-fitting track suit. He stretched like an Olympian. Someone worked his hamstrings with a massage gun. Then he ran a 5.15, and Rice, with the pressure now on him, ran a 5.25. Eisen looked down at the stopwatch in something close to disbelief. "The numbers don't lie," he said.
The scene does not need much explanation, and Lore would probably resist the explanation anyway. He would call it a charity event. But the elements are hard to ignore once you have seen them recur across thirty years. There is the public challenge issued to someone who should be unbeatable. There is the spreadsheet built in private to show that the unbeatable thing is merely improbable. There is the old friend from a small private school in Monmouth County doing the arithmetic alongside him. There is the costume change from blazer to track suit, the willingness to be laughed at, and the way the audacity reads, from outside, as either madness or comedy. The stopwatch could have embarrassed him and didn't.
Much of Lore's career rhymes with that afternoon. In 2010 he made Jeff Bezos pay $545 million to stop competing with him over diapers. In 2015 he tried it again with a company called Jet and lost $242.91 on a single test order. In 2016 he sold Jet to the world's largest retailer for $3.3 billion. He then spent four and a half years teaching that retailer to lose money on purpose, and buried his own brand along the way. He announced a city in the desert built on a nineteenth-century theory of land. He pitched investors roughly three thousand times and, by his own count, was told no about 2,800 of them. In 2025, at 53, he sat in a conference room in Parsippany, New Jersey, beneath a dry-erase board that sketched a path to an IPO in 2027. He told a reporter that he had sacrificed everything he felt he could.
The obvious question is why a man with that much money would still want to beat Jerry Rice. The answer, insofar as there is one, starts on Staten Island, with a father who once got himself carried off Bruce Springsteen's property.
By the Numbers
The Lore Ledger
$545MAmazon's price for Quidsi, parent of Diapers.com (2010)
$3.3BWalmart's price for Jet.com, then the largest ever paid for a U.S. e-commerce startup
~2,800 of 3,000Investor pitches rejected, by Lore's own count
$390,000Lore's entire savings after seven years in banking, invested in his first company
2.6% → 5.8%Walmart's share of U.S. e-commerce, 2016 to September 2020
5.15 vs. 5.25Lore's 40-yard dash vs. Jerry Rice's, 2020 NFL Combine
$7BWonder's valuation after its May 2025 raise
The Dreamer's Son
Peter and Chiara Lore were 20 and 19 when their first child was born on Staten Island in May 1971. The neighborhood was Catholic, and almost entirely Italian or Irish. "For the first ten years of my life," Lore has said, "I didn't know anyone that wasn't sort of Italian or Irish." The family lived on modest means. A Fortune profile in 2025 described the home as tumultuous and left it at that. Lore has been similarly economical. He was the oldest of three, and he would become the first in his family to go to college.
His father is the figure he returns to most often. Peter Lore eventually started a computer consulting business and named it Chadmarc Systems, after his two sons, Chad and Marc. Few small businesses have names that sentimental. Chad, as it happens, would one day run one of Marc's companies. Asked in a long podcast interview to describe his father, Lore reached for the word twice. "He was a dreamer. He was a dreamer. He never really achieved his dreams." Then he moved on to the next question.
His mother, Chiara, took a different route. She became a bodybuilder and personal trainer, and in the late 1980s her clients included the model and actress Julianne Phillips, then married to Bruce Springsteen. Two things in that household arrived suddenly, without credentials, by force of will. One was a sculpted body. The other was a son who would talk his way into rooms where he had no business being.
The talking started early. At four, by his own account, Lore charged relatives a nickel apiece to sit through narrated slideshows about Casper the Friendly Ghost. Around the same age, he told his grandmother he wanted to be a farmer. He did not care about agriculture. He liked that farmers "grow stuff from nothing."
When he was ten, the family moved from Staten Island to Lincroft, in Middletown Township, New Jersey. Lore enrolled at Ranney School in Tinton Falls, where he stayed from fifth grade through twelfth. His senior class had 34 students. In seventh grade he began reading about stocks, then options, then the instruments the financial world would soon call derivatives. Classmates called him the human calculator. He was also, by every account including his own, a class clown who spent Saturdays in detention. He did not apply himself.
One story from Ranney he still tells. His biology teacher had a habit of announcing, aloud, the best and worst scores on each test. Lore scored an eight out of a hundred, and the teacher said so in front of everyone. "It was very embarrassing," he recalled decades later, standing in the same school. "I wasn't the best student, but I had a lot of pride. I was very motivated. The next exam I had the highest score." This is the first documented instance of a pattern that would repeat at much larger scale. Lore did not need to be good at the start. He needed someone to tell him, publicly, that he was the worst, and then he would go find the top of the distribution.
The friend who sat beside him through much of this was Vinit Bharara. The Bharara family had come from India; Vinit's older brother Preet would become U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the prosecutor of Wall Street. Vinit took a quieter path. He became the partner who checks the math. In high school the two of them would sneak down to Atlantic City to count cards at the blackjack tables. That was the apprenticeship: two teenagers treating a casino's house edge as a problem in arithmetic rather than a law of nature. Lore also started a baseball card business with another grade-school friend, Lax Chandra, which they called The Mint. He bought and sold cards at trade shows.
He ran. In 1989, his senior year, he won the 55-meter dash at the New Jersey Independent Schools Athletic Association championship in 6.5 seconds. He had started the school's track team and then starred on it. As a sophomore, he has said, he discovered that you had to apply to college. "I always thought you could just pick the school you wanted to go to." Nobody in the family had done it before, so nobody had explained it.
The Cart Before the Horse
He picked Bucknell. Years later, with two college-age daughters of his own, he wrote about first seeing the campus at Lewisburg. He remembered the big trees, the brick buildings, and "something so peaceful about it." He called the choice his first real adult decision. He ran the 100 and 200 meters, long jumped, threw the javelin, and designed his own interdisciplinary major in business management and economics, graduating cum laude in 1993. He has said he started a small hedge fund while still a student. "I graduated in 1993," he once told the Wall Street Journal, "and there was no e-commerce, there was no internet."
So he went into banking. First came Bankers Trust in New York. Then Credit Suisse First Boston, where he was a vice president of emerging-markets risk management. Then Sanwa International in London, where he ran the bank's risk management division as an executive vice president and was reportedly the youngest EVP in its history. He enrolled in a statistics master's program at Columbia and left without finishing. Along the way he completed the Chartered Financial Analyst program. Through his mid-twenties, then, his profession was the formal measurement of what could go wrong.
In 1996 he got a chance to do something that would not fit on any of those spreadsheets. He qualified for the U.S. national bobsled team. The 1998 Winter Olympics were in reach. To keep his seat he would have had to train, and to train he would have had to leave the bank. He stayed at the bank. The sprinter who would one day post a better 40 than a Hall of Fame wide receiver let an Olympic seat go to keep a risk-management job. It is the most conservative decision on his record, and he made it at 25. He has never said much about whether he regrets it.
The next year he went the other way. Working at Credit Suisse First Boston, he wanted a professional credential in financial risk management, and there wasn't one. He turned to a colleague, Lev Borodovsky, a fellow risk specialist with whom he would later write The Professional's Handbook of Financial Risk Management. "Hey," Lore remembers asking, "what do you think if I created an exam to certify financial risk managers?" The reaction from others was predictable. "People were like, 'Who's going to take your exam? You're a kid.'"
He announced the exam anyway. Then checks began to arrive, and only after the checks arrived did he figure out what would be on it. "I did that just in a weekend, put the cart before the horse," he said. "I didn't know how I was going to write the exam. I didn't know anything about anything." The organization he and Borodovsky founded that year, the Global Association of Risk Professionals, now reports more than 150,000 members in 195 countries, and its Financial Risk Manager certification has been earned by tens of thousands. The first venture of a man who would become famous for selling things through the internet was a test he had not yet written.
The phrase stuck. Alex Rodriguez, who would become his business partner decades later, made it the first lesson in a LinkedIn post about him: "Put the cart before the horse." Prove the demand, then build. Take the biggest step available, and let what happens next decide the strategy.
By 1999 he had spent seven years in banking and saved $390,000. Then he quit, abruptly in his telling, to start a company called The Pit. Based in White Plains, New York, it billed itself as an online stock market for collectibles: a real-time ticker, historical price charts, personal portfolios, all applied to sports cards. It was The Mint again, rebuilt with the instruments of a risk desk. Lore didn't know anyone with money. He made more than two hundred pitches. He asked everyone he met for two more names, met those two people, and asked them for two more. He put in every dollar he had.
One early investor, by Lore's recollection, found the number baffling. "Marc, this is incredible. You're a pretty young guy. I can't believe you put in $390,000 of your own money. But I only have one question. Like, I don't understand. Why didn't you just do $400,000?"
"Because I don't have any more," Lore told him.
The Pit eventually raised more than $5 million from backers including Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, and the market writer Martin Zweig, along with Topps, the trading-card company. In 2001, as the dot-com era collapsed, Topps bought the company for $5.7 million, and Lore went to work as chief operating officer of its gaming subsidiary, WizKids. It was a small exit. It was also the first time he had built something that a larger company decided was easier to buy than to compete with. That would happen again.
Quidsi, Latin for What If
In 2005 Lore had a newborn and a problem every new parent will recognize. Diapers, wipes, and formula run out at the worst possible moment, are bulky to carry home, and cost about the same everywhere. He wished it were easier to keep them stocked. With Vinit Bharara, he started a company called 1800DIAPERS, which was soon renamed Diapers.com. The holding company got a stranger name: Quidsi, Latin for "what if."
The same year, he enrolled in Wharton's MBA Program for Executives in San Francisco. He has said he was told not to bother applying because he wouldn't get in. His father pushed him to try. He got in, and he left after a year to run the diaper company. The father who never achieved his dreams had made his son apply anyway.
The economics of Diapers.com were, on paper, terrible. Diapers are large, light, cheap, and fully commoditized. Shipping them costs a meaningful share of what they sell for. "It's impossible to make money selling diapers on the internet," as NPR's How I Built This put it, summarizing what Lore discovered almost immediately. Lore's answer was the one supermarkets have always used, applied to a new channel. Diapers would be the loss leader. "They're a loss leader for a reason," he explained later. "They drive traffic." A parent who trusted you for the thing that runs out every week would trust you for the stroller, the toys, and eventually the dish soap and dog food. Quidsi grew into a family of sites, among them Soap.com and Wag.com, each built around the same idea.
The operation was more ambitious than the pitch. Quidsi put warehouses close to big metro areas so it could ship by ground at ground rates and still arrive fast. It was an early user of Kiva robots, the squat orange machines that carry whole shelving units to human pickers instead of making the pickers walk the aisles. By 2010 the company was moving about half a billion diapers a year and projecting annual revenue above $300 million. It had raised roughly $60 million from Bessemer, Accel, and New Enterprise Associates. "Marc is the most talented e-commerce operator I've come across," said Jeremy Levine of Bessemer. "He has a deep, intuitive grasp of the finance side of things — that's something that most entrepreneurs don't have an eye for." Levine meant it as praise. It also describes the human calculator from Ranney.
Then Amazon noticed. In Lore's later telling, Amazon cut its diaper prices by about 30 percent. A Fortune newsletter would describe the episode as a pricing battle that "could best be described as anti-competitive." Most startups in that position would have folded. Quidsi's customers mostly stayed, and Lore drew a lesson from that he would repeat for years: a company valued only on price is replaceable, and one its customers trust is not.
In November 2010, Amazon agreed to buy Quidsi for $500 million in cash plus $45 million in assumed debt. The deal closed in February 2011. It valued the company at nearly ten times the venture capital it had raised. Lore's share was in the tens of millions. In March 2012 Amazon bought Kiva Systems for $775 million and stopped selling the robots to other retailers. Amazon had now bought both the company and the machines it ran on.
Lore went to work at Amazon, honored his contract for a little over two years, and left in 2013. He has been candid about how the sale felt. "After the sale, I was... depressed." A founder who had gone all in found himself, on the other side of an exit, with nothing left to go all in on. He has also said he left Amazon with unfinished business in e-commerce.
— Marc Lore, to Fortune, February 2015I would trade the stock I had in Quidsi at the time of acquisition by Amazon for the stock I have in Jet today.
The True Marginal Cost
The unfinished business was price. Lore had come to believe that internet retail as practiced by its dominant player served people "who care more about convenience than value," as he told Bloomberg Businessweek's Brad Stone. Everyone was racing to deliver faster. Lore suspected there were millions of people who would wait an extra day if waiting saved them money. Those people were not, generally, the people who ran internet companies.
He shopped the idea around. After a lunch with a partner at Accel, which had backed Quidsi, he had a promise of $1 million in seed money. He brought in two Quidsi veterans as co-founders. Nate Faust had helped build Quidsi's operations. Mike Hanrahan had been an executive alongside Lore through the Amazon years. Both were the kind of lieutenant Lore would later say he values most: people who stay long enough to get promoted. The company was called Jet. It set up in Hoboken, New Jersey, in April 2014.
Jet was a theory of cost before it was a store. Its core feature was what the company called a real-time pricing algorithm, which Lore said was designed to gauge "the true marginal cost of getting that product to" the customer. In practice, buying two items from the same distribution center cost less than buying them from two different ones. Giving up your right to free returns lowered the price. Paying by debit card instead of credit card lowered it again, since the interchange fee was smaller. As you added items, the site showed you more items that would lower your total. The everyday frictions of retail (picking, packing, shipping, card fees, returns) had always been folded into one sticker price. Jet broke them out one by one and gave each back to the customer. It was risk management applied to a shopping cart.
The business model looked radical, or reckless, depending on your view. The original plan was a Costco-style membership, $49.99 a year after a 90-day free trial, and the fee was to be the company's only profit. Merchandise would sell at break-even. "The bottom line is, we're basically not making a dime on any of the transactions," Lore said. "We're passing it all back to the consumer." The Wall Street Journal ran a test purchase shortly before launch: twelve items, sold to the paper for $275.55, which cost Jet $518.46. Jet lost $242.91 on the order. Diapers had been the loss leader at Quidsi. At Jet, for a while, nearly everything was.
He was just as unconventional with equity. In November 2014, months before launch, Jet began offering stock options to its earliest users through a referral campaign called Jet Insider. Sign-ups got six months of free membership and a link to share. Top referrers won lifetime memberships, and the top ten won shares. By February 2015, about 352,000 people had joined. One winner, Fortune later reported, was Eric Martin, who worked in the funeral industry in central Pennsylvania and received 100,000 shares of a company that did not yet sell anything. Business Insider found an insurance agent who had put $18,000 into the company. Lore had once raised money from strangers in $75,000 checks because he knew no one with money. Now he was handing ownership to strangers so they would tell their friends.
Inside, he did something similar with pay. Jet used a ten-tier system of salaries and titles. Every recruit was placed in a tier based on experience, and the tier set the pay. There were no negotiations. "Everybody made the same amount of money at the same level of the company," Lore wrote later, "both salary and dollar value of the equity." He named the company's three values as trust, transparency, and fairness, and argued that each produced the next: transparency produced fairness, and fairness produced trust. It was one of the more unusual compensation systems in American venture-backed technology, and it came from a man who would later tell students that "sometimes it's a sign of strength to accept the first offer."
The fundraising was just as aggressive, and it was more carefully structured than the headlines suggested. In February 2015, still before launch and before revenue, Jet raised $140 million in a round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Accel, Google Ventures, NEA, Thrive Capital, Temasek, and Goldman Sachs joined, the last in what Fortune's Term Sheet thought might be its first-ever pre-revenue startup investment. Reports said the round valued Jet at $450 million before the money. That was only partly true. According to Term Sheet, $125 million came as a capped convertible bridge note whose actual valuation depended on the next round: $450 million only if the Series B priced near $1 billion, and as low as $300 million if it priced around $600 million. Another $15 million was venture debt. Lore declined to discuss the structure. He did offer the line about trading his Quidsi stock for his Jet stock. A pre-launch company was being described, on paper, as worth more than the one Amazon had bought.
Jet opened to the public on July 21, 2015, with 4.5 million products after what Bloomberg called a ragged trial period. Beta testers reported lower prices than Amazon and slower delivery, which was exactly the trade Lore had bet on. Then things went wrong in several places at once. In August, Jet was caught showing links to other retailers' sites as though they were partners. Macy's, Home Depot, and Walmart asked to be removed. Jet's chief customer officer said those retailers saw Jet as a competitor. In October, Jet dropped the membership fee entirely, abandoning the core of its original model before the company was a year old. In November it raised $350 million led by Fidelity, short of the $500 million that had been rumored. By May 2016 it was valued at $1.3 billion, piloting grocery delivery, and, according to Fortune, "bleeding money."
Lore has since been unusually open about this period. Speaking with Mario Gabriele of The Generalist nearly a decade later, he said he had raised too much at Jet and gotten in over his skis. At the time, Fortune's reporter found him matter-of-fact about the whole effort: "genuinely surprised that anyone would find them audacious," and nearly impossible to get to admit that the odds were against him. In total, Jet raised $820 million across four rounds. He always knew he would need billions.
Selling Without Selling Out
He didn't need billions in the end, because Walmart called first.
Doug McMillon remembered the first meeting in a 2021 memo to employees. "It was nearly five years ago that Marc Lore and I got together in the Quail room to talk about a possible partnership between Walmart and Jet.com. As we started whiteboarding the future of retail, we found that we believed a lot of the same things." McMillon had spent his career inside Walmart. The man across the whiteboard had spent his building companies that Walmart's rivals bought or feared. Their conversation started as a discussion of a partnership and ended as a deal. The Wall Street Journal reported talks on August 3, 2016. On August 8, Walmart announced it would buy Jet for about $3 billion in cash plus $300 million in Walmart stock paid out over time to the founders and others, a total of $3.3 billion. According to Dow Jones VentureSource, it was the most ever paid for a U.S. e-commerce startup. According to Recode, there were no other bidders.
Walmart's press release cited $1 billion in annualized gross merchandise value, 12 million SKUs, more than 400,000 new shoppers a month, 25,000 orders a day, and 2,400 retail and brand partners. That run-rate figure, Fortune observed, came from about $80 million in monthly sales. Fortune also noted that Jet was spending far more than that to generate them. It ran its deal coverage under a headline asking whether the sale was a failure. "Yes," the writer noted, "we live in a world where selling your startup for $3 billion can be considered a failure." The reasoning was that Lore had set out to beat Amazon, and selling to Walmart meant he had not. The same piece suggested a more cynical reading: Lore may have known all along that Walmart, the enemy of his enemy, would eventually be desperate. It closed by noting that Eric Martin, the funeral-industry worker with 100,000 shares, certainly saw the deal as a success.
McMillon called the acquisition "another jolt of entrepreneurial spirit being injected into Walmart." Fortune pointed out that "another" was a polite way of not admitting earlier attempts had failed.
Lore, looking back, remembered the clothes. On the morning of CNBC's Squawk Box appearance, the founder of the coastal startup wore slacks and a dress shirt, "for the first time in a while." The CEO of the Arkansas retail giant wore jeans. "We didn't plan this sartorial role-reversal," Lore wrote, "but there was common messaging in our individual efforts – we wanted to reassure people that we got each other." Then McMillon handed over the business. "Here are the keys, Marc. You're going to lead this thing."
The deal closed on September 19, 2016, and McMillon announced it first on Instagram. Lore became an executive vice president of Walmart and president and CEO of its U.S. e-commerce business, running both Walmart.com and Jet.com and reporting directly to McMillon. Neil Ashe, Walmart's previous head of global e-commerce, stepped aside. The filings show what Walmart was really paying for. Lore received restricted stock units for 3,554,093 Walmart shares, vesting over five years on an escalating schedule: 10 percent after the first year, then 1.25 percent a month, then 1.67, then 2.08, then 2.5 percent a month in the final year. The longer he stayed, the faster he earned. Most of the reward came at the end. In 2017 Bloomberg reported that his pay after the deal came to $244 million, making him, by headline accounts, the highest-paid executive in America.
Lore had a phrase for what had happened, and he used it for years. "Selling out means you sacrifice the vision," he wrote. He had sold the company, not the vision. He had combined it with the largest company in the world in order to reach the vision sooner. Later, at a conference in Las Vegas, someone asked why he would sell a company that was growing so fast. His answer said a good deal about how he saw ownership. "From the moment you start a company, you're selling pieces of it every time you raise money." Equity was never the point, only a tool for buying time. If Walmart could buy him more time than venture capital could, the trade made sense.
The Square Peg
The situation he inherited looked bleak. Walmart had nearly 4,600 U.S. stores and, according to FreightWaves, no coherent online strategy. It offered free delivery on no online orders. In the quarter before the deal, its U.S. online sales had grown 7 percent. The company had $482 billion in annual revenue, 2.3 million employees, and 260 million customers a week. Its share of U.S. e-commerce, according to eMarketer, was 2.6 percent. Amazon's was 31.5.
The first year went very well. Lore ended a free-shipping membership Walmart had been running to compete with Prime and replaced it with free two-day shipping on orders over $35, with no fee. He offered discounts on more than a million online items to customers who picked them up in a store, which also brought foot traffic into the stores and pleased their managers. He started treating the stores, as he put it, like warehouses. Under one pilot, store employees delivered packages to customers on their commute home, choosing orders from an internal app and earning extra pay for each drop-off. In March 2017 he launched an in-house incubator called Store No. 8, named for the early location Sam Walton used to test ideas. He bought companies: ShoeBuy from IAC for $70 million, renamed Shoes.com; the outdoor retailer Moosejaw; the vintage-inspired fashion site ModCloth; and the menswear brand Bonobos for $310 million. Online sales grew more than 60 percent. Walmart's stock was among the best performers in the Dow in 2017. A UBS analyst said he had turned Walmart into "a viable No. 2 in e-commerce."
He was trying to make Walmart cool. The Wall Street Journal said so in nearly those words in January 2018, and Lore talked about brands that "resonate with millennial shoppers." He launched Jetblack, a $50-a-month text-message concierge service for affluent New York families, initially run by Rent the Runway co-founder Jenny Fleiss. Members could text for a bottle of champagne or a box of diapers and have it delivered. The Diapers.com founder was now selling diapers by text to Manhattan's wealthy, on behalf of the retailer of rural and small-town America.
Then came the holidays. In late 2017, gift orders swamped Walmart's supply chain and squeezed out everyday items. Online sales grew 23 percent, less than half the pace of earlier quarters and slower than Amazon and Target. The stock dropped. A report, which Lore denied, said he was thinking about leaving. "This might put a dent in Lore's savior image," said one retail-technology CEO. Venky Harinarayan, who had sold his own startup to Walmart in 2011, offered a sharper verdict: "I still can't articulate why I would shop at Walmart.com instead of Amazon."
The losses were the bigger problem. Walmart's e-commerce division lost about $1.4 billion in 2018 and $1.7 billion in 2019. In July 2019, Recode's Jason Del Rey reported that the unit was projecting losses of more than $1 billion on $21 to $22 billion in revenue. That was a striking figure for a company that had earned nearly $7 billion the previous fiscal year and took pride in disciplined operations. McMillon and the board were pressing for cuts. The executives who ran the physical stores, sources told Del Rey, were frustrated by the money-losing experiments, and their leader resented the credit Lore's team received for the fast-growing online grocery business, which ran through the stores. The founder hired to drive Walmart's e-commerce growth was being blamed for the cost of that growth.
Lore's public response came from the same instinct that had once made him enter a race he was expected to lose. "I'm not surprised by it," he said onstage at Recode's Code Commerce conference that September. "That tension, I would argue, is actually good. It's not unhealthy in any way." He also announced that the acquisition spree was over. Walmart would build its own digital brands instead. He pointed to Allswell, a mattress brand made in-house, which he predicted would become "a multi-hundred-million" dollar business with minimal investment. "This was like an 'aha' for us." Asked whether a close look at Walmart's third-party marketplace would turn up the kind of banned and mislabeled goods the Journal had just found on Amazon's, he answered more honestly than most executives would. "I think they'll find stuff. But I guess on a percentage basis, it will be less."
Meanwhile, Jet was disappearing. In 2019 most of its employees were moved onto Walmart.com, and its president, Simon Belsham, stepped down. On May 19, 2020, Walmart announced it would shut Jet down. On June 4, the site began redirecting to Walmart.com. Walmart said it did not expect a significant accounting charge. A brand acquired for $3.3 billion was written down to nothing without a meaningful loss on Walmart's books, because the purchase had never really been about the brand. "Walmart didn't necessarily want Jet," FreightWaves wrote. "It coveted Lore, his cadre of top executives and Jet's information technology."
Lore made the decision himself. McMillon said in the 2021 memo that Lore had "made the choice" to put all of the company's e-commerce resources behind Walmart.com rather than run two online brands, "because he became convinced of the potential of the Walmart brand." The founder had closed his own company because the data favored the acquirer's brand. Few founders could do that. Lore may not have found it especially hard.
Then the pandemic came. In the first quarter of 2020, Walmart's U.S. e-commerce sales rose 74 percent. The pickup and delivery infrastructure Lore's division had built, with grocery pickup at about 3,300 stores and delivery from more than 1,850, became essential. Walmart's online assortment grew from about 10 million items to more than 80 million. Next-day delivery covered hundreds of thousands of products and same-day covered thousands. By September 2020, Walmart's share of U.S. e-commerce had more than doubled, to 5.8 percent. Amazon's had grown to 39 percent. Walmart was a clear second, a long way behind, and, for the first time, a credible competitor.
On January 14, 2021, Lore told Walmart he would retire from his role. He would step down on January 31 and serve as a strategic adviser through September, completing his five-year commitment. McMillon's memo was warm, and in one line slightly wry. "Marc committed to a minimum of five years with us, which I know felt like a long time for an entrepreneur like him." Elsewhere: "Marc's expertise and aggressiveness have been game changing. We have learned a lot from him. I have personally learned a lot from him." Walmart shares fell as much as 2.2 percent that day. One analyst called the departure "an incremental negative." Walmart's stock had risen more than 80 percent since the acquisition, ahead of the S&P 500.
He told Recode what he would do next. He planned to build a city.
A Stake in the Ground
Fortune interviewed him about it from his lake house in New Jersey.
The city was called Telosa, from the Greek telos, meaning end or purpose. Lore described it as "a city with the vibrancy, diversity and culture of New York City combined with the efficiency, safety and innovation of Tokyo and the sustainability, governance, and social services of Sweden." He announced it in September 2021. The goal was five million residents by 2050, with a first phase housing 50,000. The estimated cost was $400 billion. Possible sites included desert land in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas, as well as Appalachia. He hired Bjarke Ingels Group, the Danish architecture firm behind headquarters for Google, to plan it. The renderings showed indoor farms, autonomous electric vehicles, and a tall central tower.
The central idea was much older than the renderings. Lore had been reading Henry George, whose 1879 book Progress and Poverty argued that land values come from the community rather than from the landowner, and that most of that value should go back to the community. In Telosa, anyone could build, own, and sell a house or an office building, but the city would keep ownership of the land. As the city grew, the land would appreciate. Lore projected that it might eventually be worth $1 trillion and produce $50 billion a year, enough to fund health care, schools, parks, and transit for every resident regardless of income. He called the system "Equitism."
"I'm trying to create a new model for society, where wealth is created in a fair way," he said. "It's not burdening the wealthy; it's not increasing taxes. It is simply giving back to the citizens and the people the wealth that they helped create."
He explained his reasoning with a specific image. Much of American family wealth, he told Fortune, came from luck: an "ancestor put a stake in the ground and said, this is mine." From that came the rest of the cycle. Local property taxes fund local schools, so poorer areas get worse schools, which lead to lower earnings, which lead to less valuable homes. A man whose parents had him as teenagers and raised him on modest means on Staten Island was now proposing to remove the stake from the ground.
Fortune noted the contradiction. Lore planned to fund much of Telosa himself, from expected returns on startup bets like the electric air-taxi company Archer Aviation, where he was lead investor and had added another $10 million in February 2021. "That means, paradoxically, Lore will attempt to close the wealth gap by getting even richer." He did not seem troubled by it. For him, getting richer had always been a means to an end.
In the same period he did something more conventional for a newly freed billionaire, though he approached it in his usual way. In 2020 he had joined Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez in a late attempt to buy the New York Mets. Steve Cohen won. Rodriguez, the three-time MVP whose career ended in scandal and who reinvented himself as an investor, became Lore's partner in nearly everything that followed. In May 2021 they started a venture firm, Vision Capital People, with $50 million of their own money and a plan to take 40 to 80 percent stakes in early-stage companies. Lore said that approach was a response to the "frustrating" experience of raising capital for his own startups. They backed an online brokerage called Tornado alongside Dave Portnoy. On April 10, 2021, they signed a letter of intent to buy the Minnesota Timberwolves and Minnesota Lynx from Glen Taylor.
Lore later explained the speed of that deal in terms that would have surprised anyone who knew him only as a dealmaker. Other bidders, he said, had lost the team by trying to negotiate. "Sometimes, the best way to negotiate is not to — to know not to negotiate at all." He and Rodriguez accepted the terms and moved quickly. "It has always been a childhood dream," he said. "Being a kid growing up without any money and just playing street ball, an unrealistic dream at the time. And then the opportunity presented itself and A-Rod and I jumped on it, we didn't have time to think about it."
The NBA approved the first stage of the purchase on July 21, 2021, which happened to be six years to the day after Jet's public launch. The structure transferred the franchise in installments over three years. In 2024 Taylor claimed a delayed payment had voided the agreement. The dispute went to mediation and then arbitration, and in February 2025 the panel ruled for Lore and Rodriguez. The kid who played street ball without money now owned, after a legal fight, a professional basketball team in Minneapolis.
He was also building a food company, though at first he was barely running it.
Eating Glass
Lore founded Wonder in 2018 while still at Walmart. For several years his brother Chad ran it, while Marc served as an adviser. Chad was the other half of Chadmarc Systems, the name their father had given his business. Marc became executive chairman in December 2021 and CEO in October 2022. The man who had told Recode he had no intention of running a startup as CEO again was running one within two years.
The first version came straight out of the Telosa renderings. Wonder launched in December 2021 as a fleet of Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans in the New Jersey suburbs. Each was a mobile kitchen that would park outside a customer's house and finish cooking restaurant dishes there, from menus licensed from chefs including Bobby Flay, José Andrés, Nancy Silverton, and Marcus Samuelsson. It raised a $400 million Series A, then $350 million more in June 2022 at a reported $3.5 billion valuation. At one point there were about 450 of these vehicles. The idea was beautiful, and the economics were punishing.
Then Lore did again what he had done to Jet. Wonder's most difficult decision, he later told an audience at Wharton, was to shut down the vans and start over with physical kitchens. He had to tell the board, investors, and employees that the company would absorb a loss and "start literally from zero revenue." The shift began at the start of 2023. He summarized the reasoning in one sentence that applies to most of his career: "Most people underestimate the risk of the status quo and overestimate the risk of change." Then he added: "As an entrepreneur, you have to take risks to reduce risk." The former head of risk management at Sanwa had concluded that standing still was the riskiest option.
What came next looked familiar. Wonder's storefronts were dense, delivery-first food halls where one order could combine dishes from more than twenty restaurant brands. Lore called the concept "fast fine" and compared it to "what Starbucks did to coffee." Then Wonder started buying companies. Nestlé invested $100 million in November 2023. That month Wonder closed its $103 million purchase of Blue Apron, the meal-kit company, whose stock had more than doubled on news of the sale. In March 2024 it announced a $700 million round. In November 2024 it bought Grubhub from Just Eat Takeaway for $650 million; the seller booked a loss of more than $6.5 billion. Within months, 23 percent of Grubhub's corporate staff were laid off. In March 2025 Wonder bought Tastemade, the food-media company. In May 2025 it announced $600 million more, led by existing investors NEA, Accel, GV, and Forerunner, at a $7 billion valuation. Sameer Gandhi of Accel, who had backed Diapers.com, Jet, and Wonder, sat on the board with Gwyneth Paltrow and José Andrés. Wonder had 39 locations across six states, most in New Jersey and New York, and planned 90 by the end of 2025. Lore had put more than $300 million of his own money into it. He told TechCrunch he wanted to take it public at a $40 billion valuation. Fortune quoted his description: "the Amazon of food and beverage."
The long-term plan, as he describes it, goes well past a food hall. He imagines an AI agent that knows your tastes, your diet, and your vital signs, tells you what to eat, and then delivers it. Lore already lives a version of this, since a personal chef cooks for him. In 2018, asked on LinkedIn how he balanced work and life, he described a deliberately narrow routine. "I don't watch TV, I sold my car for Uber, I almost always order sushi for lunch every day, I often wear a black t-shirt and jeans every day." He has turned his own meals into a fixed routine and is trying to do something similar, through software, for everyone else's.
The capital came the way it always had, from repeated rejection. Lore told Del Rey, now at Fortune, that over his career he had raised more than $3 billion across 15 rounds and been turned down roughly 2,800 times out of 3,000. He fills the pipeline with every meeting he can get. When an investor says no, he asks exactly why, revises the pitch, and asks for another meeting. Five of Wonder's 25 investors in one round had turned it down before investing. "Twenty percent of our investors had literally passed," he said, stressing the word. "I don't mean on a previous round; I mean on that round." He tells students he almost never lets someone go after a no. He asks the person who declined for names of others to pitch. "They feel guilty," he said, "so they are more likely to give you than even when they say yes." The pitch itself he cuts down to one claim. "What's the one thing that if we accomplish it, the idea works?"
Liza Landsman, who worked for him as a senior executive at Jet, told Del Rey for his 2023 book, Winner Sells All, about a saying of her grandmother's, roughly translated from Yiddish: "People who could talk clouds out of the sky." "And I always thought this about Marc," she said. The stories of his ambition, his methods, and their personal cost are collected in The Relentless Rise of Marc Lore. Lore's own phrase for the experience is less flattering. "I say it's like eating glass," he told students at Eastern Illinois University over Zoom from his New York apartment. "I'm eating glass and hoping I don't get cut on the way down."
He has been cut. In his thirties and forties, he told Del Rey, he rarely got home for weeknight dinners with his wife and two daughters. During the fundraising stretches that made his reputation, he sometimes didn't get home at all. His marriage to Carolyn Lore suffered and then ended. He gave up hobbies. He stopped making new friends.
— Marc Lore, to Fortune, 2025I sacrificed everything I felt I could. I had nothing else left to sacrifice, because when you do this startup thing, you can't, like, dial it back or do it less. It just is what it is. You're eating glass every day, you're working 100 hours a week, and you're all in on it.
His LinkedIn headline reads: Serial Entrepreneur | Moonshot Seeker | Mission Driven Dad. It is hard to tell whether that third phrase is meant as a description or as a goal.
In September 2024 he went back to Ranney School as the first member of its new Legendary Hall of Fame. He gave $1 million for an athletic field house. Preet Bharara moderated the conversation. Ten of the 34 members of his senior class came, Vinit among them. Lore told the students about the 8 out of 100 and the next exam. A senior from Rumson said what moved her was that he "wasn't the strongest academically speaking" and had succeeded anyway. Lore told them about 100-hour weeks, about missing far more often than hitting, about how much resilience it takes. He did not mention bobsleds. He did tell a version of a story he tells often, about his father.
Doesn't Seem Like Bruce Wants to Go Fishing
It was the late 1980s. Chiara Lore was training Julianne Phillips, and Peter Lore had learned that Bruce Springsteen liked to fish. He asked his wife to ask Springsteen to go deep-sea fishing with him. He kept asking. There was no answer. He decided anyway that it was happening. He told Marc and Marc's brother they were going fishing with Bruce, and the boys told all their friends.
The morning arrived and there was still no answer. So, Lore recalls, his father decided: "Just go to his house at 5:30 in the morning." The boys were excited. It was still dark when Peter Lore knocked on Bruce Springsteen's door.
Security carried him out. Peter Lore was not a big man, and his sons watched from the car as he was lifted off the ground, legs kicking, and brought back to his own vehicle. "Me and my brother are like, we're in shock, right?" Lore says. Their father got into the front seat, breathing hard. The boys asked if he was okay, and what was going on.
He turned around, completely calm.
"Guys, doesn't seem like Bruce wants to go fishing. You guys still up for it?"
They were. They went fishing.
Part IIThe Playbook
Lore is one of the few founders whose methods can be tested across many separate trials: a certification exam, a collectibles exchange, a diaper company, a price-algorithm marketplace, a transformation inside a $482-billion retailer, a food company that scrapped its first model, and a proposed city. Some principles below are ones he has written down himself, in LinkedIn posts, his correspondence with The Generalist, and many podcast interviews. Others are inferred from what he did, which sometimes differs from what he said. Each is tied to evidence from Part I.
The principles
- 1.Model the race, then run it anyway.
- 2.Sell the exam before you write it.
- 3.Burn the backup plan.
- 4.Make the money-loser the front door.
- 5.Unbundle the true cost and hand it back.
- 6.Treat "no" as a request for a better pitch.
- 7.Shrink the pitch to one belief.
- 8.Make compensation a public fact.
- 9.Read the slope of the résumé, not the hour in the room.
- 10.Sell to accelerate, never to exit.
- 11.Kill your own darling when the data says so.
- 12.Re-pour the foundation every week.
L
Thirty Years of What-Ifs
Each venture borrowed its central mechanism from the one before.
1996
Qualifies for the U.S. national bobsled team; chooses his banking job and loses his seat for the 1998 Games.
1997
Co-founds the Global Association of Risk Professionals and the FRM exam with Lev Borodovsky, taking payment before the exam is written.
1999
Invests his entire $390,000 savings in The Pit, an online "stock market" for collectibles.
2001
Sells The Pit to Topps for $5.7 million.
2005
Founds 1800DIAPERS (later Diapers.com) with Vinit Bharara under the holding company Quidsi.
2010
Amazon agrees to buy Quidsi for $545 million after a price war; deal closes February 2011.
2014
Co-founds Jet in Hoboken with Nate Faust and Mike Hanrahan; offers stock options to early users.
2015
Jet launches July 21; kills its $49.99 membership fee in October.
2016
Walmart buys Jet for $3.3 billion; Lore becomes CEO of Walmart U.S. eCommerce.
2018
Founds Wonder; brother Chad runs it while Marc remains at Walmart.
2020
Lore folds Jet into Walmart.com; Jet.com goes dark June 4.
2021
Leaves Walmart; announces Telosa; signs to buy the Timberwolves and Lynx with Alex Rodriguez.
2023
Wonder abandons its mobile-kitchen vans for brick-and-mortar, restarting "from zero revenue"; acquires Blue Apron.
2024
Wonder buys Grubhub for $650 million.
2025
Wins Timberwolves arbitration; Wonder raises $600 million at a $7 billion valuation.
Principle 1
Model the race, then run it anyway
Most people imagine risk-takers are bad at estimating risk. Lore is unusually good at it, which is why his boldness works. The Jerry Rice race is the clearest example. Before challenging Rice publicly, Lore and Bharara built a model of how sprint speed declines with age and worked out the range Lore had to beat. The challenge looked like bravado. Underneath, it was a calculation. The same habit runs back to card counting in Atlantic City and the risk desks at Credit Suisse and Sanwa, and forward to the capped convertible note behind Jet's pre-launch round, where the valuation adjusted depending on what the next round brought.
The crucial part is what happens after the model. Lore does not use analysis to decide whether to take a long shot. He uses it to find the narrow path through one. "Most ideas I find are low possibilities of success," he told a Wharton audience, "but that's exactly why they can have the biggest upsides. I would never discount anything just because the odds are low." For him, the model shows what has to happen for the bet to pay. It does not give permission or refuse it.
Tactic: Before any bold public commitment, write down the specific threshold you must beat and the evidence that you can beat it, then announce the commitment.
Principle 2
Sell the exam before you write it
At 24 or so, Lore announced a financial-risk certification exam that did not exist. Checks arrived, and then he wrote the exam. Rodriguez later reduced this to "put the cart before the horse," and Lore has described the broader principle as taking "the biggest step you have towards your idea." Jet followed the same order: it signed up 352,000 people through Jet Insider before it sold anything, using equity as the reason to join. Telosa was announced with a vision statement and a famous architect long before it had land.
The logic is that demand is the hardest thing to fake and the most useful thing to learn early. Building first and selling second spends capital to answer a question that a public commitment could answer free. The risk is reputational. If no one sends checks, you have announced something publicly and nothing has come of it. Lore has consistently decided that embarrassment costs less than wasted time.
Tactic: Announce the product, take the deposit, or open the waitlist before you build, and let real demand set the scope of what you build.
Principle 3
Burn the backup plan
"I've always had this methodology of having no plan B, no backup plan," Lore told a founder community. "If you've got a backup plan, it is human nature to take it when things get tough." When he left banking he put in $390,000, which was everything he had. When the investor asked why he hadn't rounded up to $400,000, the answer, "Because I don't have any more," became his best fundraising argument. Investors were not betting on the idea. They were betting on a man with no way to retreat.
There is a counterexample, and it matters: the bobsled. In 1996, with an Olympic spot available, Lore kept his job, which was the backup plan. Every major move he made afterward reads like the opposite of that choice. The principle has a cost. Fortune's 2025 profile documents a marriage that ended and friendships that never formed. Someone with no plan B in business may also lack one in the rest of life.
Tactic: When you commit to a venture, close at least one escape route in a way your investors and team can see.
Principle 4
Make the money-loser the front door
Diapers cannot be sold profitably online, and Lore sold half a billion of them a year anyway. He treated the unprofitable product as the cost of acquiring a customer. "They're a loss leader for a reason. They drive traffic." Diapers brought in parents, and the margin came from strollers, toys, soap, and pet food on the sister sites. When Amazon cut prices by about 30 percent, Quidsi survived because the relationship was worth more to customers than the per-unit price.
Lore applied the same structure at Walmart with discounts for in-store pickup, which lost margin online and made it back in store traffic. Wonder's licensed chef menus work similarly, as an expensive draw meant to make the app a daily habit. The underlying point is that what you lose money on is a marketing decision, and it should be made on purpose rather than by accident.
Tactic: Pick the single product your customers buy most often, price it to win, and design the rest of the catalog to earn back the difference.
Principle 5
Unbundle the true cost and hand it back
Jet's pricing algorithm tried to calculate "the true marginal cost of getting that product to" each customer, then return the savings: a lower price for items shipped from the same warehouse, for waiving free returns, for paying by debit card. Costs that retail usually hides in a single price were broken out and offered as choices. Telosa's Georgist design applies the same idea to land, trying to identify who actually created a parcel's value and return that value to them.
This principle also produced Jet's most costly mistake. A model that passes all savings to the customer and makes money only on a membership fee has nothing in reserve, and the Wall Street Journal's test order lost $242.91. In October 2015 Lore dropped the fee. The approach to pricing was sound. The decision to make no margin at all was not.
Tactic: Map every cost hidden inside your price, then let customers choose to remove the ones they don't value, while keeping enough margin to survive the experiment.
⚖
The Bets, Scored
Lore's signature wagers and what became of them.
| Bet | Conventional move | Lore's move | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| FRM exam (1997) | Build the curriculum, then market it. | Collect checks, then write the exam. | Worked |
| Diapers.com (2005) | Avoid low-margin commodities. | Lose money on diapers to own the parent. | Worked |
| Jet membership (2014–15) | Earn margin on each transaction. | Sell at break-even; profit only from a $49.99 fee. | Reversed |
| Jet sale (2016) | Hold out for independence or an IPO. | Sell to Walmart to reach the vision faster. | Worked |
| Walmart e-commerce (2016–21) | Protect margins. | Lose $1B+ a year to buy share and speed. | Costly |
| Jet brand (2019–20) | Preserve the founder's brand. | Fold Jet into Walmart.com. | Worked |
| Wonder vans (2021–23) | Iterate on the existing model. | Shut it down; restart from zero revenue. | Reversed |
| Telosa (2021–) | Lobby existing cities for reform. | Build a new city on Georgist land rules. | Open |
Principle 6
Treat "no" as a request for a better pitch
Being turned down about 2,800 times in 3,000 pitches would end most founders' fundraising careers. For Lore it is simply how fundraising works. His approach, as he described it to Fortune: take every meeting, find out the specific reason for each no, change the deck to address it, and ask for a second, more focused meeting. In one Wonder round, five of 25 investors had declined that same round before they invested. He also asks people who decline for referrals, and has noticed that someone who has just said no often feels obliged to help.
This is the opposite of the usual advice to "pursue only the right investors." Lore believes "everyone's money is green" and that early on the pipeline matters more than how selective you are. Repeated pitching also does something useful: each rejection helps him identify the one objection that actually needs answering.
Tactic: After every rejection, ask for the specific reason and two referrals, then rewrite the pitch before the next meeting.
Principle 7
Shrink the pitch to one belief
"I try to always narrow it down to, 'What's the one thing that if we accomplish it, the idea works?'" Lore said. "It's limiting the number of things that [investors] have to believe." Each extra premise in a pitch is another chance for an investor to say no. For Quidsi, the belief was that parents would stay loyal for reasons other than price. For Jet, it was that customers would accept slower delivery in exchange for lower prices. For Wonder, it is that families will order from one app that ends the argument over where to order from.
Founders tend to undervalue this because a long list of advantages looks thorough. In a pitch meeting, though, the list multiplies risk: if each claim has some chance of being doubted, the investor has to accept all of them. Lore turns a multi-part bet into one question, which is also why he can come back with a revised pitch after hearing no. There is only one thing to fix.
Tactic: Rewrite your pitch so that a skeptic has to believe exactly one claim, and spend most of the meeting proving it.
Principle 8
Make compensation a public fact
At Jet, everyone at the same level was paid the same salary and the same dollar value of equity, across ten tiers, with no negotiation. Lore described the values behind it as trust, transparency, and fairness, each producing the next. The system removed negotiation, ended the quiet comparisons that damage early teams, and closed pay gaps that come from differences in negotiating skill rather than performance.
This fits Lore's broader view of negotiation. He told FIU students that "sometimes it's a sign of strength to accept the first offer," and he believes he won the Timberwolves partly because other bidders kept negotiating. A founder who prefers not to negotiate and builds an organization where nobody can is acting consistently.
Tactic: Publish fixed salary-and-equity bands by level before your next hire, and decline to make exceptions.
Principle 9
Read the slope of the résumé, not the hour in the room
Lore says he has hired thousands of people and has concluded that "you cannot tell if somebody is a rock star in a one-hour interview." He now relies first on the résumé. He looks for "a demonstrable level of success in every job": several promotions, enough time at each company to earn them, and moves that are always upward. "Superstars don't move laterally." By the time a candidate with that profile gets an interview, he says, "I already know I want to hire them." The interview is used to check values and behavior.
He also keeps one rule that relies on instinct. In a LinkedIn essay about a hire he regretted, a candidate with an Ivy League degree and glowing references whose negativity "spread like a cancer," he described ignoring a "tap on the shoulder." His rule now is: "if I find myself wanting to call a candidate's references to determine if I should trust that 'tap on the shoulder,' I simply won't hire them." He screens for SPOTAK: smart, passionate, optimistic, tenacious, adaptable, kind. When asked which trait mattered most in his own success, he chose kindness.
Tactic: Screen every candidate's résumé for consistent upward moves before interviewing, and treat any urge to seek reassurance from references as a reason not to hire.
Principle 10
Sell to accelerate, never to exit
"Selling out means you sacrifice the vision," Lore wrote. Selling, by contrast, can be a way to reach the vision sooner. He described Jet's sale to Walmart as "a tool to reach [his] vision quicker with less risk," and pointed out that founders sell part of their company in every funding round anyway. On that view, the real question about an acquisition is not who owns the company afterward but whether the deal moves you closer to the goal.
He applied the same thinking to the companies Walmart bought under him. In an essay on what happens after an acquisition, he argued that telling acquired founders to "keep doing what you've been doing" quietly limits them. Moosejaw's CEO, Eoin Comerford, kept running Moosejaw and was also given the entire outdoor category across Walmart and Jet. ShoeBuy's and ModCloth's leaders got the same expanded scope. "Empowerment doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want as long as you agree with your new parent company," he wrote. "It means giving true authority to others."
Tactic: When evaluating an acquisition offer, or making one, ask whether the acquired team's mandate will grow afterward, and walk away if it won't.
Principle 11
Kill your own darling when the data says so
Lore's clearest acts of judgment have been decisions to destroy things he built. He dropped Jet's membership fee less than three months after launch. He moved Jet's resources into Walmart.com because, as McMillon put it, "he became convinced of the potential of the Walmart brand," and so Jet.com shut down in June 2020. He took Wonder's vans off the road and restarted the company "from zero revenue." Each time he gave up the attachment most founders cannot.
His explanation reverses the usual view of risk: "Most people underestimate the risk of the status quo and overestimate the risk of change." To a former risk manager, a familiar business model is not safe. It is an unpriced bet that the conditions that made it work will continue. He tells founders to "take in new information every minute with a clean slate." The shutdowns follow from that.
Tactic: Once a quarter, estimate in writing the cost of continuing your current model unchanged, and compare it directly to the cost of the biggest available pivot.
Principle 12
Re-pour the foundation every week
Lore says he spends 90 percent of his time on VCP: vision, capital, people. He recommends 300 or more hours of foundational work before raising money. More unusually, he keeps revisiting it. At Wonder his leadership team meets weekly and spends two hours on "the foundational elements of the vision, strategy, org structure, the capital plan, our performance management systems, compensation systems, behaviors, values — like, stuff that you think is already set." He says those things shift as a company grows, so he keeps reviewing them. With that alignment in place, he says, "you just let them run; I don't need to be involved at all."
This is why he dismissed "founder mode," the trend of CEOs managing deep into the organization. He prefers working at the level of the system rather than individual decisions. In his ranking, people come first: he now makes a Chief People Officer one of his first hires, which most founders put off for years. The approach suits a man who once wrote a professional handbook on risk. Most of the time, he manages the rules everyone else operates within.
Tactic: Set a recurring, protected weekly block in which leadership reviews vision, capital plan, structure, and values as if they were drafts.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Marc Lore, at Wharton's Baker Retailing CenterMost people underestimate the risk of the status quo and overestimate the risk of change. As an entrepreneur, you have to take risks to reduce risk.
— Marc Lore, to a founder communityI've always had this methodology of having no plan B, no backup plan. If you've got a backup plan, it is human nature to take it when things get tough. It has to be all or nothing.
— Marc Lore, on selling Jet to WalmartSelling out means you sacrifice the vision. Instead we joined forces with the world's largest company on an aligned vision – giving us a higher probability of achieving that vision, at a much faster rate.
— Marc Lore, In Search of ExcellenceMost of the biggest opportunities and ways to move the ball forward lies in the probabilities that nobody else wants to touch.
— Liza Landsman, former Jet.com executive, in Winner Sells AllMy grandmother had a saying, roughly translated from Yiddish: 'People who could talk clouds out of the sky.' And I always thought this about Marc.
Maxims
- Model the odds, then ignore them. Do the math to find the narrow path through a long shot, not to decide whether to try.
- Sell it before you build it. Taking the deposit or announcing the product tells you more than any market research.
- No exit ramps. A backup plan will get used the first time things get hard.
- Lose money on purpose. Decide where you take a loss, because that product is your customer acquisition.
- Every no comes with a reason and a referral. Ask for both, revise the pitch, and go back.
- One belief per pitch. Each additional premise is another way for an investor to say no.
- Same level, same pay. Making pay public removes negotiation, politics, and unfair gaps.
- Hire the slope. Consistent promotions over years predict performance better than an hour of interviewing.
- Selling isn't selling out. Judge any deal by whether it moves you toward the vision faster.
- Standing still is a bet too. Treat the current model as a risk to be measured, not as the safe option.
