How Marc Lore Architects Unicorns

The founder of Jet, Wonder, and Quidsi unpacks how he builds his organizations.

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Illustration by Eleanor Taylor

Friends,

Successful serial entrepreneurs are a special breed. Though these founders might not have the unifying pleasure of working on one singular company across multiple decades, they get to test themselves in different environments and learn what works, not just once but repeatedly. Was how they structured the team at their first company smart or sloppy? Did they grow 300% year over year because they architected a high-output organization or because they happened across a hot space?

Building an enduring company requires both luck and skill; the serial entrepreneur has the opportunity to distinguish between the two with unusual precision.

In this edition of the "Letters to a Young Founder" series, I’m thrilled to share wisdom from Marc Lore, one of this generation’s best serial entrepreneurs. Over the past 25 years, Marc has created, grown, and successfully sold multiple businesses – including Quidsi (Diapers.com) to Amazon for $545 million and Jet.com to Walmart for an astonishing $3.3 billion. Marc led Walmart’s e-commerce push over the following 4.5 years, driving America’s biggest retailer into the digital age.

Today, Marc is applying his organizational genius to Wonder, a “new kind of food hall” that’s raised nearly $2 billion to reimagine how we experience restaurant-quality meals. It’s an ambitious undertaking that requires orchestrating countless moving pieces—from real estate and inventory management to culinary excellence and logistics—in an industry known for razor-thin margins and operational complexity. From the outside, at least, Wonder has the potential to become a generational player and the culmination of Marc’s remarkable career.

Throughout our correspondence, Marc reveals the frameworks and systems that have enabled his repeated success. His VCP (Vision, Capital, People) methodology is at the core – a systematic approach to translating audacious visions into concrete metrics, organizational structures, and accountability systems.

What’s particularly striking is Marc’s mathematical precision. Where many founders rely on intuition, Marc has developed quantitative systems for weighting priorities, assigning ownership, and measuring impact throughout his organizations.

For founders grappling with how to scale effectively while focusing on what truly matters, Marc’s insights offer invaluable guidance from someone who has repeatedly mastered this challenging transition.

You’ll learn:

1. Why Marc spends 90% of his time on VCP. Marc reveals how his Vision, Capital, People framework has guided his entrepreneurial journey across multiple billion-dollar exits, and why he believes founders who neglect these foundations are destined to fail.

2. The “ownership points” system Wonder uses to clarify everyone's impact. Marc's quantitative approach to measuring each role's impact creates transparency about value creation throughout the organization.

3. What it means to have “fat” in the organization and how Marc keeps Wonder lean. The systematic process Marc uses to identify where Wonder is over-investing relative to business impact and how he gradually rebalances resources.

4. Why Marc hired a Chief People Officer before almost anyone else. Against conventional startup wisdom, Marc made this critical hire during Wonder's earliest stages. He explains why most founders get this timing wrong.

5. How Marc builds a company that SOARs. Marc’s organizational structure is designed to maximize Speed, Ownership, Accountability, Results (SOAR). Optimizing for those traits creates a high performance and efficient machine.

…and much more. To unlock the full correspondence and everything else The Generalist’s premium newsletter has to offer, join today:

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Mario’s letter

Subject: The architecture of an org
From: Mario Gabriele
To: Marc Lore
Date: Thursday March 27, 2025 at 12:38 PM GMT

Marc,

I am so excited to be starting this conversation with you, and I'm grateful for your willingness to share your wisdom with me and The Generalist’s readers.

Before turning to your far more formidable accomplishments, I hope you’ll allow me a brief opening gambit. My hope is that it helps frame why I think you’re such an interesting entrepreneur. And, that it leads us into this first correspondence.

When I was first trying to get into the world of startups, I had no concrete skills. I’d studied political science as an undergraduate, worked at a boutique law firm, started trying to write a novel, and then experimented with becoming a chef, attending culinary school and cooking at a modern French restaurant in New York. I’d followed that up by going to grad school to study International Development without a real plan for what I might do afterward.

While I was there, a germinating curiosity in technology turned into an obsession. But as that trajectory suggested, I had no obvious marketable abilities. I couldn’t code, had no design skills, and didn’t really understand what people meant when they said they worked in “product.” I asked a business school professor who had taken a shine to me how, with those limitations, someone like me might break in. (As you can sense from that question, I was still thinking in a very tracked, credentialed, un-startup way in those days.)

“You should be an athlete,” my professor told me.

Sensing my confusion, he explained what he meant. He wasn’t suggesting I don a pair of sprinting spikes and hot tail it to my local track, but be a business athlete. These kinds of people weren’t good at one specific thing but were sufficiently sharp and flexible to be useful across a few different functions. They might start by helping on a marketing task before hopping over to operations or pulling together a spreadsheet for an upcoming board meeting. They were, in effect, competent generalists rather than functional experts.

As you know much better than I do, in the early stage of a startup's life, almost everyone has to be an athlete to some degree. The best engineer might have to help out on customer support during a surge, and the CEO should be prepared to moonlight as an office manager, accountant, janitor, recruiter, and a dozen other roles. (As a company grows, the CEO has to maintain that level of mental dexterity, even as others on the team specialize, adding skills to keep a company growing.)

You have always struck me as one of the current generation’s great business athletes. I say that not because of your sporting connections, though they are considerable. For those who might not know, you ran track and field in college, are the incoming owner of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves and WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx, and founded a venture firm with baseball’s Alex Rodriguez.

Rather, it’s because you seem to approach your work as a business builder with the same craft and dedication we expect from elite athletes. And while I piddled around in the rec leagues throwing up cinder blocks, you’ve been competing at an NBA level for over two decades, scaling massive, operationally complex companies from Quidsi (owner of Diapers.com) to Jet.com to Wonder. Along the way, you’ve landed massive exits, selling Quidsi to Amazon for $545 million and Jet to Walmart for $3.3 billion.

With Wonder, you’re taking another big swing, raising nearly $2 billion in venture and debt capital to build a “new kind of food hall.” (As my history suggests, it’s a concept I’ve always been fascinated by – I briefly helped a friend run a ghost kitchen serving burritos.)

More specifically, Wonder operates physical brick-and-mortar locations and a digital service. From a location on the Upper West Side or Wonder’s app, customers can order from multiple restaurants simultaneously – getting a starter from Marcus Samuelsson’s Streetbird, a pizza from Di Fara, and a cookie from Hungry Gnome.

It’s an audacious mission, requiring you to wrangle real estate, perishable products, beloved brands, temperamental customer preferences, and logistical complexities – in a category known for low margins with established competitors.

With that in mind, I was hoping to use this first correspondence to unpack how, precisely, you architect an organization to take on a challenge of this magnitude. Where do you begin? How do you stage what to focus on and when? How do you ensure that each function within a company is firing at the same time?

In researching your work, I came across a framework you like to refer to: VCP or Vision, Capital, People. When starting a new company, how do you think about turning a vision—which can often feel vague and amorphous—into a methodology that impacts how a business runs? At Wonder today, how do you translate your vision into day-to-day operations?

I suppose I am asking something like: how do you avoid “shipping your org chart?” For those unfamiliar with that phrase, it’s the idea that your product will follow the shape of your organization. If you’re shipping a frivolous mobile game, the consequences might be relatively low – perhaps there’s an inconsistent visual language across the app because your design and product teams barely talk. But when we’re talking about shipping food in all its logistical, emotional, and culinary complexity, the challenges seem undoubtedly greater. (I do not think I’m overestimating the intricacies of turning out consistent truffled mashed potatoes, but correct me if I am wrong.)

With much gratitude,

Mario

Marc’s response

Subject: The architecture of an org
From: Marc Lore
To: Mario Gabriele
Date: Monday April 14, 2025 at 9:52 AM PST

Mario,

Thanks for kicking off this conversation. I can’t believe it, but it’s been 25 years of raising money and building companies. You learn lessons with each one, but it always comes back to Vision Capital People. Without exaggeration, I spend 90% of my time as a founder thinking about some aspect of VCP.

Why? Because you need to get the foundation right. Everything else follows from there.

You asked about Vision and how I translate that down to the business. Let’s start there and walk through how the right vision leads to picking the right strategies, which we measure with success metrics.

First, the vision. Explain what you’re going to build in detail, painting a picture of the future. This isn’t something you write once and then put away. You have to constantly come back to it and analyze it. Come back to the words you wrote down and interrogate them.

Maybe you wrote you wanted to build “the best Italian restaurant.” Ok, well, what do you mean by “best?” Is that actually what you mean? Do you want to be truly the best, number one in the world? Or do you just want to be better than your competitor? You have to flesh it out in detail and paint a picture of what the future looks like.

Once you have a vision, you must consider the strategies that get you there. When I say strategies, I don’t mean initiatives over a one-year period but 3-5 pillars that you’re building over the next 10 or 20 years. Strategies are the how: how you and your company will make your vision a reality. These will change more often than the vision, adapting alongside the business.

How do you know if you’re delivering on your vision or that your strategies are working? You need to pull each one down into success metrics.