In his thirties and forties, when he was building the e-commerce businesses that would make him a billionaire, Marc Lore hardly ever made it home for weeknight dinners with his wife and two daughters. During the intense periods of fundraising that became his calling card, he sometimes wouldn’t make it home at all.
His marriage suffered, and eventually ended. He gave up on hobbies and new friendships. “I sacrificed everything I felt I could,” Lore (pronounced “LOR-ee”) tells me, sitting in a conference room at the R&D center of his meal-delivery company, Wonder, in Parsippany, N.J. Scribbled on a dry-erase board is a three-year timeline, building up to an IPO in 2027. “I had nothing else left to sacrifice, because when you do this startup thing, you can’t, like, dial it back or do it less. It just is what it is. You’re eating glass every day, you’re working 100 hours a week, and you’re all in on it. It’s the only way to make it work.”
Lore has made it work on a spectacular scale. His 2010 sale of Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com, to Amazon for $545 million netted him tens of millions of dollars. The $3.3 billion sale of another company he cofounded, Jet.com, to Walmart in 2016 resulted in a personal windfall that even his grandkids’ grandkids couldn’t spend. By the age of 45, Lore, raised in a tumultuous home on blue-collar Staten Island, had a CV that would surpass many of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs’ bucket lists.
And at 53—with a net worth estimated by Forbes recently to be $2.8 billion, including his ownership stake in the Minnesota Timberwolves NBA franchise—he’s far from done. In his latest big entrepreneurial bet, Lore has poured over $300 million of his own funds into Wonder, a virtual food hall for the digital generation with ambitions to become so much more. Lore has opened 39 Wonder storefronts—locations equipped with kitchens that allow for walk-in orders and deliveries—across six states, most in New Jersey and New York, and plans to have 90 open by the end of this year. He has raised $1.5 billion. He acquired the meal-kit company Blue Apron, the delivery company Grubhub, and a video network called Tastemade. He recruited actress and entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow, as well as famed chef and restaurateur José Andrés, as board members. The former marketing chief of Sweetgreen and ex–grocery boss at Amazon hold executive roles. Wonder aims to be “the Amazon of food and beverage,” Lore has said.
Lore’s grand vision is to build the app and business into the platform for all food delivery for your home—whether it’s a meal prepared at a Wonder facility or a Grubhub partner restaurant, a Blue Apron boxed kit, or a bag of groceries left on your doorstep—with an AI agent executing the experience. Eventually, he says, that AI might tell you exactly what to eat based on your tastes, dietary goals, and vital signs—then serve you those meals (as Lore’s personal chef already does for him). There may even be a robot making the food.
For now, Wonder’s bet is that households accustomed to the variety and convenience of food-delivery apps are looking to eliminate one of the last frictions left: agreeing on where to order from. With the various restaurant concepts that exist only in Wonder’s slick, beautifully photographed app, there’s no need to choose. One order could include a cheeseburger from Burger Baby for your picky kid; a spicy tuna bowl from Hanu Poke for your sophisticated teen; ribs from Tejas Barbecue of Tomball, Texas, for your spouse; and a hearty Cobb salad for yourself from Royal Greens.
What these “restaurants” may lack in brick-and-mortar substantiality, Wonder makes up for with a gloss of authenticity: dishes from famed establishments such as Bobby Flay Steak; Brooklyn’s Di Fara Pizza; and Streetbird, celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson’s fried chicken joint.
I can’t help thinking there’s some irony in the fact that the guy who often missed family dinners in his earlier life—and employs a personal chef in his current one—is now running a company trying to solve the eternal what’s-for-dinner conundrum. But I’m here to get to the bottom of a different question about the serial entrepreneur: Why is this billionaire, whose insatiable drive has already cost him his marriage of 22 years, still grinding through all those 90-hour workweeks? What more does Marc Lore have to prove? And to whom?
I began reporting on Lore and his companies more than 10 years ago, and have long been fascinated by Lore’s myriad contradictions: He’s a ruthless corporate competitor, though most employees can’t recall him ever raising his voice to even a seven out of 10. He’s a brilliant mind who brags—often—that he doesn’t read anything beyond what’s directly necessary for the job at hand. And he’s a self-made billionaire who still doesn’t feel he has fully succeeded. He hears the industry whispers doubting whether he can ever build a profitable, long-term, independent business.
What would it take for Lore to rest content? A whopper of a public offering would be a nice start, he tells me: “If it’s an IPO and it’s tens of billions—10, 20, 30 billion—that would be the biggest entrepreneurial achievement of my career.”
The sales of Quidsi and Jet were lucrative, sure—but they were also deals made under duress, and both ended with Lore’s brands being absorbed into the massive entities that purchased them—and ultimately buried in the corporate M&A graveyard.
Wonder will be different, Lore believes. He can almost taste the possibility that this will be the one—the company whose name becomes a verb, the killer app that will transform an industry and become his legacy.
But first he needs people to understand what Wonder even is. That’s not always straightforward, as Lore explained in a recent meeting with a design firm presenting an overhaul of the layout and appearance of Wonder storefronts. Lore warned against “anything that smells like Wonder could be perceived as a diner, like Cheesecake Factory—just all these different cuisines and menus. It’s not. It’s a platform. It’s a home where all these restaurants live.”
Those restaurants include 16 in partnership with an existing chef, and 11 “white-label” brands created from scratch by Wonder, ranging from Middle Eastern to Mexican to “Bellies,” a restaurant entirely geared to kids’ tastes. The average Wonder location offers a selection of more than 500 menu items—many of them partially precooked in a central kitchen, then finished at the storefronts.
Last September, at the grand opening of Wonder’s 17th location, just a few blocks from his $44 million Tribeca penthouse, Lore wore a dark-green Wonder baseball cap, a beige hoodie over a crisp white tee, and multicolored Nike SB Dunk Low Pro “What the Dunk” kicks, which can fetch more than $10,000 on sneaker-resale apps. An Oura health-tracking ring adorned his left index finger.
Lore’s girlfriend, Heather Flora, looked on amusedly as he goofed around with the ceremonial ribbon-cutting shears, flanked by the chef and TV personality Marc Murphy, one of the “partner” chefs who has sold rights to his likeness and menu to Wonder. I commented to her that Lore looked well-rested for a man who had been going full tilt 80 or 90 hours a week. She smiled. “He has a whole skin-care routine,” she offered. “He looks rested, but he’s not. He’s up at all hours of the night.”
It was yet another contradiction, and one I mentioned to Lore as I munched on Wonder’s more-than-passable brisket sandwich: that someone who cares enough about his health to wear an Oura Ring and do red-light therapy might also go weeks at a time with minimal sleep.
His sleep schedule is usually more regular, he reassured me—until it’s not. It’s the result of a mind in unrelenting motion. “Even during this interview right now with you, I solved a lot of problems,” he admitted sheepishly. “Is that rude?”
“Yes,” I joked, and demanded that he at least reveal the problem or solution he was working on in the background. He demurred, saying it had to do with M&A.
“I can’t help it, because my brain is just working over here,” he explained, “but I have to still be able to live, and do stuff, and eat and talk.”
In Lore’s telling, his sometimes combustible upbringing is the key to how he became the entrepreneur he is. Those years of loneliness and unhappiness left him with the habit of escaping into mental problem-solving—and perhaps living with uncertainty and risk gave him the “cognitive flexibility” that neuroscientists have observed in habitual entrepreneurs.
Born in 1971 to 20-year-old Chiara Lore and her 21-year-old husband, Peter—who were basically kids themselves—Lore was the eldest of three children. They lived in a small apartment on Staten Island, before his family eventually moved to New Jersey. Peter Lore pursued several entrepreneurial ventures, with varying success. “His drive was insane,” Lore said of his father. “But things never worked out.”
During his early years, Lore remembers long stretches of alone time spent focused on Legos or his GI Joe figures. In the evening, nightmares took over. As a school-age boy, he remembers, he found a soothing mechanism in counting to himself and solving mental math problems.
Reflecting back, Lore says he has no recollection—not a face nor name —of any of his schoolteachers or friends during his elementary school years on Staten Island. “It freaked me out,” he says of recognizing this hole in his personal history recently. “Like, what the hell happened?”
Lore figures it must be connected to his chaotic home life, where screaming matches between family members and drug use were not uncommon. “It did affect him,” Lore’s mom, Chiara, said of her eldest son. “He never knew what was going to happen next.”
Throughout his childhood, Lore found some security with his maternal grandparents, whom he knew as Big Pop and Big Nan. Big Pop laid train tracks for the city. While his bank account was not overflowing, Big Pop felt he was rich with love. “He’d count every one of his relatives as a million bucks,” Lore said, “and he’d be like, ‘Who’s got it better than me?’ ”
In calmer moments, Lore displayed intense curiosity, prompting Big Nan to half-jokingly offer him a quarter if he stopped asking questions. “He always wanted to learn,” Chiara said.
As Lore grew older, his competitive spirit showed up more, intertwined with his mathematical mind. As a teenager, when he tagged along on trips to the racetrack with his uncle, Joe Lore, it wasn’t enough to just cheer on one horse, his uncle recalls. Lore wanted to arbitrage their bets: place smaller amounts on multiple, or all, horses in a single race to guarantee a win. To Lore, his uncle recalls, the size of the win wasn’t the point: “He just wanted to find a way to beat the odds.” (This approach was sometimes tiresome, Joe Lore recalls: “I said, ‘This is not fun anymore; I just want to go to the track, have dinner, have a beer, and bet on some horses.'”)
While not a standout athlete overall, Lore was blessed with tremendous speed as a runner. He won a state sprinting championship in high school and would go on to run at Bucknell University. He attempted some outlandish feats, like those he read about in the Guinness Book of World Records, a childhood favorite. (He now sees this habit as stemming from attempts to draw his father’s attention and acceptance.)
After college, for example, he decided to break the fastest time for running a mile backward. Lore says his training propelled him to around a six-minute, 45-second backward mile—not so far off the retro-running record of six minutes, seven seconds at the time—before an injury sidelined him and his dream for good.
In his mid-twenties, Lore qualified for the U.S. national bobsledding team after stumbling across a tryout in downtown Manhattan during a lunch-break stroll with his uncle. “I’m like, ‘Dude, wouldn’t that be the craziest thing ever if you made the Olympic bobsledding team?’ ” Joe Lore says. “He gives me this big wide grin and says, ‘That would be sick! I’m gonna try.’ ” Marc Lore would eventually qualify for the Olympic Games, but he turned down that opportunity to continue a burgeoning career on Wall Street, he says.
“Like a shark has to keep swimming, Marc has to keep building.”Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart
Lore had set some hard goals for himself: Earn six figures by 26; seven figures by 37; and eight figures, at least $10 million, by 48. He did hit his goal of a six-figure salary by 26, and then some. But in 1999, after collapsing from exhaustion at his job as an EVP of risk management at Sanwa Bank, Lore quit to pursue an entrepreneurial career.
With two close school friends, Vinit Bharara and Lax Chandra, he started an online stock market called ThePit.com in 1999 that was meant to mirror the performance of professional athletes, using their trading cards as proxies. (Lore and Chandra had dabbled in a trading-card business as high school students.) But within two years, the dotcom bust helped force them into a sale to the trading-card giant Topps for just a little more than they had raised from investors.
It wouldn’t be the last time that a swirl of factors led to the premature sale of one of Lore’s ventures. It happened again nearly a decade later, when Lore and Bharara felt forced into the sale of Diapers.com. Their e-commerce site, launched in 2005, alarmed Amazon executives by becoming a hit among a new generation of busy, digitally savvy urban working parents. So Amazon implemented a ruthless attack of 30% price cuts on diapers. “It felt very unfair,” Lore told me in an interview for my book Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets.
Lore and Bharara started sale talks with Walmart, but Amazon swooped in with a $540 million bid. When Walmart countered at the last minute with a $650 million offer of its own, the fear of what Amazon would do if the Walmart deal fell through ultimately made the decision in favor of Bezos and company’s lower bid feel inevitable. The sale agreement was inked in 2010. (An Amazon spokesperson disputed this characterization of events, saying that Lore had always made it clear to company leaders that he’d rather sell Quidsi to the tech-forward Amazon instead of the more traditional Walmart.)
With tens of millions now to his name, Lore didn’t need anyone’s pity. But he has since said that the way the deal went down—and his dissatisfying two-plus years as an Amazon executive running Quidsi and its sites (including Diapers.com and Wag.com)—left a sour taste in his mouth.
To add insult to injury, Amazon officials issued a press statement when they shut down Quidsi, laying off hundreds, with rather pointed and specific language. “We have worked extremely hard for the past seven years to get Quidsi to be profitable,” it read in part, “and unfortunately we have not been able to do so.” Many read the statement as a jab at Lore and his ability to create and run a sustainable business. “It was an unusual quote,” one former Amazon executive told me for my book. “For a lot of people, it stood out.”
After leaving Amazon, Lore went up against the gigantic e-tailer again with his next venture, Jet.com, raising more than $200 million in venture capital before the discount-shopping startup launched to the public in 2015. Lore would go on to raise a total of $800 million for Jet in less than two years. Back-to-back all-nighters became the norm during brutal weeks-long VC tours that saw Lore reach what he proudly calls “sixth gear”—pushing his body and mind to the max.
At Jet, eventually something had to give. Lore had massively pivoted the business model before its public launch, axing a planned membership fee in order to raise the potential ceiling of the business and attract more investor money. But the company was spending tens of millions a month, and money was running low. That’s when, after a period of corporate flirtation and bonding with Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, Lore persuaded perhaps the only potential large acquirer to fork over $3.3 billion to buy Jet in 2016. It was one of the largest acqui-hires in modern business history.
As president and CEO of U.S. e-commerce at Walmart, Lore hit the ground running with a flurry of acquisitions and service launches that helped spark a new narrative about Walmart—that the lumbering big-box behemoth was finally stepping up its online-shopping game. The moves were not all wins, and Lore and team often sparred with other executives. Still, Walmart’s digital metabolism and sales—not to mention its reputation—did change.
In an email to Fortune, Walmart’s McMillon praised Lore’s commitment to whatever project he’s focused on. “His mind gets consumed with an idea and develops an intense focus on it,” he said of his former direct report. “Like a shark has to keep swimming, Marc has to keep building.”
Over his career, Lore has raised more than $3 billion in venture funding across 15 fundraising rounds. He has been rejected at approximately 2,800 out of 3,000 pitches, by his own calculation—93% of the time.
His playbook is clear: Fill the pipeline. Take every possible investor meeting. When the answer is no, probe for the specific reason, accept the feedback, tweak the presentation accordingly, and persuade the investor to sit for another, more targeted pitch. Five of Wonder’s 25 investors initially declined, then ended up investing, Lore says proudly. “Twenty percent of our investors had literally passed,” he said, emphasizing the final word. “I don’t mean on a previous round; I mean on that round.”
What’s his key to a successful pitch? “I try to always narrow it down to, ‘What’s the one thing that if we accomplish it, the idea works?’ ” Lore said. “The thing that, if it works and you believe in this, then it’s gonna be a monster. It’s limiting the number of things that they have to believe.”
Tony Florence of New Enterprise Associates (NEA), a Wonder board member and the largest shareholder in Lore’s last three companies, said Lore is rare in that he can hold “a center of gravity on a very big, bold long-term vision and at the same time be obsessed with the details of the moment.”
After four-plus years at Walmart, and with shrinking influence inside the retailer’s Arkansas headquarters, Lore left the company and began splitting time between new startup investments and a moonshot idea to create a city of the future. Then Wonder’s challenges and prospects reeled him in.
“When you do this startup thing, you can’t dial it back or do it less. It just is what it is.”Marc Lore, CEO of Wonder
He had invested $80 million of his own money up to that point. Originally, Wonder’s model didn’t involve storefronts. The company used delivery vans fitted with rapid-cook ovens to prepare chef-designed dishes outside suburbanites’ homes, then walk them to the front door. The idea was to offer the next best thing to restaurant-quality dining—no soggy burger buns here—at home.
While sales numbers were impressive, the model was expensive. Meanwhile, funding for cash-burning venture-backed businesses dried up. Then-CEO Scott Hilton partnered with Lore to deliver more than 100 pitches, a scramble to raise money for the fledgling startup. “It was brutal but fun,” Hilton recalls. “Every single call, we went through what did and didn’t work, and the presentation got tighter and tighter and tighter.”
It wasn’t enough. Potential investors had been peppering Wonder leaders with questions: How big could the business get if it remained focused solely on the suburbs? How long would it take to see a return on the massive investments needed to operate a fleet of kitchens on four wheels? The story just wasn’t selling.
Meanwhile, when the company opened a physical storefront in New Jersey as a test, it was a hit. Within weeks Lore had decided this was enough to justify a hard pivot in the company’s strategy, as he had done with Jet. Even if the storefront model hadn’t definitively been proven, Lore reasoned, “I had proven to myself that this was a superior model, and it had a superior story that was easier to raise money off the back of.” In 2022, Lore took over as CEO, ditched the delivery vans, and laid off more than 100 workers.
“At a big company, they’d be like, ‘Let’s open up a few more and give it 12 months,’ ” Lore said. “We just didn’t have the time. Every day mattered.”
The first time Marc Lore’s voice cracked with emotion, it caught me off guard. We were in Wonder’s sprawling R&D office, where the minimalist decor doesn’t scream “billionaire founder.” (The vehicle parked directly outside the front entrance, however, does: a Rolls-Royce SUV, all-black everything, that can run around $400,000.)
Lore was reflecting on the end of his two-decades-long marriage. “I think it was just sad,” he muses, his voice a tick above a Catholic Mass whisper. Another 10 seconds crawled by. “Yeah, I mean, just sad … Fundamentally, if somebody wants to live a certain way, and somebody wants to live [another] way, there’s just no way to make that work.”
As a father, Lore tells me, he may have spent less time with his daughters than he would have liked, but “at least the time I was around with them, we made good use of it.” He recalls wacky bedtime stories, nail painting, igloo construction. “I’m almost getting choked up just thinking about this,” he says, his voice indeed quivering, “because it’s so different than the way I grew up. My dad never did anything I wanted to do.”
When he meets entrepreneurs who came from more stable family backgrounds than his own on Staten Island, Lore says, “it’s a different mentality. I always ask people like them, ‘Did you have a good childhood growing up? Were you loved?’ They’re like, ‘Oh, yeah,’ ” Lore says, rolling his eyes. “I’m like, ‘You have no idea.’”
Despite all his success, that fierce competitiveness hasn’t left Lore, says his uncle, Joe Lore. “There are still some people that he feels are above him that he’s chasing,” he says. “I think he wants to leave a legacy—but he doesn’t think he’s big enough.”
Lore himself uses a basketball analogy: If you were to compare Lore’s current standing as a top entrepreneur to a professional basketball player, as he did at one of our sit-downs, he says he’s the equivalent of an NBA player, but one who has never made an All-Star game nor won the Most Valuable Player award, let alone even sniff consideration for the Hall of Fame. “I’m not done,” he says. “I want to do this till 90.”
Lore’s 25-year-old daughter Sierra sees his drive as “relentlessly optimistic.” She’s doing a PhD related to longevity, and says her fascination with this moonshot field has everything to do with her dad: “There’s the tiniest chance—like a .000001% chance—that we’re all going to live significantly longer, and we’re all going to be healthy for hundreds of years,” she says. “But the reason I’m in it is because he taught me truly to believe anything’s possible.” (Despite a distant relationship with his father growing up, Marc Lore says his dad instilled in him the same idea.)
On the February day I met with Lore, his usual optimism was tempered by a pensive mood. We were in what he calls his VCP room: vision, capital, people. (That’s also the name of the venture firm he started with former baseball star Alex Rodriguez, with whom he purchased a stake in the Timberwolves.) On the back wall was a huge corporate org chart, a rainbow of sticky notes, each carrying an employee’s name. It struck me as a founder’s version of a detective’s evidence wall: True Detective: Startup Country.
Lore will sit silently in his VCP room for up to 45 minutes at a time, scanning for weak spots in his startup’s hierarchy, the leaders among its 3,700 employees, that could upend its bright future—and that thus need immediate attention.
He motioned to the section representing the growth team at Blue Apron, the onetime-darling meal-kit company that Wonder acquired in 2023 for $103 million, a fraction of its nearly $2 billion valuation after going public years earlier. “We cut from 165 to just these people,” he explains. (A Wonder spokesman says there are about 45 employees still at Blue Apron.) “So it’s very lean. But I look at it and I think it’s maybe a little bit too lean.”
Two months after I chatted with Lore at the ribbon-cutting in Manhattan, Wonder announced another acquisition of a onetime market leader that had fallen on hard times: a $650 million deal to purchase Grubhub, the takeout app that had once led the U.S. food-delivery sector and boasted a $20 billion market cap.
My mind wandered back to the M&A problem that Lore had admitted his brain was working on during our September meeting, even while he was engaged in a conversation with me. I asked him if he had been thinking through his purchase of Grubhub.
He smiled widely and nodded.
There’s no denying that the odds are heavily stacked against Lore with Wonder. It could be years before his sci-fi vision of an AI-powered, personalized super app for all your meals and groceries becomes reality, if it ever does. The acquisitions of Blue Apron and Grubhub at bargain-basement prices could prove prescient—or unwise and unnecessary distractions. And winning over venture investors is one thing; building a loyal customer base is another.
One industry insider who has been pitched by Lore expressed some skepticism about whether he can pull this off: “His real genius ability is to be able to reverse engineer from a goal that he thinks is mathematically possible and create a structure that’s like a fly trap to people who end up thinking the whole thing is sensible.”
But the restaurant industry is brutally competitive and not exactly welcoming to those trying to disrupt it. When Lore started Wonder, Joe Lore recalls, he warned his nephew that the vast majority of restaurants fail: “He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m looking at it as a number. Jet was about the math, Diapers was about the math; it was always about the math.’ ” That’s the same teenager who used to arbitrage bets at the racetrack, Joe Lore says: “It will always revert to a percent or percentage, and putting the odds in your favor. It doesn’t matter if he’s selling screws, widgets, hamburgers.”
But getting a truly delicious dinner on the table isn’t just a numbers game, as anyone in the food industry will tell you. To keep customers coming back in a competitive dining environment, each and every dish ordered will need to pass muster: that burger, that poke bowl, the ribs, and the salad. It’s no easy task—especially when the food has to hold up in a takeout container. And a glance at Wonder’s Google reviews—with ratings ranging from 2.6 to 4.6 stars—makes it clear that consistency is still a work in progress.
Despite the whiteboard sketch aiming for a 2027 IPO, Lore’s spokesman now says the goal is 2029. There’s still a lot that could go sideways. With Diapers.com and Jet, the same was true. But Lore isn’t focused on that.
“You don’t waste a minute thinking about things that went wrong in the past,” he once told me. “There’s a million things that can go wrong—you’d be worrying about everything. There’s no time for that shit.”
This article originally appeared in the April/May 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “The restless mind of the serial entrepreneur: Marc Lore and his quest to create the Amazon of food delivery.”