Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold two companies for billions of dollars, collectively. Now he plans to take his food delivery and take-out business Wonder public in a couple of years at an ambitious $40 billion valuation.
We talked with Lore in person in New York recently about Wonder and its ultimate aim of making meal planning effortless, but we also touched on Lore’s management philosophies. Below is some of what he had to say on the latter front, edited lightly for length and clarity.
Lore on so-called founder mode, wherein founders and CEOs actively work with not only their direct reports but with “skip level” employees, too, in order to ensure that small challenges do not become big ones (Brian Chesky operates this way, as does Jensen Huang of Nvidia, 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 foundational elements of the vision, strategy, org structure, the capital plan, our performance management systems, compensation systems, behaviors, values – like, stuff that you think is already set.
You’re like, “Oh, yeah, we already did behaviors. We already did values. We did performance management. We have our strategy.” But when you’re growing and moving fast, it’s amazing how much that evolves over time, and you want to stay on top of it … and just talk about it and talk about it.
When everybody is fully aligned and you have really good people, you just let them run; I don’t need to be involved at all. So I don’t get involved in the specifics of what people do, as long as they know the nuances of the strategy and the vision. When you get that dialed in with your team, and they get that dialed in with t …