Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold the two companies together for billions of dollars. Now he plans to take his food delivery and takeaway business, Wonder, public within a few years at an ambitious $40 billion valuation.
We recently caught up with Lore in person in New York to chat about Wonder and his ultimate goal of making meal planning easy, as well as Lore’s business philosophy. Below is a portion of the latter, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Knowledge of the so-called founder mode allows founders and CEOs to actively collaborate not only with their direct reports, but also with “skip level” employees to prevent small problems from becoming big problems (Brian Chesky operates this way as follows) . The same goes for Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others.
Yeah, founders mode didn’t really resonate with me. Because I operate differently. I really focus on the idea of vision, capital and people. We meet with our leadership team every week and spend two hours each week discussing the fundamentals: vision, strategy, organizational structure, capital planning, performance management system, reward system, behavior, and values. What you think is already set.
You say, “Oh, yeah, we already took action. We have already recognized its value. Performance management was carried out. “We have our own strategy.” But when you grow and move quickly, it’s amazing how much it evolves over time, and you want to keep track of it. Talk about it and talk about it.
If everyone is completely aligned and you have a really good person, you can just let it go. I don’t have to get involved at all. So I don’t get into the specifics of what people do, as long as they know the nuances of strategy and vision. When you get on the call with your team and they get on the call with theirs, everyone moves in the right direction.
How Lore thinks about hiring the right people:
I’m really into hiring rock stars. For example, it’s everyone (that I hire). I used to think I could interview someone and decide in an hour if they were a rock star. I really thought so too, and I think other people think so too.
It is impossible. I employed thousands of people. An hour-long interview won’t tell you if someone is a rock star, and the more they aren’t, the more likely you’ll be gushing over them. I wonder why someone talks about a good game, sounds good, says the right things, has the right experience, but ends up not being good.
I started going back to resumes and trying to draw correlations, and what I found was that there were clear patterns in resumes that superstars had that set them apart from non-superstars. That doesn’t mean that someone without a superstar resume can’t become a superstar. It’s okay to miss those people. But when you see someone with a superstar resume, they are almost always superstars. When I interview, I already know I want to hire them, and it’s more important to make sure I’m not missing anything from a behavioral standpoint, culture, or values. We want unity there.
However, resumes should show a demonstrable level of success in every job they’ve been in. This means multiple promotions. It means staying at one company long enough to get promoted, and leaving one company for another is a big change. Superstars don’t move sideways. They don’t go from good companies to bad companies. Because bad companies have to pay more to attract people and sometimes they shake off loose people who are not good and just want to go for the money.
But if you find someone in the (top) 5% and look at their resume, it looks like this: Boom, boom, promo, promo, promo, promo, promo, promo, and then a big leap… Promotion, promotion, big leap. When I receive a resume that shows a demonstrable level of success, I grab it and pay them what they deserve. It’s that important to me to get that superstar there. And you build a company full of superstars.
You need to have the right performance management system in place so you know exactly what you need to do to get to the next level. Because superstars are very motivated. They want to know what they need to do to get to the next level, especially Generation Z. They want to know and get promoted every six months.
Finally, Lore discusses his belief that taking bigger risks is the way to secure the future of your startup. Although that approach may seem counterintuitive to many.
People always underestimate the risks of the status quo and overestimate the risks of change. I see it over and over again.
If you have a life-threatening disease and your doctor says, “You have six months left,” then the investigational drug or whatever else seems good, even if it’s very risky. You’re basically looking for an opportunity to take risks and not suffer an inevitable death.
If you are very healthy and everything is going well, and someone says, “Take this experimental drug. “That will help you live longer.” (Many people will say this.) “You know what? It’s too dangerous. I am really healthy. “I don’t want to die from this drug.”
But startups are very different from large corporations. When you’re at a large company like Walmart (run by American e-commerce company Lore after selling one of his own companies), incremental improvements are important. There is no incentive to take risks.
As a startup founder, you are likely to die. There’s a chance you’ll die every day while you’re making a living doing this startup. The probability is 80% and the actual probability of success is only 20%. So you should take this into consideration when making your decision. We need to take risks and look for opportunities to reduce our risk of death. Maintaining the status quo is the worst thing you can do. Doing nothing is the biggest risk you can take.
