Full stop, Jet.com founder and former Walmart U.S. e-commerce wizard Marc Lore is trying to shake up the world.
And that’s where Yahoo Finance found Lore on a recent Wednesday afternoon, somewhere between executing on big, bold new ideas (food delivery startup Wonder plus city of the future Telosa), mapping out a vision for basketball teams Minnesota Timberwolves and Minnesota Lynx (which he now partly owns with former baseball star Alex Rodriguez) and having a little fun on Twitter (posting a video of watching Olympic bobsled training, a sport then Credit Suisse banker Lorealmost played back in the late 1990s after passing a sprinting tryout).
“I’m feeling great. Like you said, I’m living my best life,” Lore — who left Walmart as its change-making U.S. e-commerce chief almost one year ago — told Yahoo Finance. “I’ve been out of Walmart about a year. And you know, I was there for a little over four years and I started thinking about all the things I wanted to do in the future. And when I came out of Walmart, I wound up doing them all in the first 12 months. I was like, check, check, check, check.”
Indeed, Lore is checking a whole lot of boxes right now on a list that describes serial entrepreneur.
Lore is the driving force behind food delivery startup Wonder, which is officially out of stealth mode. The basic premise for Wonder is this: Lore wants to democratize good food. He plans to do that by licensing out the menus of popular chefs such as Bobby Flay, making their iconic food inside mobile kitchens and delivering it right to your doorstop.
Lore thinks he could have thousands of these mobile food trucks in operation across the country, but plans to have 1,000 out and about by next year. And he is currently out there raising capital to scale the business (he declines to share how much capital he has raised in our interview).
“We are in fact democratizing, giving people access to great food, food that you couldn’t otherwise get,” Lore explained.
When Lore isn’t thinking about mobile kitchens whipping up spicy Bobby Flay concoctions, he is also building out a 10-year vision for his recent high-profile purchases: basketball teams Minnesota Timberwolves and the Minnesota Lynx.
The first increment of the $1.5 billion sale of the Minnesota Timberwolves to Lore and “A-Rod” as part of their VCP (Vision Capital People) investment firm became official in July. By 2023, the pair will become controlling owners.
Meanwhile, Lore has posted several Twitter videos of himself practicing jump shots in the gymnasium — not surprising to see as business people always try to better understand a business by immersing themselves in it.
“Obviously, we want to start winning, like any team it’s about winning, but more so how do we want to be viewed by the world? You know, what do we want to be known for and admired for? It goes beyond winning, it has to be on and off the court,” Lore said of his vision for the basketball franchises.
‘Selling versus selling out’
To say Lore is a serial entrepreneur whose motor is always running is putting it mildly. And having followed Lore’s career for a while, I can’t say I am shocked by his feverish pace of activity post life at the buttoned up Walmart.
Lore founded Quidsi in 2005, a business made famous by domain name diapers.com. Amazon bought Quidsi in 2010 for about $545 million. Lore worked at Amazon until 2013, and then founded delivery outfit Jet.com.
The world’s largest retailer Walmart acquired Lore’s Jet.com in 2016 for $3.3 billion in cash. Although some on Wall Street viewed the purchase price as lofty at the time, there is no denying the impact Lore and the Jet.com folks have had on Walmart since the deal closed in September 2016. Walmart shut down Jet.com in March 2020.
Recalls Lore on selling his ventures, “I always talk about this thing selling versus selling out. I think diapers.com or Quidsi, when we sold it to Amazon, it was sort of depressing, because we had a big vision and we were sort of going after it. And when we sold the company, it was sort of like, OK, you guys just keep doing what you’re doing over here. And like stay out of our way a little bit and it was very depressing, because it’s like, the vision was gone, the vision we had no longer existed. And that was sort of like selling out. When we sold to Walmart, it was just the opposite. It was like, here you go, here are the keys, bring Jet.com and bring walmart.com and bring them together. And now the vision you had, it’s our vision too, we’re going to give you capital and you give time to get there faster, with a higher probability of success. Go at it. So that didn’t feel like selling. It felt invigorating, it felt great.”
Creating ‘a more equitable, sustainable future’
Lore concedes he has a lot going on, and we haven’t even gotten to the part of him wanting to create a city from scratch. It’s something Lore teased to me about one year ago on the day he announced he would be leaving Walmart. Since then, the project — named Telosa — has taken on a life of its own and pretty much has gone viral.
For good reason.
Lore is looking to create a utopia-like society from dirt, underpinned by a business philosophy called equitism (as opposed to pure profit-focused capitalism). Total reported cost of the project: $400 billion. Settlers may begin to arrive by 2030, says Lore. No location has yet been picked. Lore says ideally he would like to secure 200,000 acres as that would accommodate 5 million people.
“We are trying to identify the right location, while also bringing on board members that share the same passion we have, believe in the mission. The mission is really to just simply create a more equitable, sustainable future. That’s really what the project’s about, it’s not about building a city, it’s not a real estate project. This is a not-for-profit project,” Lore explained.
Continued Lore, “For society, we’re sort of calling it equitism, because it’s like a more equitable form of capitalism. It’s getting a lot of traction, people like the idea of having these great social services without having to increase taxes to cover it. The social services of the city would essentially be funded through the appreciation of the value of the land underlying it, Lore explained.
All in all, sounds like one serial entrepreneur trying to live his best life.
