Businessman Marc Lore has already sold two companies for billions of dollars together. Now he plans to run his food delivery and takeaway business. Wonder public in a couple of years with an ambitious valuation of $40 billion.
We recently spoke with Lore in person in New York about Wonder and its ultimate goal of making meal planning easier, but we also touched on Lore’s management philosophies. Below is some of what he said on that last front, lightly edited for length and clarity.
History of the calls founder modein which founders and CEOs actively work not only with their direct reports but also with “level-jumping” employees, to ensure that small challenges don’t become big ones (Brian Chesky operates this way, as does Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, among many others):
Yeah, the founder mode thing didn’t really resonate with me, because I operate differently. I really focus on this idea of vision, capital and people. We have a meeting every week with the leadership team and we spend two hours every week just on the fundamental elements of the vision, the strategy, the organizational structure, the capital plan, our performance management systems, the compensation systems, the behaviors and values, like, things that you think are already set up.
You say, “Oh yeah, we already did behaviors. We already made values. We did performance management. “We have our strategy.” But when you grow up and move fast, it’s amazing how much it evolves over time, and you want to stay on top of it… and just talk about it and talk about it.
When everyone is completely aligned and you have really good people, you just let them run; I don’t need to get involved at all. So I don’t get involved in the details of what people do, as long as they know the nuances of the strategy and vision. When you make it with your team, and they make it with their own team, everyone moves in the right direction.
How Lore thinks about hiring the right people:
I’m very, very good at hiring rock stars. Like, that’s every person. [I hire]. I used to think you could interview someone and within an hour decide if that person is a rock star. I really thought that and I think other people did too.
It’s impossible. I have hired thousands of people. You can’t tell if someone is a rock star in an hour-long interview, and more often than not, you’ll get drunk. Someone talks about a good game, it sounds good, they say the right things, they have the right experience, but then it doesn’t work and you wonder why.
I started going back to the resumes and trying to make correlations, and what I found is that there is a clear pattern that superstars have on their resumes that differs from non-superstars. That doesn’t mean that someone who doesn’t have a superstar resume can’t be a superstar. I miss those people, okay. But when I see someone who has a superstar resume, it’s almost always a superstar. When I interview them, I already know I want to hire them, and it’s more to make sure I’m not missing anything from a behavioral, cultural, or values standpoint—we want alignment on that.
But the resume should show a demonstrable level of success in each job you held. That means multiple promotions. It means staying at a company long enough to get a promotion, and it means that when you leave and move from one company to another, it’s a big step. Superstars don’t move laterally. They don’t go from being a good company to a bad one, because bad companies need to pay more to attract people and, therefore, sometimes they get rid of people who are not so good, who just want to make money.
But you find someone who [in the top] 5% and you look at their resume, it’s like: boom, boom, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, and then a big jump… promotion, promotion, big jump. When I get that resume that shows that demonstrable level of success, I take it and pay them whatever they need. It’s very important for me to have that superstar there. And you build a company of superstars.
You need to have the right performance management system in place so they know exactly what they 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 it and be promoted every six months.
Finally, here’s Lore talking about his belief that taking bigger risks is the way to secure a startup’s future, even though the approach may seem counterintuitive to many:
People always underestimate the risk of the status quo and overestimate the risk of making a change. I see that over and over again.
If you have a life-threatening medical condition and the doctor tells you, “You have six months to live,” at that point, a trial drug or anything, even if it’s very risky, [is going to look good]. You’re basically looking for opportunities to take risks, so you don’t have that inevitable death.
If you are super healthy and everything is going great and someone tells you, “Take this experimental drug; “It could make you live longer.” [a lot of people will say]”You know what? It’s too risky. I’m really healthy. I don’t want to die from this drug.”
But startups are very different from large companies. When you are in a big company like Walmart [whose U.S. e-commerce business Lore ran after selling it one of his companies]This is an incremental improvement. There is no incentive to take risks.
As a startup founder, you’re likely to die. You will most likely die every day you live and do this startup. The probability is 80%, with only a 20% chance of this actually working. So you have to take it into account when making decisions. We must look for opportunities to take risks, to reduce the risk of dying. The status quo is the worst thing you can do. Doing nothing is the biggest risk you can take.