Marc Lore is an entrepreneur and president and Chief Executive Officer of Walmart eCommerce U.S. He was appointed in September 2016 to lead U.S. e-commerce when his company Jet.com, an e-commerce startup launched in 2014, was acquired by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Prior to Jet, Lore co-founded Quidsi, the parent company of a family of websites such as Diapers.com and Soap.com, with childhood friend Vinit Bharara. The Quidsi company was sold in 2011 to Amazon for $545 million.
Career
Lore has worked in the finance industry, at Banker's Trust, Credit Suisse First Boston, and Sanwa Bank. He then embarked on entrepreneurial ventures. He was co-founder and CEO of The Pit, Inc., which he successfully sold in 2001 to the then public Topps Company. He joined the Topps Company as the Chief Operating Officer of one of its subsidiaries, Wizkids, Inc. In 2005, he and Vinit Bharara founded 1800DIAPERS, which would be rebranded as Diapers.com and fall under the parent corporation Quidsi, Inc. According to a 2009 interview, his vision for Diapers was inspired by his own family's experience with the difficulty of keeping necessary baby-care goods in stock. From 2005 to 2012 the company launched a portfolio of websites catering to families, including Soap.com and Wag.com. Lore and Bharara were successful in building a loyal customer base among young parents in urban areas. To improve the economics of shipping bulky, low-margin products like diapers to their customers, they established warehouses relatively close to urban areas to take advantage of ground shipping rates, instituted algorithms to minimize ship cost, and conducted warehouse operations using Kiva robots. The company was sold to Amazon in 2011 for $545 million. Lore then worked for Amazon for over two years.
Jet.com
In 2014, Marc Lore co-founded an e-commerce company, Jet, with Nate Faust and Mike Hanrahan. The company raised a total of $80 million in Series A funding, which closed inNovember 2014 Investors include NEA, Accel Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Mentortech Ventures. In November 2014, Jet launched a campaign offering stock options to users generating word-of-mouth for the company in advance of launch. In January 2015, Jet was featured in a cover story in Bloomberg Businessweek, in which it was revealed that Jet would be a shopping club in which members will pay an annual fee of $49.99 to access the lowest prices on millions of items, although the membership fee was eliminated in October 2015. In February 2015 Jet raised an additional $140 million in pre-launch funding from investors including Bain Capital Ventures, Accel Partners, Alibaba Group, New Enterprise Associates, and others. Beta testers in May 2015 reported cheaper prices than Amazon but longer delivery times. On 21 July 2015, Jet.com opened to the public. On August 8, 2016, Walmart announced it had agreed to acquire Jet.com for $3B in cash and $300M in stock. Following the acquisition, Lore was appointed president and Chief Executive Officer of Walmart eCommerce U.S.
