Marc Lore, founder and CEO of food-tech startup Wonder, discusses the operational timeline and scaling challenges for the company's mobile restaurant delivery model.
Assertion Partly supported
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Disclosure
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.”
Assertion Partly supported
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…”