He Sold His Startup to Walmart for $3.3 Billion. Here’s His 3-Part Plan for Founder Success

In the past 25 years, serial entrepreneur Marc Lore has built and sold four successful businesses. You might say Lore knows a thing or two about building and selling businesses. More recently, he founded the restaurant-kitchen and delivery concept Wonder.

Before Wonder, Lore built and sold Diapers.com to Amazon in 2011 for $550 million and then built and sold e-commerce powerhouse Jet.com to Walmart in 2016 for $3.3 billion. Along the way, Lore says, he realized the most important things a founder can focus on are vision, capital, and people.

Vision.  Your vision is your 10- to 15-year plan of what you want your business to become, says Lore. But it isn’t just a picture of wealth and success. Your vision should include the strategy of how you expect to get there, he says, and what your competitive advantage is. This will inform how you attack whatever problem you’re solving in a way that no one else is. Then it can help you structure your organization to support that strategy.

People.  Lore prioritizes hiring a head of human resources or chief people officer early in a startup’s life. A decision-maker in this role can help shape the business culture around performance management, compensation, and recruiting, he says. Lore explains that it’s hard to recruit some of the best people in the world to come work at an early-stage startup. A chief people officer, if they’re really good, can help make the difference.

Capital.  Once you’ve got a vision and a plan to get your business there, you’ll need to start thinking about how much capital you’ll need to execute that vision. This is where your vision, your strategy to achieve that vision, and competitive advantage can help you craft a compelling pitch to investors. Lore says the last thing you want is to feel the stress of needing to raise money. “It’s like survival,” he says, “like being chased by an animal that was going to devour you.”  But, “if you’ve got a clear vision, you’ve got capital, and you have the best people in the world in the right spots with the right level of motivation,” says Lore, “you could accomplish anything.”