Marc Lore

“Big part of the business was grunt work. We would buy cases of baseball cards that weren't sorted, and then we would basically sort them into full sets, and then sell the sets, and the sets were sold at a premium because somebody had to sort them.”

“I put a sign on my cubicle that said, Goal. Six figures by 26, seven figures by 37, eight figures by 48.”

“Yeah, I was the executive vice president, which was by far the youngest executive vice president. Yeah, I was 28 when I got the job, yeah.”

“And then at the end of the month, they had like the time trials to see who makes the U.S. National team and they were going to take 13 people and I finished 13th.”

“I invested 390,000 of my own money into the company. And, you know, the investors, the angel investors said, we're not sure about this idea, but wait, I see here, Mark, you invested 390 grand. That's a lot of money. You know, you're not that old. Why 390 and w…”

“It might have been 2003, 2004, somewhere around there. You could not buy diapers at a normal price. They were, like, prices were, like, jacked to ridiculous levels. It just wasn't a thing. Nobody bought them online.”

“Procter & Gamble and Kimberly Clark, the two big diaper manufacturers that make Pampers and Huggies, they refused to sell us diapers. They said they just don't want to waste their time on a business that's never going to work.”

“The learning, you know, just, and it still stands today, it's the idea that as long as customers love the service, and they're repeating, and they give you good marks, that you had something. You had something that was valuable. You had a brand, and there was …”

“At eleven million in sales, it was basically just me and Vinny, and we hired another woman to, like, help us with customer care and some of the fulfillment. But we got up to eleven million in sales with two people, three people, basically.”

“But you could make money, because the way shipping works is, if you're shipping a box of diapers to someone, and you have empty space in that box, the marginal cost to ship the next thing you put in the box is very, very small, very low. Like, it might be, you…”

“It's only when you have your life on the line and you can't afford to lose can you find the sixth gear. And when you're in that sixth gear, at least for me, It's like a out-of-body experience. It is like you don't have time to worry, think, be anxious, just ha…”

“We had only raised 50,000,055 million dollars up until that point, which was pretty modest amount of money raised compared to today's standards, but we went out and we needed another hundred million to keep all the websites going and to really blow it out. We …”

“Because Amazon very clearly stated that if we took that offer, they would do even more to harm the business.”

“They said, well, yeah, we're gonna take the price of diapers to zero, and we're gonna, you know, and they made some analogies to some other, used explicit language, and it was pretty scary stuff. I'll just leave it at that.”

“Like, Amazon didn't even, when they brought us in, say, hey, we want you guys to run the mom, baby, parent category within Amazon. They said, you know what, just keep doing what you're doing. Just continue to keep competing with us.”

“The transparency of salaries so everybody could see what everybody else was making. The fact that everybody in the company at the same level made exactly the same amount, you know, to really prevent unconscious bias from creeping in and things like that.”

“We had a big vision for what we wanted to accomplish, and it was cut short. So, yeah, it was, I mean, you would think after a sale like that, we made, obviously, a lot of money, me and my co-founder, but we said, do you want to celebrate? You want to go grab a…”

“Telling the board 450 trucks on the road and thirty million in revenue. We're going to take that to zero. We're selling the trucks. We'll take revenue to zero.”

“You have to have the mentality that you start off a startup, and you're sort of digging for silver, but you gotta be on the lookout for gold all the time, and you might just see gold, and when you see it, you gotta go for it, and it doesn't matter what egg on …”

“There's no way a big company can do the sort of build a bear type approach and chocolate. And so you could really own that market.”

“I'm always Thinking about scale and working backwards, and I would say, you know, at sort of ten million units, what's your cost, ah, of the display and the packaging, you know, like, and then figure out what the retail price would be off the back of that, and…”

“If you are thinking about selling it, then it would be more valuable to have deeper penetration in a regional market than a shallow penetration in a national market.”

“Thought I can interview somebody and find out if they're good, and you just can't. It comes down to resume. You have a history. You've been in the workforce. What have you done?”

“Cause you know, corporations, they just tend to shy away from risk and low probability outcomes. And I sort of gravitate more toward Low probability outcome, but massive upside. And I think that's where the opportunity lies for an entrepreneur.”

“The business plan itself was, it was like a thirty-page narrative, and I'd never seen anything like it. It was so well thought out. It was insanely ambitious.”

“The tens and the fives are easy to recognize. The tens, you know, jump out of the page, and the fives are people you're probably not going to hire. The challenge is when you have the six and the sevens, and the six and the sevens have the gift of gab, and are …”

“I don't think. 10 years from now, people are going to still be satisfied with soggy fries.”

“Well, we've built now 20 restaurant chains across all different cuisines, and we put it on a mobile platform so that the restaurant actually comes to you, cooks right outside your door very fast in a high-speed convection oven, and brings the food piping hot t…”

“The one person drives and cooks and brings it to your door. So there's only one person on the truck.”

“We pay people pretty well, so it's over 20 dollars an hour starting, and up from there, full health benefits, and we also give everyone stock in wonder.”

“It's going to take probably, you know, 10 to 15 years to roll it out across the country. It's not something you do in just a couple years.”

“So by next summer, by July, we'll have 30 restaurant chains, which we believe is, is around the right number.”

“I like hard businesses. I like businesses that require capital and are hard. To execute, because if you pull it off it makes it really difficult to be a copycat.”

“Using artificial intelligence and texting, I think people would be able to, in the future, just text what they want, and the system would know you as well as your best friend or family member, and be able to recommend precisely what you want, and either using …”

“Was Mark Laurie, who I think is the best entrepreneur on the East Coast.”

“He said, he goes, the number one problem, the number one cost that our company has at wall, you know, walmart.com, the third or fourth or second most popular e-com website in the world. The number one thing is returns due to bad sizes.”

“Mark announced his new venture firm, Vision Capital People, with his co-founder, Alex Rodriguez, earlier this year, with fifty million dollars of Alex and Mark's own money”

“I was the chief risk officer for a bank. I was making a half a million bucks a year.”

“I have 390,000 saved and putting it in. And he goes, all right, you've really lost your mind now, but you know what? You're all in. And I think you're going to make this work. So can I put 50 grand in as your first investor? And he did.”

“I wouldn't recommend putting your life savings in. But I would recommend putting enough money in so that you feel like it's life or death, because that's the only way to get into what I call the sixth gear.”

“If you want, in sixth gear, this idea of being in sixth gear and sleeping five hours a night, that doesn't work. You can't, you don't have enough energy to be in sixth gear for the remaining hours in the day.”

“You can't tell somebody that doesn't have this unhealthy childhood to find that motivation. It's something that's unexplainable, but I think it's really healthy when it starts, and I think with therapy and time, I think it can morph into something that's healt…”

“I don't think you take risk on values. So I think you need to be really grounded, know what your values are, what your core values, and never deviate, and even live them when they're hard. I think that Sometimes it's hard, but that means you're living your val…”

“I've found, and I'm very trusting, when you openly trust someone, really trust them, like where they can burn you, like put yourself in a place where they could burn you. They rarely do. Occasionally you might get burned, and that's part of one of the conseque…”

“I found that actually it is more like one 50. Like it's rare that you will get burned and you'll get better at associating with people that are less likely to burn you. But the upside is tremendous. Like I said, if you go halfway on trusting or three quarters,…”

“I'm a big fan of Myers-Briggs personality test. There's 16 personalities. I try and know the personality type of all my friends, family, and anyone, colleagues, because I think understanding the personality type is like kind of the first, you know, the beginni…”

“If you think that, or the CEO or the founder of a company thinks that they can found the company, do the capital, do the vision, do all the parts of the business, and on the side with their pinky, do like the chief people stuff. That's not gonna work. You're n…”

“It's very, very, very rare, and I talked to people about this, that you'll actually change your mind from a reference. Like, I want to hire this person, let me check the references, and then you're like, no, now I'm not going to hire the person. Or, I don't th…”

“I won't interview somebody, or I don't even want to meet them. I don't want to see them until they passed the resume test”

“When they leave the company that they're at, Superstars make demonstrable jumps in either title, level, type of company, and it's very clear.”

“And if I find a top 10% resume with spotty traits, home run, and then I hire them on the spot. I don't need to do any references at that point. They've already proven on their resume and do the values that they're amazing.”

“Most people don't really understand what a superstar is, so I, for the most part, I will never take a recommendation unless the resume is Fits the description.”

“Yeah, it would be, you know, more like 15 investments. How do you put ten million seed in a company, and then the company winds up, let's say you own 40% for ten million, and then the company winds up doing a fifty million dollar round that you lead to keep yo…”

“I find if you've got the very best people in the world in a certain segment of the market, it's always going to be really valuable and interesting to a strategic.”

“I gave them five million and helped them raise the fifty million, the same kind of Same kind of thing. I kicked off the fifty million dollar round with 10, and that all came together, and they had sixty million dollars. They had the best team in the world. The…”

“I don't think people spend enough time on the vision. They'll say, like, if you ask somebody, what is your vision? 10 to 15 years, where do you want to be? It's rare that somebody will be able to, like, recite a, like, really tight three to five sentences of e…”

“I think it's a little overdone, this idea that, like, they help in a different way, the C or the A. When I think about my best investors, because they came in all the rounds, I treat them all like they're just great. They're sounding boards, they open doors, t…”

“Albert Potkin and Nicole Winneman just announced recently that me and Alex Rodriguez invested We did take a 40% stake in the company and it's in social commerce.”

“I think the two big areas still left untapped in retail are social commerce and conversational commerce.”

“Archer, Mark and I came in sub a hundred million dollars. Mark was a big, big investor there. I came in a little bit later and we took Archer from a hundred million dollars and it went public at 3.6 billion. And all this happened in less than two years.”