HIBT Lab! Wonder: Marc Lore

Picture this: you just wrapped a long day of work and you are starving! You open a delivery app and place an order from your favorite restaurant. About an hour later, you get a notification that your meal has arrived. You’re practically salivating as you tear open the bag, and then...a rude awakening — your dinner became cold and soggy in transit. This frustrating and all-too-common experience is exactly what Marc Lore is trying to solve with his latest venture, Wonder. This week on How I Built This Lab, Marc returns to the show to share how Wonder, recently valued at $3.5 billion, has the potential to disrupt the entire food delivery and home dining industry. Plus, Marc offers advice on how to approach big challenges and discusses several other business ideas he’s been cooking up since leaving Walmart last year. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

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• 4:23Guy Raz?

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• 5:07Guy Raz?

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• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. As you might already know, How I Built This Lab is the place where we talk to founders and entrepreneurs working on big ideas that could have a significant impact on the world. It's also the place we talk to interesting content creators and even past guests from the show to catch up on what's been going on in their lives now. Well, today, we're joined by someone who first shared his story on How I Built This in 2021. Mark Lorrie is the founder of diapers.com and Jet.com. He grew up on Staten Island, where from an early age, he was always trying to find ways to make money, especially because his family didn't have much.

• 5:55Guy Raz?

  Mark would eventually become the first person in his family to graduate from college. And at one point, he became so committed to bobsledding that he actually qualified for the US Men's National Bobsled Team in 1998. If you haven't heard that episode of the show, go back and find it. It is really amazing. Anyway, Mark eventually started a trading card business with a friend in the late 1990s. It was an early e-commerce business, and in the 2000s, he'd go on to build diapers.com, which by 2010, became the biggest seller of baby products on the internet. That is, up until Amazon caught notice and acquired the company. It was actually

• 6:39Guy Raz?

  a low point in Mark's career. So, a few years later, Mark started another e-commerce site called Jet.com, and it would go head to head with Amazon. It was a business that would eventually be acquired by Walmart for around $3 billion. Fast forward to today, and Mark has since retired from his role as Walmart's CEO of the e-commerce division. But that hasn't stopped him from building new businesses. He's launched at least six new companies since he left Walmart, and he even purchased the Minnesota Timberwolves. Mark's latest venture is called Wonder, which was recently valued at a whopping $3.5 billion.

• 7:21Guy Raz?

  And we're going to hear how it's shaking up the food, delivery, and home dining industry in a pretty unique way. Mark, it's great to have you back on the show.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  It's great to be back.

• 7:31Guy Raz?

  We had you on the show, I think your episode aired in 2021. Around that time, you were just winding down your time at Walmart, but you would stay on as a strategic consultant. And as that was happening, I mean, it was also during the pandemic, and e-commerce obviously became really, really important at that time. Just tell me a little bit about what that was like. I mean, because you, all of a sudden, you're in this new world, and you were tasked to kind of create this e-commerce division for Walmart. I mean, it was all, all hands on deck, right? I mean, trying to keep up with demand.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it was quite challenging, you know, just growing off a big base that quickly. So, you're talking about adding, you know, tens of billions of dollars of revenue over a couple of years. And it required a lot of labor and had to make a lot of hires. And it's always challenging to hire great people and keep that standard and that bar really high. That was probably the most challenging piece of it.

• 8:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you've started so many of your own businesses and then they were acquired and then for a time you worked for the company, but you ultimately prefer to work for yourself rather than a bigger company. Is that fair to say?

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think I'm happiest when I'm doing something entrepreneurial, building something. I mean, it could be inside of a big company, building something. It's really about the autonomy to just run and build fast and not have to get, you know, traditional corporate buy-in before doing everything because corporations, they just tend to shy away from risk and low probability outcomes.

• 9:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  And I sort of gravitate more toward low probability outcome, but massive upside. And I think that's where the opportunity lies for an entrepreneur.

• 9:10Guy Raz?

  All right. So anyone who listened to your episode of How I Built This, and if you haven't, you should go back and listen to it. It's kind of a masterclass in building an e-commerce brand. You told me during the interview last time that, you know, you were going to do something else, that you were thinking about doing something else. Can you talk a bit about some of the ideas that you were just experimenting with?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Not only experimented with, I basically co-founded a half a dozen companies in a really short period of time.

• 9:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Tell me about some of those ideas.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Mojo is one of them. It's a sports stock market that's about to launch here in New Jersey for football season.

• 9:46Guy Raz?

  This is where you can actually bet on specific athletes, right? Not teams.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's basically you're placing a career bet on a player and you're able to get in and out of that in real time. So imagine if there were one stat like wins above replacement, for example, in baseball.

• 10:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  When that player retires, you get paid whatever their wins above replacement is. And so imagine somebody early in their career, you have no idea what the career ending war is going to be. And you could imagine, if you're right, you can make a lot of money if you invested in Tom Brady before he was Tom Brady.

• 10:18Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  And that's really the exciting part of this is that there's liquidity, you can get in and out, but there is a intrinsic value created by this stat that makes it very clear whether or not you're going to make money on a particular investment. And it's very different than other claims to be stock market. Market like baseball cards and things like that. Where you can be right on the player, but the market could go the other way on you. This is it's got intrinsic value. So we're very excited about it. One is Wizard. It's basically conversational commerce. I think there's a future where people will text what they want instead of going to a website.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  And so the idea is that businesses could use Wizard to offer a phone number where people could text the business to buy products instead of having to go to the website. Another company is Jump, which is a dynamic, real time ticketing exchange. Where the idea is that any customer or fan, so let's say you go to a Yankee game and you're sitting, you know, thirty rows back. And in the eighth inning, somebody leaves the game in the second row. All those seats become available for anyone in the stadium to what we call jump to.

• 11:33Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow. I love that. Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  So it's dynamic real time. There's no empty seats in the stadium near the field at any time. So everyone's always jumping. It's a reverse auction. So at some price, somebody will jump. And so the idea is that in any venue, in any sport, you wouldn't see empty seats because that's so frustrating. You know, I grew up and always was in the sort of bad seats and would try to jump down and find a seat and you'd get kicked out by the usher and things and

• 11:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Always try to move down, get closer. And it was always frustrating to see all these empty seats or people leave in the eighth inning. And the usher say, no, no, no, you can't go down. It's like, why not? All these seats are open. So

• 12:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  The idea is now there's a technology where anyone could jump to any seat and you know, the price could be very cheap. So that's one company called Jump. Another is Thoughtful, which is an app that enables people to be more thoughtful. To their friends, family and organizes all their ways to be thoughtful, you know?

• 12:27Guy Raz?

  Like remembering birthdays and sending gifts and stuff?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, birthdays and also just it's educational in the sense that, you know, you might have friends that are have a certain religion. And on certain days, it might prompt you to say, hey, your friend is Jewish and this holiday is important. To them, and this is some history about the holiday. And this is what you would say to your friend on that day.

• 12:51Guy Raz?

  Wow, how cool.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  People that, you know, going through infertility issues or pregnant and checking in on a friend. And it's automated in a way that prompts you with suggested texts or things to say. You could obviously edit it, but if you go into the thoughtful app, you can click on each day, then it'll basically send it through your existing text on your phone. So it's like organizes it really well. And so every day sort of prompts you ways to be more thoughtful to friends and family based on what you know about them. It could be forest fires in California. It knows that all the friends that live near there that might want to prompt you to send a note to them, check in on them and see how they're doing, stuff like that.

• 13:32Guy Raz?

  It's kind of crazy to me because you were basically running the e-commerce division at Walmart. And obviously ideas are coming to you like fast and furious. And you co-founded all these companies. The one you really decided to put all of your energy into is Wunder.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Wunder was the one that really stood out as having the ability to completely disrupt the entire food and beverage space, which was a massive market. I think the food industry is ripe for disruption. And you're just looking and thinking about that. And then obviously sort of all of us getting tired of food delivery being, you know, soggy fries and not being able to get, you know, healthy options like fish and things that don't travel well.

• 14:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  And paying all those fees and things and just thought younger generations are putting a higher price on convenience, not wanting to cook as much, willing to pay a premium for it. And I just thought, you know, what does 2.0 of this food delivery look like?

• 14:26Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  I don't think 10 years from now, people are going to still be satisfied with soggy fries. And so I thought, is there a way that you could bring the restaurant to the customer's home so that they had great quality food, piping hot without having to pay all those fees? That was the original thinking.

• 14:44Guy Raz?

  So let's explain what it is. It's not food delivery because that exists. There's DoorDash and Uber Eats and stuff. This is different. This is not you want a pizza, it gets delivered to your house. That's not particularly innovative today. What is Wunder?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're trying to create the next generation of what it means to be a restaurant chain. So when we think about a restaurant chain now, it's a brick and mortar. You go to the restaurant. Well, we've built now 20 restaurant chains across all different cuisines. And we put it on a mobile platform so that the restaurant actually comes to you, cooks right outside your door, very fast, in a high-speed convection oven, and brings the food piping hot to you. So I'm talking everything from a steakhouse, like Bobby Flay Steak, at the high end, all the way down to burgers and pizza and family style at the lower price points and everything in between, Chinese, Italian, Japanese. We've got sushi nakazawa that we can bring right to your door, Pizzeria Mozza from Nancy Silverton.

• 15:42Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  We've got great chefs like Jose Andreas and Marcus Hemus in new restaurants coming soon.

• 15:47Guy Raz?

  This is basically a mobile restaurant. So inside, there are the stoves and the burners and all of the equipment and a chef or two chefs maybe inside that. And they park in front of your house and start cooking for you?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yes, it's much more technology than you might think. So it is a Mercedes Sprinter van. So it's not very big. The one person drives and cooks and brings it to your door. So there's only one person on the truck. So it's on demand because some people think you got to order way in advance. You could go on the app.

• 16:20Guy Raz?

  All right.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  It'll tell you all 20 restaurants and it'll show you the time that we'd be expected to bring the hot food to your door. And it's usually, on average, around 30, 40 minutes from the time you place the order, you'll be eating the food. And so that means that the truck is probably 10 minutes away.

• 16:34Guy Raz?

  All right.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  From your door, it pulls up and then cooks the food in, you know, 15 minutes.

• 16:39Guy Raz?

  In front of your house?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  In front of your house.

• 16:41Guy Raz?

  Wow. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll hear more from Mark Glory, founder of diapers.com, jet.com, and now Wonder. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 16:56Guy Raz?

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• 17:38Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 18:23Guy Raz?

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• 19:08Guy Raz?

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• 19:52Guy Raz?

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• 20:35Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest today is Mark Lorrie, founder of diapers.com and jet.com. He was first on the show back in May of 2021, and he's back on the lab today to talk about his latest venture called Wonder, which was just valued at a whopping $3.5 billion. All right, here's the thing. This is very complicated, right? Like, you could, with your experience and who you are, you could say, you know what? I'm going to take on the DoorDash and Uber Eats and GrubHubs of the world and just make food delivery better and more efficient. But you're actually doing something incredibly complex. It's not a delivery business, like a logistics. Business, it's a food business, it's a tech business.

• 21:18Guy Raz?

  Like you are taking on a lot of complexity to make this work. So where did you sort of look at this food delivery market and say, there really is an opportunity here to offer people up something better? Like, why do you think that people will choose this over what they're getting now?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they do seem to be choosing it. We're able to order a steak and have it be like it just came out of the oven or fish. Fish doesn't travel well. If you wanted a grilled piece of salmon or grilled piece of cod, that is the real differentiator.

• 21:50Guy Raz?

  All right. So basically, what you've been doing is you've been working with restaurants and chefs you like. You essentially say to them, hey, we want to recreate what you do in the kitchen, but in a mobile truck. So we want to understand your process, how you make the food, how you serve it, and we want to recreate that and we'll license your recipes as IP. And then we will create these trucks, these mobile vans that basically are mobile Jose and Dress restaurants. And we go in front of your house, it's not Jose coming out and, you know, serving you food, but it's his food.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. The other thing to note is that the prices are pretty much exactly what you'd get in that particular restaurant. So if you went to De Faro Pizza, it would be the same price. If you went to Bobby Flay Steak, the same price. So the prices are not inflated. It's basically, without any fees, what you would pay in the restaurant. So cheaper than the delivery aggregators and, you know, delivery companies.

• 22:44Guy Raz?

  And you're saving money because there's no overhead. You don't have a massive staff.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  It's vertically integrated.

• 22:48Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's vertically integrated. We build these restaurants from the ground up. We've got a central commissary kitchen where we'll sous vide and par cook the food and put them in kits. And then the kits get loaded out onto these trucks and then they're out all night. And the beauty about the model is that the trucks are only 10 minutes away because they go customer to customer. They don't have to go back to some location to get the food.

• 23:09Guy Raz?

  Right. Mark, you are, obviously, you have created these amazing businesses and everyone who knows about e-commerce thinks of you as a really important pioneer. This is a different world. I mean, we know food delivery is like a $200 billion business now, but this is different. I mean, you're talking about almost like hiring a personal chef. And so I'm trying to understand how you actually make that into something that is cost efficient, right? To scale this, you're going to need hundreds of thousands of these vans all over the US. And then each van is parked in front of a house for like a half hour. That's a long time.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, more like 15 minutes, though. That's the thing. It's the speed. So if you think about the drive time from one home to another, 10 minutes, and the cook time, 15 minutes, that's 25 minutes, including driving and cooking. That's about the time it takes food delivery company to go to the restaurant, pick up the food, and bring it to a customer. And it's only one person on the truck. So that's how you make the math work.

• 24:12Guy Raz?

  Got it.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  And we're able to cook a Bobby Flay steak in five minutes.

• 24:16Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Because it's already sous vide in the central commissary.

• 24:20Guy Raz?

  Gotcha. It's already been cooked sous vide, so now they're doing the final touches. They're grilling it.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yes. If you ate the steak, I mean, you wouldn't be able to tell that you weren't eating it in Bobby Flay's restaurant. In fact, Bobby Flay came to try the steak, him and other chefs as well. They come and they try the food and they say, wow, I feel like I'm eating in my restaurant. This is great. But explain to me how you're going to be able to cook this in a truck. And then that's when we drop the bomb and say, no, that is and was cooked with the push of a button.

• 24:48Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  From a truck. And that's when it blows people away.

• 24:51Guy Raz?

  And this is really, you started this business, what, about 18 months ago, more or less?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's when we really started to get into market. Yeah.

• 24:58Guy Raz?

  And how many people do you guys have now?

• 25:00Speaker 01

  I mean, total employees, about 1,700.

• 25:03Guy Raz?

  What? You have 1,700 employees already?

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:07Guy Raz?

  And you're just in New Jersey right now, right?

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Correct. We're in Essex Union County and just went into Bergen County.

• 25:13Guy Raz?

  And will the vans be, I mean, obviously Bobby Flay and Nancy Silverton, Jose Andres, they're huge names in food. The van will say Wonder on it, or will it have the names of the chefs on it?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the vans look exactly the same, the Wonder vans, because on any night, a van could be Bobby Flay or it could be Jose Andres.

• 25:31Guy Raz?

  Got it. So when you first approached chefs about this, I mean, was there any skepticism? Were any of them like, I don't know, man, you know, you gotta have the kitchen, you gotta have the team there, the prep cooks, it's, you gotta be there. You can't like, do this in a truck.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, certainly when we started, there was a lot of skepticism and we had to prove it. You know, we had to actually just show the chefs the food and the quality.

• 25:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  And that's what did it, you know?

• 25:53Guy Raz?

  And you're still kind of in testing mode, right, in New Jersey? And how's it been so far? I mean, presumably you are tracking this like a hawk right now, because this is the test market.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's going really well. You know, the scores we're getting are excellent, outstanding. The repeat rates, you know, people are coming back at a really good clip. You know, close to three quarters of all the customers that try it will come back in the first 60 days. So that's a really high repeat rate. The average order value is great. It's in the 70s for a family.

• 26:22Guy Raz?

  $70?

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, yeah, it's going great. The penetration continues to increase. In Westfield, the first town, we're over 70% household penetration.

• 26:31Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  So, yeah, customers are trying it and they're coming back and loving it and we're expanding. We just went into Bergen County, like I said, in October. We'll be in Westchester County.

• 26:41Guy Raz?

  So you're doing this on a relatively small scale now in parts of New Jersey and Westchester County. So you can really track quality and control quality. But all of these chefs, these big name chefs are also, you know, they're kind of giving up control of their brands, in a sense, to you and these trucks. And when you make it on a much bigger scale, how do you guarantee the quality? How do you guarantee that somebody is actually going to get the same steak that Bobby Flay makes for you at one of his restaurants? I mean, even though you've trained somebody...

• 27:18Guy Raz?

  How do you make sure that what the customer is getting is because they're going to look at it and say, this sucks, Bobby Flay, I hate you, your food sucks if they don't like it. You know, he's going to hear that.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:28Guy Raz?

  So how do you ensure that that doesn't happen?

• 27:31Speaker 01

  That is the key to the model and that's where the investment in food science and food engineering really comes into play. And so we'll sous vide the steak, put it in a water bath, you know, at a perfect temperature and put it into a kit and the kit goes out on the truck. And literally from there, it is in the high speed convection oven, press this button, medium rare, and it'll come out perfect temp every time.

• 27:55Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  And so even more so than a restaurant, even a great restaurant, there are different chefs and sous chefs cooking and it doesn't always come out exactly the same.

• 28:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  In this case, it does.

• 28:06Guy Raz?

  And same with pizzas? I mean, is the oven also does pizzas that way? It's not a specific pizza oven?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  No, it does pizzas the same way. We will par cook the dough and you'll have the pizza and you won't know that it was cooked in four minutes in an oven.

• 28:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  The quality of the food is just what you would expect from the very best restaurants. That's the idea.

• 28:26Guy Raz?

  All right, let's talk about some of the challenges. I mean, because clearly you love challenges. You've already proved that with Jet and with diapers.com.

• 28:35Guy Raz?

  You're living in Manhattan, you're living, you know, I don't know, Boston. There's no parking anywhere. How do you get around that?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Well, given the density in a place like New York City, we wouldn't have to go more than a few blocks from a truck. And so either you can put 20 trucks and have 20 different restaurants in a parking lot and just cook the food and use a runner to bring it three blocks away. That's how dense we expect the orders to be. You can get a fixed location and put the, the equipment in there and run 20 restaurants out of a 2,000 square foot facility. So there's lots of options. It really depends on precise area.

• 29:13Guy Raz?

  Let's talk about staffing. I mean, there's a hiring crisis in the US, particularly in food and hospitality. Restaurants are struggling. I mean, all of a sudden, some people get COVID and then the restaurant is short staffed and it's, it's tough. But even beyond that, just bringing people into work in restaurants has been really, really hard. You're talking about. Hiring drivers who are also trained cooks. How do you do that? How do you find those, the humans, to do it?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, we pay people pretty well. So it's over $20 an hour, starting and up from there. Full health benefits. And we also give everyone stock in wonder. I believe that everybody working at the company should have a piece of ownership. And, you know, I want everyone to feel like, yeah, they could share in the success.

• 30:01Guy Raz?

  But these are two different skills. Being a driver of a van and also being a food prep person and, you know, presenting it beautifully. Tell me about the training process because you're, you can't just find people out of the box, ready to go and do this kind of work.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Yes, we have a really robust training program. And we found that people really like the idea of learning a new skill and getting out of the road and being able to handle the end to end. A lot of times when you are in the kitchen and you're cooking the food, you're not also serving it to the customers. So people have a lot of pride in they're going to make a meal and they're going to bring it to the door and they're going to see the customer that's eating it. And in many cases, they could start to get to know the customer as well. And so there's that end to end experience that people really appreciate.

• 30:47Guy Raz?

  I know I asked you about the staffing issues and your responses. We offer this great package, which is important, but even that hasn't been enough in many cases for many restaurants. I mean, I'm here in the Bay Area. Some Chipotle's are offering $22 an hour because they can't find enough people. Starbucks in the Bay Area, some of them are offering 20 bucks an hour. It's very, very challenging. You're looking at building thousands and thousands of these mobile vans. So ultimately, you're going to have to create almost like a category, a new category of employees, people who've never done these two things at once.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. That's what we're doing. Most of the people have had no culinary training, chef training at all. So we put them through a robust program. And I've talked personally to many of these chefs on the road, as we call them, cores. And many of them, you know, it's a new career path. And like I said, there's definitely some pride in being able to. Cook food for a family and then see that family firsthand and put a smile on their face. It really means something to folks.

• 31:52Guy Raz?

  You know, here's the thing. I think this is an important point, especially for people who are listening to this and are kind of in the early phase of their career, which is you've started and sold businesses three times, maybe more. And they're huge businesses like Jet and diapers.com. And you can basically take the approach like, I've proved myself. I don't have anything more to prove. I'm going to start this business and it's going to work. And I don't really care about your skepticism. But what I like is that you are willing to engage with the skepticism and the pushback because this is your approach. You're like, yeah, I'm starting from scratch and I'm going to prove this concept and then there's going to be skepticism and I'm going to answer that skepticism.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fun. It has to be fun. If it's stressful or if it's, if it's not fun, then it's not going to happen. You have to love it.

• 32:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  I absolutely love building something from nothing and seeing it come to fruition.

• 32:49Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another quick break. But when we return, more from Mark Laurie, founder of diapers.com, jet.com, and now Wondery. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 34:45Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz and I'm joined by a return guest, Mark Glory. You might know him as the founder of diapers.com and Jet.com. And now the founder of Wonder. It's a food delivery app that sends a truck to cook a meal right outside your front door. All right, let's talk about vision here because I'm thinking maybe one day I'll have a bunch of people over. I'm like, hey, should we do Jose Andres or should we do, you know, Marcus Samuelson? And then the truck pulls up and makes dinner for 12 people. But tell me about the vision like.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  And you mentioned they're 12 people guy, but it's like the primary use case is sort of every day of the week, just for family, it could be two, three, four people. I mean, the dinner party, it could work for that, but that's not really what it's meant for. It's really meant to be an everyday type of occasion.

• 35:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I'm using it for the dinner party. I'm sorry, the chef's going to go crazy and be like, I gotta make 12 of these. All right, so tell me about the vision and tell me about how you will roll this out across the United States.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, like you said there, we started in northern New Jersey. We're moving into Westchester. Then we'll roll it out to the rest of the tri-state area and then start exploring new cities and new suburbs around those cities. It's going to take probably, you know, 10 to 15 years to roll it out across the country. It's not something you do in just a couple of years. But we also, you know, outside of the mobile restaurants, we do have other adjacent businesses that are simultaneously being built. The big vision. Is for wonder to be the go to solution for meal time. Anytime you want to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, any price point, any day of the week. And so that means that it can't be just mobile restaurants pulling up to your door. We need to make meals that are ready to eat and cook in your own oven or even meal kits.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Where on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, you're not spending $70, you might want to spend 20. And so we really do want to hit every occasion and we've already got the customers on the app. And so on a marginal basis, it's very profitable to sell other things like meal kits and ready to eat meals.

• 36:49Guy Raz?

  Right, just like your model with diapers.com.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 36:52Guy Raz?

  You start with diapers, but you move into other things.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yep.

• 36:55Guy Raz?

  So the personalized cooking is just the start. And then eventually you branch out, you've got meal kits and other kind of ready to eat things available.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've just launched 30 ready to eat meals, which are basically, imagine a protein side, potatoes, and it's in a tin and you basically just take the top off, put it in the oven for 30 minutes and you've got yourself a great meal and we can deliver it fresh same day.

• 37:18Guy Raz?

  So this is at least 10 to 15 year project before it's nationwide. And one of the arguments is that if this works, it's very hard to replicate. It's not like one of these delivery services that, you know, you've got now 10 or 15 different companies doing it. This model is very hard to do because you've got trucks, you've got chefs, you've got the technology, right? And that's hard to stand up quickly.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very capital intensive. You know, it requires many years and a lot of money in food engineering and food science to be able to pull this off. So by next summer, by July, we'll have 30 restaurant chains, which we believe is around the right number. It's a pretty big moat around the business just to have 30 chains. Where we've invested tens of millions of dollars in each chain in terms of the R and D in food science, as well as all the engineering of the trucks themselves and all the evolution that's happened there. And we continue to evolve that every day.

• 38:15Guy Raz?

  Mark, you mentioned that this is a capital intensive business. I think you've raised over $800 million. So I have to assume that your investors are gonna have to be patient, right? So it's gonna be a while before this is a profitable business.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll be a while before the corporation wonder is, but the great thing about this model is you can prove profitability in a region. And so it's local. And so it's very different than a national business where it requires the entire business to get profitable. There's really no such thing as a local part of a national business, like an e-commerce. But here, you could actually saturate a particular region and show that the economics are profitable and it works. And so that makes it easier for investors to have conviction to expand.

• 38:58Guy Raz?

  You must also be learning a lot about food, right? Like a lot about the science of food, how it travels.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 39:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah, tell me a little bit about what you learned about food, how it travels and how it works in a mobile setting.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, the big thing is, you know, having come from e-commerce where everything's commoditized, where you buy a box of diapers from Procter and Gamble, it's the same box. Like, there's no change. And you don't expect it to change. With food, it's more dynamic. You can be ordering salmon filet and from a certain purveyor and it's great. And then all of a sudden, it's not. And what happened?

• 39:32Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  You know, what changed? Like, food is, it changes. You know, it depends on the season, it depends on who the purveyor is, and you have to be on top of it. And so one of the things that we do that's very unique, I think, to the restaurant world is that we've got meal level feedback from about 20% of our customers. And so they'll tell us, yeah, this burger was a nine taste and an eight temperature, or the steak was a 10, but it was a seven in portion size. Or like, really detailed feedback and numbers. And every week, I mean, we look at it every day, but every week, we have a full-on meeting to go through how the scores for the week changed. And we pick up things all the time, like, very quickly. Like, oh, something

• 40:14Speaker 01

  happened here. We were like, 99999, and this week, 8.4, what happened? And you immediately say, oh, yeah, they changed the quality of the meat without telling Something like that and then you very quickly change it. I don't know how restaurants honestly deal with that because it must be so hard without getting that detailed feedback at the customer level. It's hard to know whether something went from a nine point O taste to an eight point five or an eight point six even. You know, it's the small changes would be hard to figure out. And that's one of the things I really appreciate about food, about how challenging it is to get that right.

• 40:51Guy Raz?

  Hmm. Help me understand how you kind of compartmentalize all the different parts of this kind of business, right? Because you have an idea. It's a hard idea, admittedly, really hard. You've got to build trucks, right? So there's like that part of the business. You've got to design and then outfit these Mercedes transport vans. Then you've got a whole tech vertical in your company, like people building an app that's responsive. And then you've got a whole food business, like people who are makers, understand food, how it travels. How do you like jump from one to the other? How do you organize your thinking to oversee these three different parts?

• 41:27Speaker 01

  I think it comes down to just hiring great people, you know, it's VCP, Vision Capital People. Those are the most important components that I focus on and the vision is constantly evolving. The people piece though is where I spend most of my time because it's really about getting the right organizational structure and hiring the very best people and setting the culture up in a way that gets the very best out of them, you know? So people are motivated to want to give the best they've got. And if you get the best people and you get the very best they've got and they're in the right organizational structure, magical things can happen. And you can do many things simultaneously.

• 42:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How do you, I mean, again, like just getting my head around this. It reminds me a little bit of Peloton, which is also a very complex business because it's a logistics business. They deliver the bikes, they set them up at the houses, they manufacture the bikes, they've got studios, a media company. It's a tech company. It's a lot of moving parts, right? And basically that's what wonder is. It's a, it's not to compare it to Peloton and, you know, but just to say it's very complex in that way. You've got all of these different moving parts, including, you know, The possibility of car accidents. I mean, there's so many variables here. There's so much unpredictability around it. And I don't know, is your sort of view just embrace

• 42:46Guy Raz?

  that chaos or embrace that uncertainty? Because I would just have sleepless nights over any single one of those things breaking down.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Yes, it is embracing it. It is understanding what the nature of all the potential issues could be and how we're going to scale it and just tackling the highest priority item first and then the next highest priority item and just knocking them down. If you sort of take a step back and look at all the things at once, you'll get overwhelmed in everything that needs to get done. But if you sort of get everything on a piece of paper and start with the highest priority and then you start knocking a couple off and you start feeling like, hey, wait a second, this is doable. Let's just keep knocking these items off and eventually we'll have everything really tight and locked up. And you can't waste time, there's no time to waste to worry about the future or dwell on the past. You're going to make mistakes.

• 43:36Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  You're going to have do-overs. You're going to go through, sometimes you're going to go through a door and you're going to have to turn around and come right back out. And you can't dwell on that. I think that's the key that really separates what it means to be an entrepreneur. There's just no time for that. And if you're the kind of person that thinks about a failure or is worried about what might happen or what you have to do in the future, and you're just, even seconds, minutes wasted thinking about that during the day is going to be too much. I like hard businesses. I like businesses that require capital and are hard to execute because if you pull it off, it makes it really difficult to be a copycat.

• 44:18Guy Raz?

  To copy?

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:19Guy Raz?

  I want to ask you about e-commerce because you're such a pioneer in that space. And e-commerce is obviously now well-matured. I mean, we all get our two-day deliveries from Amazon or Walmart or Target, whatever it is. People are used to this. Now, they expect it. Things are available and it comes to your door. And you mentioned this new business that you're working on around texting companies for products, which seems interesting. Where do you think?

• 44:44Guy Raz?

  E-commerce is headed like in 10 years from now, will we be using it pretty much in the same way we use it now?

• 44:51Speaker 01

  I do think that the idea of having to go to a website and search for your product and say, I want to buy a toaster. And you search toaster and you get a long laundry list of toasters and you have to like weed through and figure out what toaster you want to buy. I don't think that's the future. I think the future is much more personalized. It's much more fluid, using artificial intelligence and texting. I think people would be able to in the future, just text what they want. And the system would know you as well as your best friend or family member. And be able to recommend precisely what you want and either using text or even voice. To just acknowledge that and have it delivered without having to do a lot of detailed searches and things.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  So I do think it becomes a lot smarter and a lot more conversational.

• 45:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  And in the way that it's just back and forth, like if you went into a brick and mortar. Went into a local Best Buy or something and wanted to buy a TV. You'd have an expert there and you'd have a conversation back and forth. Does it do this? Does it do that? I have this. I need it for this.

• 45:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  And having, imagine having all that, that knowledge already built in so that you can do that via voice or text. And be talking to somebody as knowledgeable as that person, but who also knows you as well as your best friend. And the merge of the two, I think is where we're going, but it's not going to be 10 years. Retail moves a lot slower than that. I think it's probably a 20 year plus before we really start to, to see that materialize. But it's, it's heading in that direction.

• 46:19Guy Raz?

  You're talking about artificial intelligence.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, artificial intelligence and, and machine learning by that time should be at a place where it's, it's more commonplace. And that's, that's how people will be ordering product.

• 46:31Guy Raz?

  What is it that drives you? Like, what is it inside of you that is like, I need to just build out all these things, you know? Like, is there something that, that you can explain to yourself or that you understand about who you are and how you work? I don't know, that explains this like restlessness. You know, because you just talked about wonder and then earlier we talked about six other ideas that you had that you co-founded. What is it? Like, why? When you get up in the morning, you're like, I gotta do this and that and this idea and that idea and I want to pursue them all.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  First of all, I would say it's just fun. It's sheer fun. You only get a certain number of years on this planet and you want to enjoy your time while you're here. And if you can make an impact and have fun at the same time, well, what's better than that? And I do think some of these ideas have the potential to have a positive impact on people in the world. And at the same time, it's super fun, challenging, like you said, to try and pull it off when there's a lot of doubters out there. And also, you know, in any company that I've built, we've hired a decent number of people. And I know I take a lot of pride

• 47:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  in watching those people's careers grow and learn and develop and they go on to do amazing things. And so it's not necessarily just about the company, but it's about all the follow-on effects of building something like that. And in the case of, like you said, the chefs on the road, which could potentially be hundreds of thousands, if not, you know, a million people that have a new career that they're proud of. And they too can make an impact in the people that they touch. And so it's no one thing that really drives me. It's sort of a bunch of things.

• 48:18Guy Raz?

  You are like 51, maybe, I think, right?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  51, yeah.

• 48:22Guy Raz?

  51, right. And you've done all these things in such an amazingly short period of time. And pride didn't feel short because you started these businesses in your twenties, but so much. Now you're doing wonder. And if I was betting on the betting markets, like if I was betting on your new betting company, but it wasn't about athletes, it was about founders and entrepreneurs, I would bet that this is not even your second to last or third to last or fourth to last or fifth to last business, right? Like, you're going to be starting more businesses. You'll do this for a couple of years, but you'll do something else and then something else.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  I think that's right. My goal is to be the oldest startup founder in history.

• 48:58Guy Raz?

  Is it really?

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So when I'm 90, you know, or 95, that would be so fun to do a startup from scratch, completely from scratch, a new idea, and just get out on the road pitching VCs at 95 with the cane and the wheelchair.

• 49:15Guy Raz?

  And you're like 95 and you're like, this business won't be profitable for another 20 years.

• 49:23Guy Raz?

  Awesome. Well, Mark Lorry, thank you so much for coming back on the show and updating us on what's been going on in your life.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Thank you, Guy. It was great to be on.

• 49:32Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at Guy.Raz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Elaine Coats, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Josh Lash, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, and Kerry Thompson. Neva Grant is

• 50:17Guy Raz?

  our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.