diapers.com: Marc Lore. The ecommerce visionary who lost to Amazon but still made billions (2021)

Summary

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How I Built This with Guy Raz

Episode: Diapers.com: Marc Lore – The Ecommerce Visionary Who Lost to Amazon but Still Made Billions

Original Interview: May 2021
Summary covers content beginning at [04:35]

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Overview

In this episode, Guy Raz interviews Marc Lore, the entrepreneur behind Diapers.com and Jet.com. Lore shares his unconventional journey from a struggling student to a Wall Street executive, reluctant banker, and eventually to building and selling two landmark e-commerce companies—one to Amazon and the next to Walmart. The conversation unpacks early failures, bold bets, relentless competition with Amazon, and the mindset shifts that took Lore from “mercenary” to “missionary” entrepreneur.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Early Life and Drive

• Upbringing and Influence:

  • Raised in New Jersey; his father ran a computer consulting business, his mother was a personal trainer and bodybuilder.
  • Early entrepreneurial ventures: newspaper delivery, car washing, baseball cards ([08:24], [09:05]).
  • Academic struggles and family dynamic shaped his ambition.

    "I was the first person to go to a four-year college… I didn't do homework. I didn't pay attention in class. I was the class clown. I just didn't take school seriously."
    – Marc Lore [09:45]

  • A pivotal moment was realizing, as a high school sophomore, that getting into college required acceptance, not simply paying tuition.

• Competitiveness and Transition to Focus:

  • “If I had to turn it on… I got the highest score in the class.”
    – Marc Lore [12:58]
  • Used competitive drive to prove himself, motivated by familial validation.

• College and Athletics:

  • Attended Bucknell University, leveraging athletic prowess despite lackluster grades.
  • Coach challenged him to maintain straight A's; Lore delivered ([11:41]-[12:37]).

2. Wall Street: Ambition vs. Fulfillment

• Banking Career:

  • Rose quickly, reaching Executive VP at Sanwa Bank by 28 ([16:51]).
  • Focused on financial goals: "Goal: six figures by 26, seven figures by 37, eight figures by 48."
    – Marc Lore [16:19]

• Athletic Feats:

  • Qualified for the U.S. National Bobsled Team ([17:18]-[20:25]).
  • Chose not to pursue athletics full-time—remained money-driven.

• Something Missing:

  • Despite financial success, Lore felt unfulfilled—attributed to a clash between his "mercenary" upbringing and the "missionary" values from time spent with grandparents ([21:06]-[22:53]).

3. First Startup: The Pit

• Concept: Online sports stock market using baseball cards as proxies for athletes ([23:36]-[24:43]).
• All-In Mentality: Invested all his savings: "Why 390? Why not 400? Because that's all I had."
  – Marc Lore [24:50]
• Initial Success and Sale:
  • $10M in transaction revenue in 10 months ([26:24]).
  • Sold to Topps for $5.7M after the dot-com crash ([27:01]).
  • All investors got their money back, modest gain ([27:12]).

4. Diapers.com: Founding and Early Struggles

• Idea Genesis: Noticed "diapers" had high monthly search volume, little online availability ([29:28]-[29:56]).
• Obstacle: Diapers as notorious “loss leaders”; impossible to make money due to price competition and high shipping ([31:26]-[31:58]).
• Vision: Use diapers to drive traffic and upsell high-margin baby products ([32:19]-[32:49]).
• Bootstrapping:
  • Couldn’t get manufacturers (Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark) to sell direct ([33:42]).
  • Bought diapers at retail price from wholesale clubs and resold at a loss to build customer love:

    "Let me get this straight. So you’re selling a dollar for 90 cents?"
    – Investor to Marc Lore [38:56], [05:02]

• Belief in Value:
  • Focused on repeat customers and delivering great service, despite mounting losses.
  • "The learning… as long as customers love the service and they're repeating… you have something valuable."
    – Marc Lore [39:53]

5. Scaling Up: Growth, Box Optimization, and New Categories

• Breaking In: Finally convinced manufacturers to sell direct by leveraging buying power and clearing out wholesale stock ([40:56]).
• Efficiency: Brought in a PhD physicist from his banking days to optimize shipping with "Boxem"—minimizing wasted space and cost ([42:42]-[44:13]).
  • Still couldn’t make a profit on diapers alone; needed to upsell additional items ([44:37]-[44:49]).
• Expansion:
  • Launched multiple niche retail sites (Soap.com, Wag.com, BeautyBar.com, Yoyo.com) under the Quidsy umbrella ([48:05]).

6. The Amazon Wars: Growth, Showdown, and Sale

• Amazon’s Reaction:

  • As Diapers.com neared ~$300M revenue (2010), Amazon slashed diaper prices 30%. Lore confirms it was direct retaliation, not coincidence ([50:02]).
  • Growth slowed, but customer loyalty remained strong ([50:22]).

• Strategic Pressure and Acquisition:

  • Fundraising became impossible as investors were wary of Amazon’s involvement ([51:06]).

  • Amazon launches "Amazon Mom" and leverages pricing as a competitive weapon ([53:01]).

  • Threatened to cut diaper prices to zero if Lore accepted a higher offer elsewhere ([54:05]-[54:41]).

    “They said… we're gonna take the price of diapers to zero, and… made some analogies to some other… use explicit language. And it was pretty scary stuff. I’ll just leave it at that.”
    – Marc Lore [54:34]

  • Sold Quidsy/Diapers.com to Amazon for $550M, citing lack of choice ([54:54]).

  • "We didn't want to sell the business… we basically sold out."
    – Marc Lore [57:55]

7. Life at Amazon & Culture

• Post-Sale:
  • Lore describes depression, not celebration, after the acquisition ([56:58]), feeling a sense of unfinished mission.
• Cultural Priorities:
  • Stresses culture at Diapers.com was everything—employees’ well-being and fairness ([55:56]).

8. Jet.com: The Rematch

• Motivation: Unfinished business and the desire to build a formidable Amazon competitor ([61:47]).
• Innovation:
  • Jet.com used dynamic pricing to encourage customers to build efficient order baskets, saving on supply chain/shipping ([62:04]-[64:02]).
  • Raised $750M; planned on Amazon/Costco-like hybrid ([64:08]).
  • Attempted a membership model but dropped it after VC skepticism ([67:43]).
• Rocket Growth:
  • Hit $1B run-rate revenue in 10 months ([65:31]).
• Strategic Mindset:
  • “Vision, capital, and people” are the three levers that determine business success ([64:57]).
  • Honed company culture with transparency and salary equity ([66:28]).
• Amazon 2.0:
  • Difference: Now a mass merchant, not single-problem company; less susceptible to Amazon’s surgical attacks ([67:06]).

9. Jet.com Acquisition by Walmart

• Acquisition:
  • Walmart acquired Jet.com for $3.3B, the largest e-commerce startup acquisition in U.S. history ([71:58]).
  • Lore accepted after alignment of mission and values with Walmart’s CEO, Doug McMillon ([72:30]).

    “We didn't sell out. Yes, we sold the company, but the mission was very much intact…”
    – Marc Lore [73:43]

  • Given broad autonomy to transform Walmart’s e-commerce ([73:47]).
• Culture Shift:
  • Walmart seen as more empowering for Lore than Amazon ([75:34]-[76:11]).
  • Creative acquisitions (e.g., Bonobos) to rewrite Walmart's image and attract top digital talent ([76:38]).

10. Reflection, Legacy & Next Steps

• Retrospective:
  • Lore attributes success to “values creating value” ([80:22]).
  • Admits luck played a part, but persistent drive and not accepting failure crucial ([79:19]).

    "The drive to keep coming, like the Terminator, I wouldn’t accept failure. You know, I just would keep going and going and going until the luck turned my way."
    – Marc Lore [79:19]

• Future:
  • Lore, now nearly 50, sees the next 20 years as a chance to have real, disruptive global impact ([78:49]).

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Early Sacrifice

  “Because that's all I had.”
  – Marc Lore on investing his life savings [24:50]

• On Selling at a Loss

  "Let me get this straight. So you're selling a dollar for 90 cents?”
  – Investor [05:02] / [38:56]

• On Competitive Drive

  “If I had to turn it on… I got the highest score in the class.”
  – Marc Lore [12:58]

• On Values & Mission

  "Once I made the transition from mercenary to missionary, I let values create the value. That's what happened. Values created the value."
  – Marc Lore [80:22]

• On Facing Amazon

  “They said, well, yeah, we're gonna take the price of diapers to zero... use explicit language... pretty scary stuff. I'll just leave it at that.”
  – Marc Lore [54:41]

• On Not Celebrating After Big Success

  “We were depressed. We were depressed.”
  – Marc Lore [56:58]

• On Jet.com’s Team Culture

  “Everybody in the company at the same level made exactly the same amount, to really prevent unconscious bias from creeping in…”
  – Marc Lore [66:29]

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Important Segments (with Timestamps)

• Marc Lore's Childhood and Competitiveness: [08:24]–[14:13]
• Early Interest in Finance, Wall Street Career: [14:41]–[21:06]
• First Startup Experience "The Pit": [23:36]–[27:12]
• Origin of Diapers.com: [29:28]–[31:09]
• Bootstrapping and Buying at a Loss: [37:45]–[40:49]
• Box Optimization & Supply Chain: [42:42]–[44:13]
• Amazon's Direct Attack: [49:47]–[54:41]
• Selling to Amazon and Aftermath: [54:54]–[57:55]
• Launching Jet.com and Rationale: [61:47]–[66:14]
• Walmart Acquisition and Integration: [71:58]–[76:38]
• Reflection on Mission, Luck, Lessons: [79:08]–[80:58]

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Final Thoughts

Guy Raz and Marc Lore’s wide-ranging conversation provides an honest look into the risks, emotional costs, and strategic thinking behind building businesses in Amazon’s shadow. Lore’s journey—a blend of work ethic, vision, resilience, and shifting from money-centric to mission-driven entrepreneurship—offers unique lessons for founders navigating fiercely competitive, capital-intensive industries.

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Transcript

[Guy Raz]

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[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You will learn so much in this episode.

[Guy Raz]

Anyway, Mark is now working on a new business called Wonder.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It's a high tech food delivery concept.

[Guy Raz]

And back in 2024, he joined me on the Advice Line podcast and he talked about some of the challenges and

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

changes that Wonder is facing.

[Guy Raz]

So if you want to hear more about that, you can SC back in your queue. But for now, let's hear how it all began with Mark's earliest business in diapers dot com. Here's our conversation for May of 2021.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Enjoy.

[Marc Lore]

In the early days, believe it or not, we'd actually go to the wholesale clubs, so BJ's, Sam's Club, and we would buy the diapers.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And you were just paying full price for these diapers.

[Marc Lore]

Full price, no discount.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Then you gotta mark it up on the website. So why would somebody buy them from

[Marc Lore]

you on the we didn't mark them up.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You didn't mark them up?

[Marc Lore]

No, we just lost more money.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you were basically losing money to make it more convenient for people to

[Marc Lore]

get diapers, as one investor liked to say. Let me get this straight. So you're selling a dollar for 90 cents?

[Guy Raz]

Welcome to how I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz and on the show,

[Guy Raz]

how Mark Lore took an idea guaranteed to lose him money selling diapers online, built an e commerce giant, sold it to Amazon, and then went head to head with them by building an even bigger business. Jet.com.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Lots of stories we've told on this show are about consumer brands that succeeded not by Creating something entirely new, but by taking something old or unremarkable and selling it more cheaply or efficiently or seamlessly than others. Michael Dubin took the frustrating experience of buying men's razors at the drugstore and

[Guy Raz]

turned it into an easier and less

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

expensive one by creating Dollar Shave Club. Same story with Warby, Parker, and Framebridge.

[Guy Raz]

These companies offered their customers pretty much

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

the same type of glasses and the same type of picture frames you could

[Guy Raz]

buy anywhere else and just figured out

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

how to make them easier and cheaper and even slightly cooler to buy online. And that basically is what Marc Lawre wanted to do with one of the most essential products ever invented, diapers.

[Guy Raz]

He wanted to sell them online easily, cheaply, and effortlessly.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Except that unlike glasses or razors or picture frames, the margins on diapers suck.

[Guy Raz]

In fact, diapers are a loss leader. Most stores that sell them don't make money on them. They make money by getting you into

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

the store to buy other things. Baby wipes, pacifiers, clothing, strollers, and more. And Mark Lorre believed that he could pretty much do the same thing, except without the costs of a brick and mortar operation. So in 2005, he launched Diapers.com with a partner, and by 2010, his company

[Guy Raz]

became the biggest seller of baby products

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

on the Internet, which was great, but

[Guy Raz]

it also caught the attention of one

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

notable and powerful competitor, and that competitor,

[Guy Raz]

yes, it was Amazon, would end up

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

acquiring diapers.com for nearly half a billion dollars, which, as you will hear, was not a happy moment in Marc Lore's career. So a few years later, he started another e commerce site, a retailer that went head to head with Amazon. And mark called it Jet.com, a business

[Guy Raz]

that would eventually be acquired by Walmart for around $3 billion.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

As a kid, Mark Lore grew up in New Jersey. His dad ran a computer consulting business, and his mom was a personal trainer and a bodybuilder.

[Marc Lore]

So it was kind of fun. You know, I was probably a junior in high school going to my mom's bodybuilding competitions.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Wow.

[Marc Lore]

But she did well. She won a couple competitions and things. It was fun, but really inspirational as a kid, I bet.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah. My mom's a bodybuilder. There's my mom, my ripped mom. She's gonna kick your butt.

[Marc Lore]

She used to squat, like, 350 pounds when she was, like, 110 pounds. Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

That's insane.

[Marc Lore]

I know.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I read that, like, when you were in middle school, you got into different businesses and stuff, and you started selling baseball cards in high school. And did you make Money. Were you good at buying cards for cheap and selling them for, for more expensive?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, I would say we did okay. I did it with very close friends. Lax, Chandra. 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.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah.

[Marc Lore]

So we would do that all summer. But I also did every possible sort of job a kid could possibly do. Everything from, you know, newspapers, recyclables, washing cars, mowing lawns, picking weeds, anything to make a buck.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah. How were you at school as a kid? Were you good in school?

[Marc Lore]

No, I wasn't good at school. I definitely had some, you know, my parents used to fight all the time. It was like a. It was rough growing up. I didn't focus on school at all. My parents, I was the first person to go to a four year college and my parents didn't really know much about school. My mom went back to get her high school diploma. They got married when my dad was 20. She was 19. Had me less than a year later. Yeah, I didn't do homework. I didn't pay attention in class. I was the class clown. I just didn't take school seriously and there was no repercussions at all. In fact, when I was a sophomore in high school, I remember somebody asking me, hey, so where are you going to go to college? Are you thinking about college yet? I said, I don't know, I'd probably just go to Harvard. And they said, Harvard? You can't get in Harvard. What do you mean? And I said, what do you mean get in? Don't you just say where you want to go and then you pay and you go like, no, it doesn't work like that. You have to actually get into the school. They have to accept you. This is literally the first time I ever understood or knew sophomore year in high school that you had to get accepted. And so that was sort of a wake up call. And then junior year I did start like applying myself and did better.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah, it sounds like it wasn't particularly stressed at home that like you had to do well and make good grades and stuff.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, not at all. But I was mathematically gifted, like gifted in math when I was a little kid as a soothing mechanism, you know, I used to count and then eventually when I got a little bit old, I used to do multiplication problems in my head and big stuff like that. Yeah, it was just, it Just. I guess it was just natural.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You ended up going to Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, and I guess on a track and field scholarship, Right? Like you. That was why you ended up going there. Because as a kid, you were, like, a pretty gifted athlete. You were, like a high school state champion.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah. So it wasn't. They don't give scholarships. But it was what helped me get into that school because I didn't have the grades to get in. But when I got there, I didn't realize this, but when I got there, the coach sat me down. He said, okay, you know, you're basically on academic probation. The day I got there, and they said, you know, you need to, like, get certain grades to stay on this team. And I said, well, you know, I want to be a decathlete, which is 10 events. And he said, no, you're not going to have time to train for that. You need to focus on school if you're going to stay on this team and stay in the school. I'm like, wait a second. I just got here. So that kind of got me fired up. And I told the coach, I said, all right, well, listen, how about this? If I get straight A's first semester, then I'm good, right? Then you'll train me. And he laughed and he told the team. He said, oh, Mark just made me a bet. You know, I gotta train him for the decathlon if he gets straight A's. I was like, okay, fine. And then I got straight A's the first semester. Wow.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

What explains that? Were your classes more interesting once you got to college? Were they easier or what?

[Marc Lore]

It was more just. First of all, I was challenged by the coach, and I felt like, you know, I think he thought I was just not smart or something, because the way it started off.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Did you, by the way, did you think you weren't smart?

[Marc Lore]

No, I knew I was smart, yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You knew you were smart?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah. Because if I ever had to turn it on once in biology class, I got the lowest score in the class. And it was like a seven or something. I didn't study. It was really embarrassing because he. This teacher, Mr. Arminati, would announce the lowest and the highest score. And it was just really embarrassing. He's like, and the lowest score. And he would do it in a really condescending way. And everyone laughs. It was just very bad. I can't imagine doing that today. But anyway, after I got the lowest score, I studied for the next exam. And he announced my name again. But this time it wasn't the lowest score. It was the highest score.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So it sounds like what drove you was a competitive spirit. Right. Like you wanted, if you had to. And to prove yourself, you. You. You were gonna be the best.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah. Also, it's just a. Probably just based on growing up, my dad, you know, was not completely present. And the only way to get my dad's attention was to do something extraordinary. So it's sort of programming as a young kid, like, to associate doing big things with feeling loved, basically. I didn't realize that growing up. Obviously, it's only with therapy and as an adult, thinking back to that stuff, but that is ultimately where my drive came from. It didn't come from a healthy place. It wasn't healthy. But I've turned it into something more healthy today.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So it sounds like you were a talented track and field athlete and you studied. I read you studied business and economics. So was it kind of in your mind that. And given that you had some, like, strengths in math, that you would go into something around finance out of college? Was that in your mind?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, when I was in middle school, I started reading books. Like, in seventh grade, I started reading books on derivatives. Like, when it came to learning about how to. How derivatives work, I could get into that book and read it cover to cover, no problem.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

That sounds so unbelievably boring. Okay, keep going.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, so, no, so I would literally read books on derivatives. Any book I can get. So when I graduated from Bucknell, I wanted to get into derivatives, basically. Even though I was very entrepreneurial, I didn't even know that was an option. The idea that you could be an entrepreneur at that time.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you, I guess you graduate in 1993, and your first job at a school is with Banker's Trust in New York City. And I guess your goal was to work at the trading desk.

[Marc Lore]

That's correct.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Did you enjoy it? I mean, you're in New York City, you're on your own, you're independent, you got your own apartment. Like, was it exciting or were you always working? What do you remember about that time?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, no, I loved. I didn't enjoy college as much as other people. I was ready to get in the work world, start, have a job and make money. I grew up basically a mercenary, as I call it. You know, I was growing up in a household with my dad always talking about, you know, making money and my uncles making money and going to Atlantic City and trying to beat the house at blackjack and going to the horse track with my uncles and trying to make a buck. It was like Everything was about making money. That's what I call mercenary kind of attitude. And when I got into banking, all I wanted to do was make money. I put a sign on my cubicle that said, goal. Six figures by 26, seven figures by 37, eight figures by 48.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Wow.

[Marc Lore]

And I basically worked as hard as any person could possibly work. I was always the first one in the office at the bank, the last one to leave. It'd be 8 o' clock at night and you know, ask, what else can I do?

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And this is kind of a rapid rise. I read that, like, from, you know, 93, because you're just out of college through the 90s, you really got some really big promotions. I mean, within seven years, you were like the head of the risk management division at Sanwa Bank.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, I was the executive vice president, which was by far the youngest executive vice president.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You were barely 30 or 29 or something, right?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, I was 28 when I got the job. Yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you were just, you were just grinding. And by the way, just to add one more thing, I believe that in 1996, in the midst of all this, I can't even believe these words are about to come out of my mouth, you qualified for the US National Bobsled Team.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah. Yeah. Not a lot of people know that, but yeah, that's true.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So my extensive knowledge of bobsledding comes entirely from Cool Runnings. And I know that they were, I mean, that movie. They were track and field athletes and that's why they were good at bobsledding. Is that how it works? Like, if you're a really good fast runner, like, you can become a good

[Marc Lore]

bobsledder if you're not only fast, but explosive legs and speed. So it's sort of like if you could squat and broad jump and high jump from a standstill. So the way this all happened. Do you want me to tell you the quick?

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah. I mean, you're a banker in New York and you qualify for the US National Bobsled Team that's going to the Olympics in 1998. How does that happen?

[Marc Lore]

Okay, yeah. This is the story of how it happened. So I'm having lunch down at the World Financial center and I see that there's a, like, bobsled track set up and there's like a tent, basically. Like five bucks. Come down, push the sled, and they'll time you on how fast you push the sled. That was fun and interesting. But more interesting was the thing that said the fastest time of the week, they'll invite you to the training camp.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Wow.

[Marc Lore]

So the next day, I brought my sneakers and I pushed the sled. And the guys there were like, whoa, that was the fastest if we've seen anybody push the sled so far. And so it turns out I had the fastest time of the week. And I did get this call, and they said, hey, do you want to come up to Lake Placid? It's basically like, people get invited up there and they take a test. Strength, speed, explosiveness, broad jump, high jump. And they scored me. And they said, hey, you got a great score. This is pretty amazing. Would you want to train for the next month? Because we have. At the end of the month, there's the tryouts to make the team push the sled. And I said, sure. Let me see if I can get a month off from work. And I got a month off. And I lived up in Lake Placid and trained every day for 30 days on how to push the sled and all kinds of other techniques and things. 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. And I finished 13th.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It's like a movie story, right? It's like that movie Rookie of the Year, where the kid throws the baseball back and he's got this amazing arm, and then he joins the Chicago Cubs. You know, you're just having lunch in downtown, and you push the sled.

[Marc Lore]

This was perfect for me. Yeah. I'd still been working out, but I did. When they told me that I was invited to go train at the Lake Placid, it was like, a few months from the time they were at the World Financial Center. And so those few months, I basically just pushed cars around. Every day after work, I would go to an empty parking lot and push cars.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You'd push cars. You'd put the car in neutral and just push it around.

[Marc Lore]

Neutral? Yeah, basically.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I don't even know where you find an empty parking lot in Manhattan, but you clearly did.

[Marc Lore]

This was in New Jersey.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Gotcha. Wow. But I guess ultimately you decided not to take this spot on the team, right? Because you would have basically had to quit your day job to train for the Olympics.

[Marc Lore]

I don't have to travel around the world with the team for two years before the Olympics.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And bobsledding is not really super lucrative.

[Marc Lore]

And I was driven to make money. Remember, I'm a mercenary, so at that point in my career, I was a mercenary.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, so you're back in New York. Not on the bobsled team. And the story I've read, and I'm sure there are more details to it, goes something like this. You've got this great career in finance. You're in your late 20s, but it's just something about. It's just not fulfilling you. And you are watching all this.com action going on and you want to get in on it. Like, you decide, I got to get out of this and get in on this thing. Is that what happened in 2000?

[Marc Lore]

Pretty much. I was watching all that stuff happening. I was making a half a million a year at 28.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Wow.

[Marc Lore]

And at that time, I was married and had just had a baby. And I felt this desire to want to be an entrepreneur. Like, you know, I wanted to be a farmer when I was four years old, and I wanted to be that. For years. My grandmother would ask me what I wanted to be and I'd say that. And she didn't understand and used to laugh. And I said, but, Nan, they grow stuff from nothing. And now I get it. You know, I just wanted to grow stuff. And the other thing that was happening at the same time was I hated the culture in the bank. I hated the way people were treated. Yeah, it wasn't very diverse. It was very condescending toward women, and it was very harsh. There was no empathy, and kindness didn't play a role. And keep in mind, I was kind of torn. So I was. I grew up in this mercenary household, my dad and uncles and stuff. But then, because I was. My parents were so young when they had me, My mom used to leave me with her parents, which I called Big Nan and Big Pop. And they were the complete opposite. You know, my grandfather came over from Italy and had a job working on the railroad and used to say that he had the best job in the world, laying railroad times. And was literally serious. Like, he used to say that he was the wealthiest man in the world and he would count all of his grandkids and children as a million bucks. And he was just like the complete opposite in the classic missionary. He was driven by a higher purpose. And I was always drawn to that. But each year, I was only in banking for seven years before I quit. And something was really missing. Something was wrong. I didn't feel fulfilled, and I felt like it seemed like a road to nowhere.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you decide to quit, which is a big deal. I mean, you had a big paying job and to go and start a business with a childhood friend of yours, Vineet Bharara. Am I pronouncing his name, right?

[Marc Lore]

Yep. Vinit. We call him Vinny. Yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And was any part of you nervous about doing that?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, I had a newborn baby at the time, so, yeah, it was. And actually did it with Vinnie and Lax Chandra. So all three of us were best friends. And Laxa did the baseball cards with both of my childhood friends. Childhood friends since I was 10 years old.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

By the way, what was the enterprise that you were going to do? What was this business idea?

[Marc Lore]

This was basically a sports stock market. We used baseball cards as a proxy for the athlete, but it was much more of a stock market than it is anything to do with baseball cards. People would have accounts, they'd have build a portfolio. There was a ticker, there was market makers, there was bid offer spreads. It was meant to be a stock market for sports players.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So this is going to be a marketplace for. I just don't fully understand it. I mean, it's just a marketplace to sell sports collectibles online. Is that a fair.

[Marc Lore]

No, no. It was if you imagine a baseball card that you never take delivery of. So it just. It sits there as a proxy for the athlete. So you'd buy the cards, they'd go in your account, the price would go up, and then you'd sell them, and the money would go in your account, and you'd buy and sell and trade. And so actually, it felt much more like a stock market. Like, we would watch the games and. And if players did well, the stock would go up, player did bad, the stock would go down, and people were trading pretty aggressively during the games.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And you raised some money, right? You guys raised like.

[Marc Lore]

We raised $5 million, all from 60

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

angel investors who really believed in this idea. Because I'm just thinking today, if you pitch me that idea, I would be very skeptical.

[Marc Lore]

Well, here's. This is gonna. This sounds like I'm absolutely crazy when I'll tell you this, but I invested 390,000 of my own money into the company. And 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're not that old. Why 390? Why not 400? And my answer was, because that's all I had.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Marc Lore]

So I literally had 390,000 in the bank. And I think the investors saw that and they said, wow, this guy's got a lot to lose.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah.

[Marc Lore]

Now, would I recommend this? No, I wouldn't recommend you take every dollar that you have. But I'll tell You what if I didn't do that? Wouldn't have got the investment dollars and wouldn't have worked either, because it really felt like my life was on the line.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, so you. And by the way, this is called the Pit, right? This is.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you get the money and you launch this in 2001. And it's a website.

[Marc Lore]

2000.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And it's a website. It looks like a marketplace with a ticker going across the screen and stuff.

[Marc Lore]

Yep. Yeah, it just looked. Yeah, exactly.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And did you get, like, some media attention for this? We did, yeah.

[Marc Lore]

And we got a lot of customers.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You got a lot of customers?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, we had a lot of people came on, there were trading. They would Send checks for 10, $50,000 and start trading.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And how would you guys make money? What was the revenue model?

[Marc Lore]

We made money on the bid offer, spread and commission.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you launched this thing. You're getting some traction. Did it show promise? Did it look like it was going to.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, it was really working. The first 10 months, we were doing about 10 million in transaction revenue.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Wow.

[Marc Lore]

It was going really good. But then about 10 months in the NASDAQ crash, this is when the monster. Monster crash.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah, that was the beginning of the bubble bursting. And you immediately felt the results of that?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, because we needed to start raising money, and it was just ghost town.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

There was no money, zero. And so I guess you. Because I'm wondering why this happened, but basically, 10 months in, you sell the business to Topps, the baseball card company, for 5.7 million, which is not that much more than what you raised.

[Marc Lore]

That's right. And believe it or not, everyone got their money back and a little bit more. And they said it's the best performing investment in their portfolio that year.

[Guy Raz]

So everybody get their money back.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And a little bit of change on top of the. And Topps now the biggest, one of the biggest, maybe the biggest baseball card company in the US Owns you, and you and Vinny become Topps employees, right?

[Marc Lore]

Yep. And lax. Yeah, all three of us. And then Vinnie went on to become the general counsel of Topps, Inc. LAX ran the Pit, and I went out to Seattle to run a game company called Wizkids, which was acquired by Topps as well.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And just to be clear, they didn't make computer games. Right. Wizkids made, like, physical games that you.

[Marc Lore]

Physical games think about, like, little miniature figurines that have stats and things, almost like Dungeon and Dragons, but like, with miniature figurines. And you would collect the figurines. The figurines were collectible.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right. So you end up working under tops for two years and you decide that you want to start something new. Is that what happened?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, I was a little bit. It was tough. Like I was probably after I was there for two years, I'm now 10 years out of school, I'm like 32, 33 ish. I had ambitious goals and dreams for my career and things and I'm basically. One day I remember it was like after hours, I'm sitting, started getting into this dungeon and dragons and sitting around with a bunch of gamers at night and I got this 20 sided die in my hand and I'm rolling it, just thinking what happened? You know, I was like on top of the world at 28, the fastest to EVP, making all this money, you know. And then here I am at 32, rolling the 20 side to die, you know, it was just, I don't know, it was like surreal. It was like that didn't feel right. The banking didn't feel right, but also didn't feel right just running game companies, you know, that's.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And you were not going to go back into finance. That was out of the question.

[Marc Lore]

Definitely not going to back into finance now.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So I guess around this time you and Vinnie start talking about doing something new, a new business. And we now know that this would lead to diapers dot com. But I want to understand what was going on. Did you guys start to have conversations like, you know, what can we do and what opportunities are out in the world? Like how did you even start? What was the conversation?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, I'll tell you exactly how it started. This is even before talking to Vinny, but I would just go on Google and search for random words and see how many times they were searched in the search engine. And I remember searching the word diapers.

[Guy Raz]

Why?

[Marc Lore]

Well, I was doing a lot of diapers at the time.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You were changing a lot of diapers yourself?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, I got you buying them and changing them. But I put lots of words in. I mean, I don't know, hundreds, maybe a thousand different things. Just getting the brain going.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Just looking for what people were searching online.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, just some nugget of like what are people searching for? Just try to get ideas, Brainstorming basically, you know, not knowing what you'd find. No idea. But put in the word diapers and I remember it came up 200,000 times in a month searched. And I'm like that's really interesting because you can't buy diapers online. Not even Amazon at the time could

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

you buy them in 2004, you couldn't buy.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, 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. Then I went to Vinny and I said, hey, Vin, what do you think about this idea of like selling diapers, delivering them like overnight to moms and dads at normal Walmart prices? I think we said Walmart prices. And they started talking it through and thought, yeah, there's something here. When we would ask people, though, about whether this would work, people that knew something, they said, that's silly idea. There's no way to work. Because don't you know that diapers are a loss leader for these brick and mortar stores? They drive traffic and so they lose money on them. And if you're going to pay for shipping and fulfillment, you'll lose even more money. There's no way it can work.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And just so I understand is the reason why diapers didn't. Nobody wanted to sell them online was because once you paid for shipping, you weren't actually making. You were not going to make money off them. Even if you were able to get great prices from the manufacturers, it would still be hard to.

[Marc Lore]

Oh, not even hard. It was impossible because there are loss leaders. So there's very little margin in diapers. And yeah, the cost to ship because they're heavy is really expensive. You are definitely going to lose money on diapers.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But what I'm trying to understand is why are diapers. Why do diapers lose money? I mean, everybody was a kid is going to buy diapers for two to three years. So that seems to me that there's a lot of money to be made there. How is it that that's not the case?

[Marc Lore]

It's not the case because all the retailers compete for people looking to buy diapers and they'll keep lowering the price to try to drive.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It's a race to the bottom, basically. It's a race to the bottom.

[Guy Raz]

I got you.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So the retailers are pricing it down just to get people in the door to buy other stuff.

[Marc Lore]

Exactly.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But you must have figured this out pretty quickly that you can't make money off diapers. So I'm thinking if I'm talking to a friend about a business idea, we're like, all right, we, that, let's go to the next idea. But that didn't happen.

[Guy Raz]

Why?

[Marc Lore]

Because I think we saw the bigger vision, which was, wait A second. These things are a lost leader for a reason. They drive traffic to the store and online. The difference between a brick and mortar and online is online. You can sell so many more things because the unlimited shelf space. So we thought, okay, great, so let's drive people. You know, we're going to lose more money than a brick and mortar does in diapers because we have to pay for shipping. But that's okay. We can sell even more products and more high margin products than stores can.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you guys start working on this. And I guess initially it's not called diapers.com, right?

[Marc Lore]

It started off 1-800-diapers because we couldn't

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

afford diapers.com domain and you guys, I guess, kind of relocated to New Jersey where both of you grew up, right?

[Marc Lore]

Yep. In Montclair, New Jersey. Yep.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And what did you. I mean, you had to build a website, you had to get inventory. Let's just break this down because building a website in 2004 and server space was really expensive, right?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah. We had our own box, physical box. There was no cloud.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And you guys put, I mean, imagine you were putting. You put all of your money into this.

[Marc Lore]

A lot of it. Yeah. It wasn't 390,000 this time, but it was.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And what like, I guess when you started calling up manufacturers to buy their diapers was just like, was everyone just saying, like, this is a bad idea? Like, selling diapers online is just crazy.

[Marc Lore]

It was crazy. So crazy, I guess that 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.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

When we come back after the break, how to turn a big fortune into a small fortune by selling diapers online

[Guy Raz]

and how Mark and Vinnie eventually figured

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

out how to turn things around. Stay with us. You're listening to how I built this.

[Guy Raz]

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[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

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[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I'm Guy raz. So it's 2005 and Marc Lore and his co founder Vinny have just launched their website, which at the beginning is called 1-800-DIPS. But as customers start to find out about the site and start to put in orders, manufacturers refuse to sell them any diapers. So the two co founders have to figure out how to get them.

[Marc Lore]

In the early days, believe it or not, we'd actually go to the wholesale clubs, so BJ's, Sam's Club, Costco, and we would buy the diapers, but you

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

would go with like a shopping cart and just load it with diapers.

[Marc Lore]

At first we'd go with a big shopping cart and then we would make a deal. They would load them up with their, like, pallets. Yeah. They'd move the pallets and put them on a truck. We'd rent like an 18 wheeler would come and they put the pallets on the 18 wheeler.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And did they ever ask, hey, what are these diapers for?

[Marc Lore]

No, they just. They loved getting the sales and they were quite happy to sell them. We had a little arrangement where we'd leave them some diapers for their other customers and in return they'd put them on the truck. And eventually we were clearing out like multiple clubs at a time.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And you were just paying full price for these diapers?

[Marc Lore]

Full price, no discount.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, so this is. I'm no business genius, but I'm thinking if you buy the diapers for full price, then you gotta mark it up on the website. So why would somebody buy them from you on the website?

[Marc Lore]

We didn't mark them up.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

We didn't mark them up.

[Marc Lore]

No, we just lost more money.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you were basically losing money to make it more convenient for people to

[Marc Lore]

get diapers, as one investor like to say. Let me get this straight. So you're selling a dollar for 90 cents.

[Guy Raz]

That's what you were doing.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You were buying the diaper for, let's say a dollar. And then to compete against BJ's and Costco, you were selling it for 90 cents?

[Marc Lore]

Basically, yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And paying for the shipping costs.

[Marc Lore]

And paying for the shipping and fulfillment and credit card fees. Yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

That sounds like a crazy business. I mean, I read that within like a year after you launched, you did $11 million in revenue. But that probably means you were still. Because you were losing money.

[Marc Lore]

The more revenue we had, the more money we lost. That was the problem.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So how are you financing the loss before you even raised any outside investment?

[Marc Lore]

That was all me and Vinny.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You were just watching your money being burned out of your bank account.

[Marc Lore]

It doesn't sound smart.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It sounds nuts.

[Marc Lore]

We had a plan. We had a vision.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Your vision was it's going to be okay because we're going to figure this out. We just need to get customers first.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah. I think 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 lots of ways to solve the economics is what we thought and felt.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

How many people were you able to hire before you got Outside Capital?

[Marc Lore]

At 11 million in sales, it was Basically just me and Vinnie, and we hired another woman to help us with customer care and some of the fulfillment. But we got up to 11 million in sales with three people. Basically, it was really hard.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And you were still only selling diapers, right? In the first couple years, we were

[Marc Lore]

selling diapers, wipes and baby formula and some other things.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But yeah, all right, I guess in 2006, you were able to raise some money, the $4 million in venture funding. And you started to get around that time, Procter and Gamble, Kimberly Clark and a few others agree to start directly selling to you.

[Marc Lore]

The only reason why they did, by the way, is because we changed the rules with the wholesale club. You know, we used to leave them some diapers. And then we said, you know, wonder what happens if we take all the diapers? Maybe they'll get mad and they'll like call P and G. And so we tried it and it actually worked. We went in there, we took all the diapers. They said, you know, our deal was we load the truck up and you leave us diapers. And we said, okay, well then you don't have to load the truck, but we're taking all the diapers. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't do that. I'm like, I think we can just like any other customer. And he's like, well, yeah, I guess you can. I guess you can, but. And we said, hey, the only but is please, please call your Procter and Gamble and Kimberly Clark, you know, rep and tell them to just sell us direct and then we're out of your hair. We won't take all the diapers. And very soon they did that. And we got a call from Procter and Gamble. And Procter and Gamble said, hey, we're doing a favor basically for a very important customer of ours who would like us to sell you. We don't believe in your business model. Nothing's changed on our side, but we're going to sell you.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, so by 2007, this is now about two years, two and a half years after this idea really launches, you become diapers.com, you buy that domain name and you become diapers.com. what was the pitch to your investors? Did you say to them, like, what was the vision you laid out for them? Was it like going to be an everything baby store? It was going to be your one stop shop for all things baby strollers and car seats and everything?

[Marc Lore]

That was what you were saying, baby clothes and everything? Yep.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And I guess while you were in finance There was a guy that you had worked with named Levi Lev Borodovsky, Is that right?

[Marc Lore]

Yes.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And he was like a genius, or is maybe he's like a PhD in nuclear physics, Is that right?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And I guess you kind of recruited him to help you figure out a way to make your business more efficient, because he was like such a smart guy. What did he figure out? How was he going to make the business more efficient?

[Marc Lore]

Well, there's a little technicality on how you figure the price of shipping. Mostly it's based on weight. But at some point, if the box is big and it's not that heavy, you'll get charged for the actual cube of the box instead of the weight.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

The dimensions? Not the weight.

[Marc Lore]

The dimensions. Yeah, the dimensions instead of the weight. So we noticed that there was still a lot of empty space in every box. We put diapers, we put formula, we put baby food or whatever. And then you look at what percentage of the box were those products actually taken up. It was like maybe like 40%. And so we thought, what if we had 20, 30 different box sizes and we could build what we called box them was basically a way to figure out exactly what box certain items can fit in. So you pick the box as soon as you knew the items and what configuration they need to be packed in the box to fit.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So the idea was if we can be super efficient with the way we package things and then how we ship them, we actually might be able to make money even off diapers.

[Marc Lore]

Nope.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

No.

[Marc Lore]

Could not make money on diapers.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You knew that you couldn't. Yes, but.

[Marc Lore]

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 put something that weighs a pound into that same box, it might cost you 10 cents of incremental shipping. So the margin on the margins was great.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

That means you had to encourage consumers to buy more for every order. Is that right?

[Marc Lore]

That's exactly right, yeah. Buy more stuff. Buy baby clothes, buy pacifiers.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So how did you do that?

[Marc Lore]

I think we just built a really good user experience online. We had everything that mom and dad could possibly want for their baby. They were all first party, so we didn't have third party sellers. Like everything was hand picked by us. And we had all the products that moms would want and we organized it in a really convenient way. Everything was covered.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

How are you getting the other stuff, the clothing and the, you know, the other products. Were retailers coming to you and saying,

[Marc Lore]

hey, no, no, once again, much harder than you possibly could imagine trying to convince retailers to sell you product. I didn't, I had no idea. I was never in retail. And we had to fight really hard to get manufacturers to sell us products.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

One thing I'm wondering about, because I'm trying to put myself in your shoes, right. And our listeners know and anyone who knows me, is that I have probably more anxiety than you do, but, but maybe you do too and you just kind of hide it better. But I would be worried if I was like in my mid-30s and I was like watching all my money go down the tubes. Like I would be nervous about me. I'd be nervous about the people who came to work for me and whether they were going to have jobs and like they depended on me and their families depend on me.

[Marc Lore]

And like, yeah, no, I had a seven year old at a four year old and I had all my family and friends invested in the business, losing money every day. And I just always thought like, what do we need to figure out? What do we need to do? What's the problem? What's the next hurdle? Like what do we have to do? And that was like motivating me. You know, it was sort of like a challenge. It always came down to like, are we gonna be able to make payroll? Like so it's never been easy.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, but it sounds like it didn't.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I don't know, you didn't get that like horrible sick feeling in your stomach about that possibility. Maybe the way you're wired, it just enabled you to kind of feel like it's going to be okay.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, I like to talk about this sixth gear because that's the only thing I can say is that I didn't know it at the time. I was working in banking, working really hard, working really long hours, but I never got out of fourth gear. 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 have time to do.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I think what's so fascinating to me about everything I've been reading about diapers.com is it was like multi pronged. Your strategy was multi pronged. It was like, okay, we're gonna. Diapers will be the Entry point. We'll sell a bunch of stuff, and then we'll be super efficient. We'll be really efficient, and that's where we'll make our money. We'll squeeze this, get rid of any waste. We'll put warehouses in very targeted, specific places. Like, I read that you had warehouses in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, Sparks, Nevada, and Lenexa, Kansas. Cause those were the most efficient and strategic locations to enable you to save money.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah. We had to have every cost advantage we could find. But the vision was even bigger than just selling everything that moms and dads would want for baby. It was, we're going to sell parents everything. So we launched another website that was wag.com for pets and soap.com for household supplies. Yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Beautybar.com which was makeup and cosmetics, right?

[Marc Lore]

Yep. Yoyo.com is toys. Casa.com was home. We had like 10 websites.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And this is where you kind of started to operate under the parent name. Quidsy.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, Quidsy. We changed the corporate name to Quidsea, but we wanted to keep the specialty stores because we felt that was sort of the magic, as opposed to just a mass merchant where you sold everything. But we had one shared shopping cart, so you can shop on Diapers.com, add stuff to your cart. You can Click on the WAG tab, turns to wag.com now it feels like a pet specialty shopping experience, but you're adding to the same cart you check out. Yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, now we're going to get into the chapter of your life where you begin to encounter Amazon. You know, you guys were, I think by the end of 2010, you were on track to do $300 million in revenue. You were still not yet profitable, if I'm right. But, but, but there was a path to profitability. It started to look clear exactly that that was going to happen. And as you grew, you obviously became. Got on the radar of Amazon. And the reason why I know about this is because there's a book about Jeff Bezos and Amazon written by a reporter named Brad Stone, and he devotes quite a bit of it to the story of quidseaandiapers.com so I want to dive into this a little bit because I know that from what I've read, as early as 2009, Amazon approached you guys and said, hey, we'd like to acquire you. Is that right?

[Marc Lore]

No, we had a discussion with them, but they didn't say, we want to buy.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

They would say, would you consider selling the company? Something like that. Just to feel you out?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah. Like they said, if you're ever open to selling it, like, let us know.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So from what I understand, not long after that, Amazon slashed its diaper prices by like 30%. Let's just say it was coincidental. But is the timeline.

[Marc Lore]

No. Yeah, it wasn't coincidental.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It wasn't. Okay.

[Marc Lore]

No, it was unheard of at the time. The idea that a commodity product that already lost money, it's already a loss leader, that you would lose another 30%, that's unheard of. Unprecedented in the history of retail.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Did that have any quick impact on Diapers.com on your business?

[Marc Lore]

It definitely slowed our growth rate. You would have thought it would have a much bigger impact, like we would actually shrink in size, but all it did was slow our growth rate. The customer base we had was very loyal and we didn't lose many customers, which I think was surprising to Amazon.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So that didn't make you nervous when that happened? You thought, we're going to be fine?

[Marc Lore]

No, I mean, when you say nervous, it was definitely something that we had to seriously focus on figuring out how we were going to combat that. Anytime you have a company that size that's targeting you.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So it seems like this is 2010. It seems like your only option at that point, I'm thinking, is to go out and raise more money. And is that what you tried to do?

[Marc Lore]

Yes. We had only raised 50 million, $55 million 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 100 million to keep all the websites going and to really blow it out. We started putting some feels around the market, but everybody said, hey, listen, Amazon's coming after you. We're. That's too risky for us.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

By the way, by 2010, when you're doing roughly 300 million in revenue, how many employees did you have?

[Marc Lore]

Maybe like 300.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Right. So there's a lot of people involved at this point. What are you telling yourself? What are you saying, okay, maybe we try this? What was that this that you would try next?

[Marc Lore]

It was really like we were gearing up to battle to raise that money, but at the same time, Amazon had asked us to go out to see them in Seattle, so we did that.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

They asked you to go see them and you knew it was going to be about potential acquisition?

[Marc Lore]

I think we had a hunch, yeah. It's hard to remember exactly. But yeah, I think before we get

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

to that meeting, because I think this happened in September of 2010. I imagine that within your business, there was a big dartboard with Amazon on it that they were the enemy.

[Marc Lore]

Absolutely. Yep.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So when they contacted you and said, hey, come out here, what do you remember thinking about that offer?

[Marc Lore]

We were just like, yeah, they're coming after us. They're clearly targeting us. Now they want to talk. Are they softening us up to, you know, before the surrender? You drop a couple bombs and then have the talk, you know, about surrendering. It felt like that. That's what it felt like.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, so you go to Seattle to meet with Amazon. From what I've read about Amazon in the book by Brad Stone, on September 14, 2010, you guys go to Amazon headquarters to meet with them to discuss a possible acquisition. What happens at that meeting?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, now you just sparked my memory. But that's when they told us that they were launching Amazon mom, which was a program designed to get moms into their membership program, and it was really driven by diapers.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

From what I read, it would have meant that, like, if you [e-mail] sold a case of Pampers for 45 bucks, you could get it for $30. The same product for $15 less. I mean, there's no competing against that.

[Marc Lore]

Yes, that's exactly right. That is 100% correct.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So, I mean, it sounds like. I mean, we know what happened. You eventually were acquired by Amazon, but it sounds like you were left with no choice. You had to agree to that acquisition.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, it's even. Even worse that we got a higher offer that we didn't take a higher offer from. I would just say I don't think I've ever publicly disclosed this, and I don't think I can.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But you got a competing offer from somebody else.

[Marc Lore]

Yes, for 100 million more.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Why didn't you take that offer?

[Marc Lore]

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

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And listen, let's just be honest. This is how a lot of big corporations operate. They shouldn't, but they do. It sounds like a mob shakedown.

[Marc Lore]

Felt like it.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Did they do it with a smile on their face? I mean, these are people from the Pacific Northwest. They're very friendly.

[Guy Raz]

How did they.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I mean, how are they presenting this to you?

[Marc Lore]

In a pretty aggressive way.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

They said, hey, you gotta accept this acquisition offer or else we're gonna crush you. We're gonna bury you.

[Marc Lore]

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 Use explicit language. And it was pretty scary stuff. I'll just leave it at that.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you. You sell it to Amazon, you sell the business to Amazon, they buy it for 550 million or something like that. That's a pretty good return. I mean, you had raised 50 million, but of course you were losing money every year. But did that mean that your investors. Sounds like they came out okay.

[Marc Lore]

Actually, all the investors did really well. But the early investors made a huge return on their investment.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So now you're an Amazon employee. You are running quidsi, but now under the corporate umbrella of Amazon. And I'm just thinking, if it was me, it would be a little weird. Here was this business that was kicking me in the butt for two years that I could not compete against because they were just so much bigger and they were gonna crush me. And I surrendered. I had to, with a great outcome, financial outcome. But now I'm working for you. How were you able to, two weeks later, a month later, just, like, become an Amazon employee? Was that hard for you?

[Marc Lore]

Well, let me just say one thing we didn't Talk [e-mail] was just how Vinny and I really set that culture up and that value system in a way that the culture was everything. Our mission was to make lives easier for new parents. And that was really important to us. And we brought these people into this organization and we felt a responsibility to the employees. You know, one of my personal core values is fairness. And I felt like even though I maybe wasn't happy about how that went down, you know, we did accept the offer for 550 million. We did sell the company. And I just felt the right fair thing to do was to give it the best we got for both Amazon and the employees, more importantly. And so that's kind of the way we looked at it. So there was definitely, like, wasn't happy. So we were. When the day we sold the company, Vinnie and I, you know, you might have thought would go out and, like, have a drink to celebrate. We were depressed. We were depressed.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Even though that day was going to be transformational for you.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, basically, I think it was, like 40 years old at the time, and we didn't have a lot of money saved, either of us. And so it was a never need to work again kind of moment, and we couldn't even celebrate. Yeah, we had a vision for what we wanted to create. We put our heart and soul into it, and then our dream was sort of done. 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. Wow, that felt terrible.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you were still competing, but now it was all part of the same family?

[Marc Lore]

Exactly.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I understand the disappointment for sure. I think some people listening would say, but maybe, you know, mitigated by the money. But it doesn't sound like it was entirely mitigated by the money. Is that right?

[Marc Lore]

Oh, for sure. Definitely wasn't.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah.

[Marc Lore]

If I was still, you know, in my mercenary mindset, I might have felt differently, but I had made the transition by this point to be a full fledged missionary. I've gone all the way from one side, all the way to the other. And I was driven and motivated by the bigger mission. Yeah, we didn't want to sell the business at that point. We definitely didn't want to sell the business. We basically sold out.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

When we come back in just a moment, how Mark took the hard lessons he learned from competing against Amazon the first time and decided to launch yet another business, this time with an even

[Guy Raz]

bigger e commerce idea.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Stay with us. Hi, I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I built this.

[Guy Raz]

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[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I'm Guy Raz. So Mark is running QUIDSI at Amazon, but it's not a super happy period in his life. And after around three years, he decides to leave. Now, at this point, Mark has enough money that he never needs to work again in his life.

[Guy Raz]

But still, he can't quite shake the

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

idea that there's more to do.

[Marc Lore]

I just felt like there was unfinished business, meaning we had a vision and it got cut short. And so that vision we had, the mission that we had set out was still alive. Like we wanted to give it another shot.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, so you start to noodle on an idea around E Commerce again. Talk me through what this idea was going to be in your head before you, you decided to launch it. What were you thinking about doing?

[Marc Lore]

I just still continue to think that there was room in the market for another E commerce player. Amazon didn't have any real formidable competition at the time and felt like I saw an angle. I saw the inefficiency that was brought about by people shopping on Amazon, buying things in one unit at a time, having it shipped across the country and things, and a lot of expense in that. And came up with this idea that what if you empowered customers and gave them the information to shop smarter to save money?

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Meaning that you were able to encourage people to buy more things at one time instead of just a one off.

[Marc Lore]

Not only more things at one time, but more things coming from the same location so they could ship in the same box. A lot of Amazon's packages will ship from different locations. Like what if somebody's building a basket of product and they're about to put a product in the basket that would not be available in that same warehouse to ship in the same box, but was on the other side of the country. You could give the option to the customer to substitute that product for a product that was in the warehouse that could ship in the same box, that be could save $6 in shipping and give $3 back to the customer. And so we built this real time, smart pricing engine that showed customers lower prices on things that would pull costs out of the supply chain. And so actually, if we did have scale, not Amazon scale, but enough scale, by having a more efficient supply chain, you could actually have lower prices and lower costs. But it assumed that you got to some level of scale. And so you needed to raise money, enough money, a lot of money to help bridge to that level of scale.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And this was for what would become Jet.com.

[Marc Lore]

yes, Jet.com.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

and how much did you raise in total?

[Marc Lore]

About 750 million.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And so this was going to be, if I'm right, kind of like initially like a hybrid between an Amazon and a Costco, which was for 50 bucks a year, you got a membership, and then you would be offered the lowest prices on like 10 million items, more or less initially. That was the idea.

[Marc Lore]

Exactly.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And I guess like Costco, because Costco really doesn't make money off the stuff they sell, they make money off selling memberships. That was the idea that you would make the money from all those people paying 50 bucks a year.

[Marc Lore]

Absolutely correct.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So with that $700 million, I mean, you had to build warehouses, you had to create the supply chain. I mean, you now had considerable experience in that space. But, God, it just sounds like a huge undertaking.

[Marc Lore]

It was massive. Yeah. It all comes down to what I call VCP Vision Capital. People. We had the vision, we needed to raise the capital and we need to hire the very best people in the world. And it was the people that made the difference. The people that we hired were incredible and empowered them, gave them the information and let them run as fast as they could run. I mean, we got to a billion run rate in revenue within 10 months of the business launching, which was, I think, probably unprecedented at the time.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Now, I have a feeling I know how you're going to respond to this, but I mean, if you were being truly honest, intellectually honest here, I mean, it sounds like anybody hearing this story is going to say, okay, Amazon really was not pleasant when they went after Quidsi. So Mark goes and works for them for a couple years after the acquisition, but then he leaves and he basically decides to compete against Amazon. I mean, I know at the time you were quoted saying, no, it's not about, you know, them versus us, it's just something I want to do. But that had to have driven you to some extent because you talked about being a competitor as an athlete, a competitor in the math test. When you get the worst score in the biology test, you want to get the best score. That's inside of you.

[Marc Lore]

It wasn't about beating Amazon. It was about, you know, a big massive market that was growing fast. And I was very excited to start a new culture and a new business with all the learnings from previous businesses.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah.

[Marc Lore]

And we really honed a lot of the core values and the culture at Jet, like in really cool ways that I'm super proud of, you know, 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.

[Guy Raz]

But how did you, I mean, you

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

knew what Amazon was capable of doing. They could say we're just going to cut the price of diapers by 30% and we don't care if we're going to lose a lot of money because we are going to win this battle. I mean, Amazon is a very smart company. What was going to prevent them from doing the same thing?

[Marc Lore]

This time around it was a little bit different because we weren't like had one product, we were so single threaded on diapers was such a high percentage of our sales and such a low percentage of their sales. So we would go en masse. They weren't going to be able to cut prices on everything.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So I guess like three months into launching Jet.com, because I remember seeing those ads everywhere, all over the New York subways. They were everywhere. I mean, you guys put millions of dollars into marketing this, but three months in you dropped the $50 a year membership fee. Was that because that just was not going to be a smart way to make money?

[Marc Lore]

No. I still continue to think to this day that that would have worked well. The problem was that started to, we knew we had to do a big round of financing and starting to read the tea leads from investors who said this membership, they really want to see what the retention rate's going to be. If people buy the membership, do they stick with you? Do they renew? And sort of got spooked by that thinking we're not going to have enough time to prove that out. At the same time we're also seeing great traction without it. And so we sort of pivoted the business model in such a way that the math worked without a membership. It did not necessarily mean that that wasn't the right strategy for the business. Had we had the capital and had the time.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So the site launches in July of 2015 and you knew that it was going to lose money for at least five years. That was part of the plan that you showed to investors. But then there was going to be an inflection point where it would turn around. You would get.

[Marc Lore]

I told the investors we needed. We were going to lose $3 billion

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

before you started making money.

[Marc Lore]

That's correct.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And what did you have to do to. What was the plan? What was going to happen to start turning around and becoming profitable?

[Marc Lore]

Just E Commerce is all a scale game. You build the infrastructure, you build the technology, get the people, and then you just need enough sales because the margin, the variable margin on sales is pretty low. And so you need a lot of sales to cover your fixed expenses.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I have to imagine that you knew you were going to burn through cash, but you were not worried about this because this was part of the plan. You had predicted this and you were okay. And with the money raised to 700 million, how much Runway did you have? How much time did you have before you actually had to either raise more money or shut down?

[Marc Lore]

We were burning about 40 million a month.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right.

[Marc Lore]

But the real key was raising. We did a $618 million Series A. So we'd raised some money before that. And then we had the 600 million Series A. That was a really tough round to get done. That was at that time, we had negative gross margins. It was going up against Amazon. You know, we needed to raise $600 million to get through the next, you know, 18 months, basically.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

What did investors who decided not to invest, what, the skeptical ones, what were they saying to you?

[Marc Lore]

It always came down to whether or not you can raise the capital you needed to create a really big business, because you were going to burn a lot of money competing against Amazon until you got to scale. And so 3 billion was what I said. It could have been more. And they didn't know whether or not we'd go out and be able to raise 3 billion.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Even with your track record at this point, because you'd already. You were still getting lots of no's even with what you'd already built.

[Marc Lore]

Oh, yeah. Way more no's than yeses, of course. Yeah. But I always had a great experience with venture capitalists. I think they added a lot of value to the company outside of capital of one of these entrepreneurs that says, you know, raise as much money as you can get, the best venture capitalists, the best people that can help you around the table. I never worried about control and all kinds of other things that people worry about. You have to trust people. I think people start from a place they just trust too much. And it's funny, the more you're able to let go and trust, the less work you do. Just have a lot more bandwidth to do a lot more. And I do that in my personal life and it gives me an extraordinary amount of time just straight up trusting people.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I was talking to somebody who's been on the show about a year and a half ago. He's a really wonderful entrepreneur. We're just chatting and I said, do you have any resentment or do you have any. Do you hold any bad feelings against the people who doubted you or who turned you down? Or do you remember them? Or do you not take any of it personally? You said to me, I remember every single one. I take every single one personally. And I love that.

[Guy Raz]

That was very honest.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

How about you?

[Marc Lore]

No, I don't know. I just feel like it's usually good reasons. I definitely don't take it personal. It does feel good when there's a big exit and investors say, man, I should have listened to you. I can't believe I didn't invest. That definitely feels good, but it doesn't feel like I don't have anything. People make different decisions based on what's right for them at the time. I accept that.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So Jet.com, i mean, it's burning through 40 million a month, but it sounds like with what you have, you could last a year and a half. But a year in, you get an offer from Walmart, an acquisition offer. Before I ask you, this is sort of strange. I'm going to ask you why. But then I'm going to say the price, which was 3.3 billion. Billion. It was the highest anyone had ever paid to acquire an E commerce startup in the US at that point. So imagine that was an offer you couldn't refuse.

[Marc Lore]

It depends. So I think we could have refused it. But again, tying back to what I said before about mission and values, it was the conversation that I had with Doug McMillan, the CEO of Walmart, on a whiteboard in his office that sort of made the decision really easy for me. He basically said, listen, first of all, a lot of trust was built between us from the very beginning of every conversation. He always did exactly what he said. And we also shared a similar vision of what we wanted to achieve in E commerce. Walmart had an E commerce site, Jet had an E commerce site. And we felt, hey, if we could bring the assets of both companies together, the people and technology that we had built at Jet with the capital resources to stores of Walmart and merge it together, wow, we could really, really become a formidable competitor. And this is where I say it's the difference between selling out and selling the company. Like, we didn't sell out. Yes, we sold the company, but the mission was very much intact and everything we had set out to do was now with a higher probability of success and we had more capital to do it. We were going to get there faster.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Were you surprised how quickly that happened? I mean, a year after you launch?

[Marc Lore]

I was surprised, but at the same time I got it, it made sense. And when Doug said, mark, we want to give you and your team the keys to sort of pull this all together and run this and take us to the next level, that was empowering. Now I wanted to give Doug, Walmart and the board the very best I've got because it was very different than the Amazon experience. Didn't feel like selling, by the way. Yeah, it was very motivating. I was like, wow, now we have, we've got, you know, it's sort of like we're fighting there with guns. And then, you know, all of a sudden you see like the big tanks roll in and you're like, yeah, give me the tanks. I want the tanks. I want the Air Force, you know, coming to back us up here.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So how was it going to work? I mean, was the idea that you would run jet.com but also turn walmart.com into a more formidable player?

[Marc Lore]

I mean, yeah, Walmart was the number one responsibility. I think we basically took all the best people from Jet and put them on Walmart. We took the technology, we took the fulfillment centers. I think the goal was really clear. Like, let's turn Walmart.com into a formidable E comm player and use all the assets available to us. It didn't really make sense to have two mass market sites because we wanted to merge the best talent and put them all in Walmart.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It wasn't the brand they needed, it was the technology and it was the logistics and the people.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, exactly.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

What was it like for you? I mean, and this is now the third time you were acquired, right? You'd gone to work for Tops, you'd gone to work for Amazon, now you're working for Walmart. But you're an entrepreneur. It has to be a little bit strange or hard to all of a sudden work in an environment where you're not totally calling the shots.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, it was very challenging. Very challenging. I mean, I'd already had experience working inside Amazon, so I knew what to expect. And so I wasn't surprised by anything. In fact, I was probably pleasantly surprised, you know, at the culture of Walmart and the ability for me to make the moves we made with speed. But still, it's just hard. Anytime you're in a big company like that, there's so many people to get on board, to convince. You have to educate people and you have to bring them along. It's not the entrepreneurial way. The entrepreneurial way is you just go and you can't do that.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But compared to your experience at Amazon, it does seem like you had a better experience with Walmart. They actually made you head of E Commerce in that role. You did some interesting things. 2017, you acquired Bonobos. We actually had Andy Dunn, the founder, on the show a couple years ago. And that was a pretty big deal, right? I mean, people were like, wait, Bonobos and Walmart? But presumably that was part of your strategic plan around E Commerce.

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, the high levels. 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 the place the best people in the world wanted to go. And so I knew we weren't going to go anywhere unless we changed the narrative, unless the people thought that Walmart was now going to be a contender. And buying Bonobos was part of that strategy because that was a cool, hip, modern brand focused on millennials that was more premium product. It basically opened people's eyes and made them look at what Walmart differently. And that was certainly not one thing alone, that one move. But it was all the moves that we made together. It all started to compound and it really, in the last couple years, it really started to come together. You.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You recently announced that you are stepping down after four years at Walmart.

[Marc Lore]

Four and a half. Yep.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Four and a half. Do you feel like you accomplished the things that you promised you would accomplish and that that were expected of you?

[Marc Lore]

I do. I do feel good about it. Would I have liked to have done more, gone faster? Sure. But if I just take a step back. Did we change the narrative? Yes. Did we Dramatically accelerate top line sales? Yes. Did we create an incubator that's now building startups that could shape the future of retail? Yes. So. So all things considered, given the size of the company and the fact that it's an aircraft carrier, not a speedboat to move it the way we did, I feel proud of that. And I think that experience is going to make me a better entrepreneur going forward too, which I really appreciate.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You are either almost or already 50 years old. I think I'm 49.

[Marc Lore]

Yep.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Okay.

[Marc Lore]

So I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's a scary number.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It's a big number and you've got a lot of experience behind you. You're at an age where people become first time CEOs. You've done it at least three times. There's no question that you're going to do something else.

[Marc Lore]

That's true. I mean, there's opportunities in retail, there's opportunities in health care, opportunities in energy. And I'm in a place now where I can really do something really disruptive that can, can have a lasting impact on the world. And that's what gets me fired up.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

When you look over the course of your career so far, how much of your success do you attribute to how hard you worked and how smart you worked and how much do you think happened because you got lucky?

[Marc Lore]

I think it's a combination of all three. I could think of things where I did get lucky, where things could have gone a different way and I've been really screwed. But at the same time, the drive to keep coming, like the Terminator, I wouldn't accept failure. You know, I just would keep going and going and going until the luck turned my way.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You know, every story is different, right? And every journey is different. And you know, you're still going. I mean, I can talk to you in 20 years and there may be, we may talk about none of this that we just talked about. And I wonder, when you think about your trajectory, you were a crappy student and had a rough childhood. If you knew that we were going to have this conversation, then when you were 18 or 19 and you would say, oh my God, look at me now, what would you think? Would you think, man, I made it? Would you have been satisfied and impressed and happy? What do you think you'd expect, you feel if you had that crystal ball?

[Marc Lore]

Yeah, I think I'd be happy. The path to get to where I am today was not a straight line. Like I said, I'm in my early to mid-30s playing Dungeons and dragons. That wasn't what I had set out to do. But once I made the transition from mercenary to missionary, I let values create the value. That's what happened. Values created the value. And I feel like in a great place now, and I feel like I'm set up. Like you said, the next 20 years are going to be, I think, are going to be a lot better than the last 20.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

That's Marc Lore, co founder of Diapers.com and Jet.com by the way, even though Mark's career as a founder and executive has been wildly successful by any measure, the competitive athlete in him still can't help wondering what might have happened had he chosen a different path. Does a part of you ever kind of wonder what would have happened? Or maybe you should have. You should have just bobsled.

[Marc Lore]

Absolutely. Absolutely.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

He had a gold medal or something.

[Marc Lore]

It's possible. It's very possible.

[Guy Raz]

Hey, thanks so much for listening to

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

the show this week. Please make sure to click the Follow

[Guy Raz]

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[Guy Raz]

And if you're interested in insights, ideas and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my [e-mail] or on substack.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

This episode was produced by Casey Herman, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei.

[Guy Raz]

It was edited by Neva Grant. Our production staff also includes Chris Masini, John Isabella, Sam Paulson, Alex Chung, Kerry Thompson, Katherine Cipher, Norgill, Rommel Wood, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built this.