Entrepreneur Marc Lore on ‘founder mode,’ bad hires, and why risk aversion kills

Businessman Marc Lore has sold two companies for billions of dollars, combined. Now he plans to take his food delivery and retail business Wonder public in a few years for a whopping $40 billion.

We spoke with Lore in person in New York recently about Wonder and its ultimate goal of making food easier, but we also touched on Lore’s management philosophies. Below is some of what he had to say at the end, slightly edited for length and clarity.

Lore in the so-called founder mode, where founders and CEOs work diligently not only with their direct reports but with “monitoring” employees as well, to ensure that small challenges do not become big ones (Brian Chesky works in this way, as Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Elon Musk , and Sam Altman, among many others):

Yeah, the inventor mode thing didn’t work for me, because I work differently. I am very focused on this idea of ​​vision, money, and people. We have a meeting every week with the leadership team, and we spend two hours every week on the basics of vision, strategy, organizational structure, financial plan, our performance management systems, compensation systems, ethics, values ​​- like, things you think are set.

He’s like, “Oh, yeah, we’ve already done the behavior. We have already done the pricing. We have implemented performance management. We have our strategy.” But when you grow up and move fast, it’s amazing how much that changes over time, and you want to sit on top of it… and talk about it and talk about it.

If everyone is fully compatible 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 clarifying what people do, as long as they know the nuances of strategy and vision. If you get that drive with your team, and they get that drive with their team, everyone is moving in the right direction.

How Lore thinks about hiring the right people:

Really, I’m big on hiring rock stars. Like, everyone [I hire]. I used to think you could interview someone and an hour later decide that person is a rock star. I really thought that, and I think other people did too.

It’s impossible. I have employed thousands of people. You can’t tell if someone is a rock star in a one-hour interview, and more times than not, you’ll get honey in a jar. Someone talks a good game, sounds good, says the right things, has the right information, and then it doesn’t work, and you wonder why.

I started going back to the resumes and trying to draw connections, and what I found is that there is a clear pattern that the big stars have in the resumes that are separated from the non-stars. That doesn’t mean that someone who doesn’t have a superstar can’t be a champion. I miss those people, okay. But when I see someone with a star resume, it’s almost always a star. When I interview them, I already know that I want to hire them, and it’s more than just making sure that I don’t lack anything in terms of ethics or culture or values ​​- we want to understand each other there.

But the resume should show a tangible level of success in every job they’ve been in. That means a lot of promotion. It means staying at a company long enough to get promoted, and it means that if you move from one company to another, it’s a big move. Celebrities don’t step aside. They don’t go from a good company to a bad company, because bad companies need to pay more to attract people so sometimes they move the wrong people, who just want to make money.

But you find such a person [in the top] 5% and you look at their resumes, it’s like: boom, boom, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, then a big jump … promotion, promotion, big jump. If I find that resume that shows that level of tangible success, I grab it and pay them whatever they need. It’s so important to me to put that star in there. And he built a company of stars.

You must have a proper performance management plan so they know exactly what they need to do to get to the next level. Because stars are highly motivated. They want to know what they need to do to get to the next level, especially Gen Z. They also want to know about promotions every six months.

Finally, here’s Lore talking about his belief that taking big risks is the way to secure a startup’s future, even though the approach may seem counterintuitive to many:

People always underestimate the dangers of the status quo, and overestimate the dangers of making a change. I see that over and over again.

If you have a life-threatening disease, and the doctor is like, “You have six months to live,” at that time, an experimental drug or anything, even if it’s very dangerous, [is going to look good]. You actually want opportunities to take risks, so you don’t have that inevitable death.

If you are healthy and everything is going well, and someone says, “Take this experimental drug; it can make you live longer,” [a lot of people will say]”You know what? It’s very dangerous. I’m really healthy. I don’t want to die from this drug.”

But startups are very different from big companies. If you are in a large company like Walmart [whose U.S. e-commerce business Lore ran after selling it one of his companies]it’s all about continuous improvement. There is no incentive to take the risk.

As a startup founder, chances are you will die. Chances are you will die every day you live and do this startup. 80% chance, and only 20% chance that this will actually work. So you have to take that into consideration when making decisions. You have to look for opportunities to take risks, to reduce the risk of death. The status quo is the worst thing you can do. Doing nothing is the biggest risk you can take.