Mar 30, 2026 · 1h 13m · how-i-built-this
diapers.com: Marc Lore. The ecommerce visionary who lost to Amazon but still made billions (2021)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of How I Built This, serial entrepreneur Marc Lore details his journey from Wall Street banker to founding e-commerce giants Diapers.com and Jet.com. Lore shares how he navigated aggressive corporate warfare with Amazon, engineered complex logistics solutions, and transitioned from a mercenary mindset to mission-driven leadership.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 41.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 2.3 Guest teaching 2.3 Guest disagreement 0.8 Guy pushing back 1.2
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 57:05 Lore rejects revenge motive framing
Lore firmly pushes back on Raz's assertion that launching Jet.com was an act of personal revenge against Amazon, insisting it was solely about market size and corporate culture.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 56:30 Raz presses Lore on Amazon rivalryRaz refuses to accept Lore's polite framing of market expansion, invoking Lore's past track and test scores to argue that an intense competitive score-settling drove Jet.com.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 37:25 Lore corrects packaging profit misconceptionLore breaks down the precise unit economics of box volume, correcting Raz's assumption that packaging optimization made diapers profitable rather than subsidizing add-on basket shipping.
Guy holds their own ▶ 40:50 Raz details Quidsi warehouse strategyRaz demonstrates granular command of Lore's business model by naming specific tactical warehouse hubs in Camp Hill, Sparks, and Lenexa and their strategic cost advantages.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| E-Commerce Innovation and the Economics of Diapers | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Host monologue introducing Marc Lore's background and framing the economics of online diaper retail and e-commerce loss leaders. | |
| Childhood Influences, First Businesses, and Academic Realizations | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Lore shares childhood anecdotes about his bodybuilder mother, flipping baseball cards, and discovering in high school that college requires an admissions process. | |
| College at Bucknell and the Origins of Competitive Drive | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Lore clarifies that Bucknell did not give athletic scholarships, explains betting his coach he would get straight A's, and reflects on seeking his father's attention through extreme achievement. | |
| Wall Street Career and the Mercenary Mindset | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Lore describes his early fascination with derivatives in middle school and his intense mercenary drive upon entering Wall Street banking. | |
| Qualifying for the U.S. National Bobsled Team | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Lore details how pushing a promotional sled at the World Financial Center led to Lake Placid training, pushing cars in parking lots, and qualifying 13th for the U.S. Bobsled team. | |
| Disillusionment with Banking and Seeking Missionary Purpose | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Lore discusses quitting banking due to toxic culture and lack of empathy, contrasting his father's mercenary attitude with his grandfather's missionary purpose. | |
| Founding The Pit and Operating under Topps | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Lore corrects Raz's framing of The Pit, clarifying it was a dynamic stock exchange for athletes using cards as proxies rather than a collectibles marketplace, and explains putting his entire net worth on the line. | |
| The Ideation of Online Diaper Retail | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Lore explains how keyword search volume led him to diapers and educates Raz on the strategy of using loss-leader traffic to sell high-margin items across infinite online shelf space. | |
| Mid-Episode Break | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Lore explains buying wholesale diapers at full retail price to fulfill demand and strategically clearing wholesale club pallets to force P&G into direct supplier negotiations. | |
| Packaging Optimization, Sixth Gear, and the Quidsi Network | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Raz asks if packaging algorithms made diaper shipping profitable, prompting Lore to correct him that diapers never made money, but packaging efficiency lowered the marginal shipping cost of add-on products to near zero. | |
| The Price War with Amazon and Predatory Acquisition | 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Raz and Lore review Amazon's predatory 30% price cuts and Amazon Mom launch, with Lore revealing they were forced to turn down a higher $100M buyout offer due to Amazon's threats of total price obliteration. | |
| The Emotional Aftermath and Missionary Realignment | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Lore describes feeling depressed upon selling to Amazon despite making millions, feeling they had sold out on their broader mission and responsibility to staff. | |
| Intermission and Transition to Jet.com | 4 | 2 | 3 | 5 | Raz pushes hard against Lore's claim that Jet.com was not about beating Amazon given Lore's ultra-competitive background, but Lore defends his focus on company culture and market scale. | |
| Pivoting the Model and Navigating the $40M Monthly Burn | 3 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Lore explains pivoting away from membership fees to raise capital, burning $40M monthly, and adopting radical trust rather than holding grudges against skeptical investors. | |
| The $3.3 Billion Walmart Acquisition and Transforming Retail | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Lore contrasts selling to Walmart for $3.3B with the Amazon sale, emphasizing shared vision with Doug McMillon, acquiring Bonobos to shift cultural narrative, and transforming Walmart.com. | |
| Reflections on Persistence, Luck, and Future Disruptions | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Lore reflects on his Terminator-like persistence, shifting permanently from mercenary to missionary value creation, and jokingly ponders an alternate life in Olympic bobsledding. |
Statements from this episode (22)
Lore's childhood baseball card hustle profited by assembling sorted sets
“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.”
Marc Lore set a cubicle goal: eight-figure earnings by age 48
“I put a sign on my cubicle that said, Goal. Six figures by 26, seven figures by 37, eight figures by 48.”
Marc Lore became Sanwa Bank's youngest executive vice president at age 28
“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.”
Lore qualified for the U.S. National Bobsled Team by finishing 13th
“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.”
Marc Lore invested his entire $390,000 life savings to launch The Pit
“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…”
The Pit generated $10M in transaction volume in its first 10 months
“The first 10 months, we were doing about ten million in transaction revenue.”
Online diaper sales did not exist at normal retail prices in 2004
“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.”
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 …”
Diapers.com reached $11M in sales with only three total employees
“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.”
Diapers.com profited by cross-shipping items in the empty space of diaper boxes
“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…”
Founders only reach maximum execution when they cannot afford to lose
“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…”
VCs rejected Quidsi's $100M funding round because Amazon was targeting them
“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 …”
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.”
Amazon told Quidsi's team to keep competing against them post-acquisition
“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.”
Jet.com reached a $1B revenue run rate within 10 months of launching
“I mean, we got to a billion people Run rate in revenue within 10 months of the business launching, which was I think probably unprecedented at the time.”
Jet.com paid identical salaries to all employees at the same organizational tier
“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.”
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 burned roughly $40 million per month after its launch
“We were burning about forty million a month.”
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 …”