Marc Lore
Founder, Chairman & CEO, Wonder Group. On 3 shows, 6 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@MarcLore ↗LinkedIn ↗wonder.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Marc Lore co-founded Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com, and Jet.com, leading Walmart U.S. eCommerce as President and CEO from 2016 to 2021. He currently serves as the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Wonder Group and co-owns the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx.
3shows
6appearances
104statements
14resolved
8supported
2contradicted
57%fully supported
84said about them ↓ Everything Marc Lore said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Lore: Quidsi rejected a competing buyout offer $100M higher after Amazon threats
“Yeah, it's even, even worse that we got a higher offer that we didn't take.”
Amazon threatened to drop diaper prices to zero if Quidsi resisted sale
“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.”
Quidsi rejected a $100M higher buyout offer due to Amazon retaliation threats
“Because Amazon very clearly stated that if we took that offer, they would do even more to harm the business.”
Amazon explicitly threatened to price diapers at zero to force Quidsi sale
“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.”
Marc Lore: Candidates with top-10% resumes and SPOTIC traits are hired on the spot
“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.”
Lore: Stage-specific VC value-add is overdone and causes conflict
“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…”
Marc Lore refuses to interview candidates with lateral career moves
“Any kind of deviation to that, I don't, I just don't even, won't even interview. So a lateral move, out. Right. You know, move from a Google to Kmart. Sorry, Kmart, but out. Like, I just, I, anything, any little, like, tap that says not top five percent, and s…”
Lore pitched investors that Jet.com would lose $3B before turning profitable
“I told the investors we needed, we were gonna lose three billion dollars.”
Jet.com raised a $618M Series A while operating with negative gross margins
“But the real key was raising, we did a six hundred and eighteen million dollar Series A. So we'd raised some money before that, and then we had the six hundred million Series A. That was a really tough round to get done. That was, at that time, we had negative…”
Walmart acquired Bonobos strategically to change its image and attract elite talent
“The most strategic part of the plan was to change the narrative. I knew that we didn't have the talent inside of Walmart at the time to do what we needed to do. We had to attract the best people in the world, and at that point, you know, honestly, that wasn't …”
Lore: Big chocolate brands cannot execute a customizable direct-to-consumer model
“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.”
Lore: Price for scale and take zero margin to expand 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…”
Lore: Interviews cannot assess candidates; hiring must rely on track records
“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?”
Lore: AI-driven text commerce will act like a best friend recommending products
“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 …”
Marc Lore: Founders Must Invest Enough Personal Capital to Feel Life-or-Death Pressure
“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.”
Marc Lore: Founders Cannot Successfully Manage HR on the Side
“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…”
Marc Lore targets a $500M fund concentrated in 15 companies
“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…”
Marc Lore: Elite talent consistently makes step-function career moves
“Top five percenters, top 10 percentage of the elite people, when they move in step fashion. It'll be a bigger title, much bigger role, or a better company, and they'll get in that company, and they will be promoted multiple times, and then they'll leave, and t…”
Marc Lore rejects the 'trust but verify' management model
“A lot of people say, oh, trust, of course, trust, but verify. And I don't believe in the, but verify. I think you start out trusting people and until they prove otherwise. And it's very, Risky because you can get burned, but I've seen the power of the upside o…”
Marc Lore uses open compensation with identical pay per level
“That's why I have a open comp system where everybody knows what everybody else is making and everybody at the same level makes the same amount of money. So women, minorities, everybody makes the same. There's no like this idea that maybe it's not fair.”
Marc Lore: Startup acquisitions follow a barbell distribution
“You know, people tend to buy is the barbell strategy. They'll buy the aqua hire. You raise a million bucks and you bootstrapped it and you have like three good people and somebody will say like, oh, this is great. Like here's ten million... And then there's li…”
Marc Lore: Retail search engines will be obsolete in 20 years
“The idea of like search engine, 20 years from now is going to be laughably like the cassette tape. It's like, wait, so dad used to like go, you wanted to buy a toast and you typed in toaster in this like search engine and you had 10,000 responses and you had t…”
P&G and Kimberly-Clark initially refused to sell to Diapers.com
“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.”
Founders should solve customer love first and unit economics later
“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 …”
The other half of the tape: Marc Lore's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 77 times in 23 episodes across the shows. 7 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Andy Dunn 20Sam Parr 18Christina Carbonell 9Harry Stebbings 7Ted Wang 6Guy Raz 4Davis Smith 4Shaan Puri 3
Statements about Marc Lore, by other people (7)
Alex Rodriguez: Eliminate mid-tier candidates immediately to avoid being tricked
“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 …”
Marc Lore is the best entrepreneur on the East Coast
“Was Mark Laurie, who I think is the best entrepreneur on the East Coast.”
Parr: Marc Lore identified sizing returns as Walmart.com's top cost
“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.”
A Jet.com contest winner turned an $18K ad spend into $20M
“With, when Jet was growing or early on with Jet, they had a contest. I don't know if you've seen this article, but they had a contest about who can acquire the most customers for Jet. You become a marketer, you go spread the word, whoever, whoever does, whoeve…”
Dunn: Marc Lore is probably the East Coast's best e-commerce entrepreneur
“So probably the best third-party e-commerce entrepreneur on the East Coast.”
Marc Lore launched Diapers.com with a 30-page narrative business plan
“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.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
How I Built This 38
My First Million 23
20VC 16
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 13 mentions in 1 episode
2023 11 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- Alex Rodriguez: From MVP to CEO; Business Lessons from Warren Buffett & Magic Johnson | E1010 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Davis Smith: From Selling $6M of Pool Tables to Scaling Cotopaxi to $150M in Revenues | E1095 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- CEO Lessons: Bulls**t Mission Statements, Firing People & Saying ‘NO' (#505)
- This $3B Founder Is The Next Elon Musk (#499)
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 15 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
2021 18 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- Why You Shouldn't Be A Slave to a 40 Hour Work Week | My First Million #212
- Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, "How Much is Pomp Worth?", and More
- Why Today Is the Day to Ask For a Raise | My First Million #216
- How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, QVC for Mobile, and More
- Making Millions Improving Mobility & How to Beat LinkedIn | My First Million #184
- How to Have an Early Adopter Mindset, ConstitutionDAO, Optimizing Twitter Bios, and More
- How a $25 Million a Year Sweepstakes Business Works | My First Million #193
- How Vending Machines are Generating Millions & The Next Big Social App | My First Million #187
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 4 mentions in 1 episode
2019 8 mentions in 1 episode
2018 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
- 20VC: A Framework For Approaching Risk and How It Affects Portfolio Construction | Lessons and Advice From Working with Dropbox's Drew Houston | Why Being A Learning Animal Is The Most Important Factor For Success with Ted Wang, Partner @ Cowboy Ventures
- 20VC: Why Brands Can Have The Same Revenue Multiples As Enterprise Companies & The Right Way To Think About Amazon In Today's World of Commerce with Eurie Kim, General Partner @ Forerunner Ventures
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Marc's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder, Chairman & CEO, Wonder Group | 4 | 58 | 55% 6/11 | full record on How I Built This → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder, Chairman & CEO, Wonder Group | 1 | 24 | 0% 0/1 | full record on 20VC → |
| MY FIRST MILLIONLEDGER | Founder, Chairman & CEO, Wonder Group | 1 | 22 | 100% 2/2 | full record on My First Million → |