The other week we were fortunate to have legendary Entrepreneur Marc Lore stop by to hangout with our community. From time to time our community has the opportunity to bring in a more experienced and veteran “world changer” and learn about how they found success chasing their dreams.
Marc is one of the most well decorated and seasoned founders that we’ve had the pleasure of learning from. He is the Founder of Wonder Group, a company that’s reinventing the at-home dining experience. Prior to that, he started and sold four companies, most recently, Jet.com which was acquired by Walmart in 2016 for $3. After the acquisition he remained the president and CEO of Walmart’s eCommerce division until 2021. He is also the newest NBA owner having purchased the Minnesota Timberwolves and Minnesota Lynx. Telosa is Marc’s legacy project – a city he is building from scratch to test a new model for society, called Equitism.
In this event we sat down with Marc and led a moderated Q&A covering some of his most compelling realizations of what it took for him to become a successful founder. Following that discussion, we opened up the floor to questions from our community members. Below is a transcript of our conversation with Marc. Hopefully you too can glean some of the lessons that Marc shared with us.
Q: On finding a community. In those early days, when you had just left the finance world and banking in Corporate America, where did you look for support? Your peers were the ones that had those consistent salaries, and you said, ‘This isn’t for me. I’m unhappy, I need to make something for myself.’ Where did you find support? How did you deal with that?
Marc: I've always had this methodology of having no plan B, no backup plan. If you've got a backup plan, it is human nature to take it when things get tough. It has to be all or nothing. From there, you get to see yourself do things you never imagined were possible.
For my first business, I didn't know anyone with money, but managed to get 16 investors to put in 75 grand each into this company. I had over 200 pitches. I asked everybody I knew. ‘Hey man, do you have two people you can recommend?’ And I'll just go talk to them and then…hey, you got two people. I go talk to them. I didn't know anyone like this. You have to know people that have money. You literally have to work your freaking ass off, put the time in, and not stop til you get where you want to go.
Q: Convincing people to listen. How did you convince investors to listen and invest in a young Marc with no prior track record? What was it about Marc at that time that was so galvanizing?
Marc: The biggest thing was that I was putting my entire life savings into the business. I remember one investor early on said, ‘Marc, this is incredible. You're a pretty young guy. I can't believe you put in $390,000 of your own money. But I only have one question. Like, I don't understand. Why didn't you just do $400,000? I never heard of such an investment.’
And I told him, ‘Because I don't have any more.’ I literally took every freaking dollar in my savings that I had saved over the first seven years in banking and put it into this company.
And that was the catalyst. Somebody could say, ‘Like, that's crazy,’ but it is that kind of conviction that people get behind. It was the vision that people could get behind. Was the business plan exceptional? Not really. Was I some sort of guru? Definitely not.
If you are really serious about something, you gotta take risks. Entrepreneurship is very simple. [It’s] risk and effort. [If] you got those two things, you can pretty much make anything happen. I've seen smart people make stuff happen. [I’ve seen] people not smart make stuff happen. It always comes down to what they all have in common: [they] work their ass off and they aren’t afraid of failure.
Q: Advice for students in school building. What advice do you have for student founders in terms of maximizing their college experience? If you could turn back the clock to when you were in college and you recognized that you wanted to build something, would you have still gone into banking?
Marc: I am a big believer in the importance of school. I think if you have the foresight to have an idea of what you want to do really early on, at your young age, that's great. I would use the time in college to really do your own research and experimentation, because it's a safe place. Those are four years where you don't have a responsibility. I absolutely would look to learn and deep dive into something, because you never really have the time to do [that] when you start a career and working.
In respect to whether you want to jump right into a new startup or actually go work somewhere… The most important thing is getting experience. If you really want to do a startup, go work for a startup. Get in there and see what it's like. You could learn a lot about how startups operate, think, recruit people, create a culture, etc.
There's a lot of learning that you get without doing it on your own. If you come out of college, start a company, you don't know how to compensate people. How do you recruit people? How do you read a resume? How do you motivate people? How do you build an org structure? There's so many things. You don't wanna learn those things necessarily on your own dime, because it is unlikely the first time it’s gonna work out.
Q: Managing time and staying organized. Given that you have so many different ventures and so many things going on in a particular day, how do you best manage every single task you have and how do you prioritize particular tasks in a day? How do you think about offloading tasks to different people and how do you trust a particular person to do a particular task?
Marc: From my experience with so many companies, I realized that if you really want to be successful, you have to go all in one. I try to avoid any distraction. You can’t make things work when you've got distractions. I try and outsource everything I possibly can so that I can be focused.
With respect to business, I just rely on the people that I trusted with those other businesses to go run my other ventures. I just can’t spend time on that. In terms of my existing startup Wonder, and hiring folks, I am a really a big believer in finding the best people and empowering them.
The 3 Main Things that it takes to Create Trust and Empower People are:
- You need to have a clear vision and clear strategy and get alignment on that so that these great people are aligned with your thinking on vision.
- A lot of people don't spend enough time on the organizational structure, but that is a really powerful method to unleash really strong executives. Leaders realize to get the very best out of [their team] you have to have the structures.
- They (great leaders) have as much, to the extent possible, end-to-end ownership of the most important metrics driving the business. That's really key. I'm a big believer in spending the right amount of time on building a structure.
Q: Building a team and creating values. Marc you’ve underscored the significance of a clear mission, values, and behaviors in creating a strong company culture. It starts with having a clear mission, but what's your North Star? What's that emotional connection that people have to have in your business? What’s motivating them to do everything in their power to ensure its success? Is it something that transcends their individual interests?
Marc: It's really important that the mission never changes from the start. It's meant to be a forever thing. The mission should never change. Disney's mission is to make people happy. That's an incredible motivator. You know, you come to Disney, you want to work there, and you know that the mission is all about making people happy.
So I think it's really important to have that strong mission, a set of values that the company lives by that resonates with people. In my current company, it is transparency, trust, and fairness. I find that to be super empowering. When the company is transparent with its employees and trusts its employees, it creates a fair, equitable, safe working environment. It's very empowering for people.
And then finally, what are the behaviors? I think it's important to get this down on paper. What are the behaviors that you're looking for in the people you hire? For us, we have eight behaviors. Those behaviors are, well, every person that gets hired by the company gets checked against those behaviors. In performance reviews, you get checked against those behaviors. If somebody's not living up to those behaviors, you have to be willing to move them out, even if they're performing really well. That's really important.
And behaviors, what I mean by behaviors, is things like caring, inclusivity, optimism, being self-aware, proactive, gritty. You have to come up with what your list is. But, it's really important that when you interview people, you look past their performance and how good they are, and first start to make sure that they're a good cultural fit, because that becomes the fabric of your company and culture.
Q:
Marc: Everything you're doing, whatever you're doing, it’s important. It is important to you, and it is important to the people you hire. It's no less important than what I am working on.
You want to have conviction that what you're working on has the potential to impact people's lives and shape the world. And I'm sure what you're working on has that, I’m sure it has that impact.
Q: How to Treat People
Marc: I've always believed in leading with empathy and kindness and giving back more than you take. Never discount somebody because of their economic status, their social status, or their education. Give everybody the time of day and don’t just give people time because there is something to gain. Just be really cognizant of that and stay humble, you know? That's what I would say.
Q: Hiring People
Marc: The potential of any company is dependent on its ability to recruit, retain, and motivate the very best people of the world. Get the very best out of the very best people. That starts with creating an incredible culture, grounding in a set of values - a set of behaviors - and a clear vision for where you want the company to go.
And a clear mission too. What's your North Star? Why do we get up? Making that crystal clear is the best way to get the best people and get them energized about what they’re doing. The culture and the value system is really what keeps people motivated.
The work employees do has to be bigger than themselves. There has to be a higher purpose to what they're doing. As an entrepreneur, that's really important early on. It's not about making a buck, it's about having a mission and a higher purpose, and then money will come.
Q: College Students Pursuing Startup or Full Time Job
You may want to take a gap year to focus on this (your startup) and see what you can do in the next 12 months. And if you have real passion and raise some money, then yeah, then just learn on the fly, take some jumps and it'll make you stronger later.
You have to be honest with yourself, and if like in 12 months, you couldn't get to a certain place, being “all in” on it, then you go and get some experience working at a startup. I just wouldn't do this thing where you meander for the next three to five years.
Q: Young Inexperienced Founders Raising Capital
Marc: It starts with a very small amount of capital. It depends on your level of ambition, on how ambitious you want to be. There are 3 levels of ambition.
- Create a billion-dollar company
- A 10-billion company
- A hundred billion billion company
As your first startup, I'm sure most of you would agree that a billion dollar startup would be pretty cool, a unicorn. To do that and make a really good return on capital for investors, you should raise a hundred million dollars and give yourself a pretty good shot of getting there.
A hundred million dollars would come over seven rounds of financing, starting with as little as 1.5 million in the initial seed round. The goal would be every 18 months to double the amount you raised and double the valuation. So you raise 1.5 million, and call it a 5 million valuation, and then you wanna raise 18 months later, 3 million at a 10 million valuation, and then raise 6 million at a 20 million valuation, and so on and so forth. That would be doubling the amount [that you] raise each time - you'd be raising a total of a hundred million and could make an incredible return for all your shareholders.
Q: Important Skills
Marc: I would say obviously being completely fluid with Excel, things like that. I mean, those parts, those are important, but it's much more about the softer skills.
One of the most important things you'll find yourself doing as an entrepreneur is selling, you're selling employees to come work for you. You're selling shareholders to invest in you, and you're selling customers to buy your products. So there's definitely a lot of that (selling).
