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This episode is brought to you in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Athens, and it was truly an incredible trip. We ate amazing food, we saw the Parthenon and the Agora, and all the incredible things you can see in one of the most amazing cities in the world. And one of the things that made it special was the home we booked on Airbnb.
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Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.host. 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 where 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 Lorry 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. Mark would eventually become the first person in his family to graduate from college. And at one point, he became so committed to Bob's letting that he actually qualified for the US men's national Bob's Let 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 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 CEO of e-commerce.
But that hasn't stopped him from building new businesses. He's launched at least six new companies since he left Walmart and even purchased the Minnesota Timberwolves. Mark's latest venture is called Wonder, which was recently valued at a whopping $3.5 billion. 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 a great tag back on the show. Great to be back. 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, it was also during the pandemic and e-commerce obviously became really, really important at the time. Just tell me a little bit about what that was like. I mean, because 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 hands on deck, right?
I mean, trying to keep up with demand. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it was quite challenging, you know, just growing off a big base that quickly. So you're talking about adding tens of billions of dollars of revenue over a couple years and it required a lot of labor and make a lot of hires and so is challenging to hire great people and keep that standard and that bar really high.
That was probably the most challenging piece of it. Yeah. So you've started so many drone businesses and then they required 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? Yeah.
I mean, I think I'm happiest when I'm doing something entrepreneurial building something. 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.
Yeah. And I gravitate more toward low probability outcome, but massive upside. And I think that's where the opportunity lies for an entrepreneur. Alright.
So anyone who listened to your episode of How to Build a This is where you can actually bet on specific athletes, right? Not teams. 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.
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 can imagine if you're right, you can make a lot of money. If you would invest in Tom Brady before he was Tom Brady.
Right. 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 the stat that makes it a 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, 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 a 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. 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 say you go to a Yankee game and you're sitting, you know, 30 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. Oh, I love that. 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 in. 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 get kicked out by the ushering things and always try to move down, get closer. And it was always frustrating to see all these empty seats where people leave in the eighth inning and they actually say, no, no, no, you can't go down. It's like, why not? All these seats are open.
So the idea is now there's a technology where anyone can jump to any seat and the price could be very cheap. So that's one company called Jump. Another thoughtful, which is an app that enables people to be more thoughtful to their friends, family and organizes all their ways to be thoughtful. Like remembering birthdays and sending gifts and stuff.
Yeah, birthdays and also just it's educational in the sense that you might have friends that 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. Wow, how cool.
People that 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 can obviously edit it, but if you go into the thoughtful app, you can click on each day, then it will basically send it through your existing text on your phone. So it's like organizes it really well. So every day it 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 and check in on them and see how they're doing stuff like that. It's kind of crazy to me because you were basically running the conference division at Walmart and obviously ideas are coming to you like Fast and Furious and you co-founded all these companies. But one you really decided to put all of your energy into is Wonder.
Wonder was the one that really stood out as having the ability to completely disrupt the entire food and beverage space, which is a massive market. I think the food industry was right for disruption and you're just looking and thinking about that and then obviously sort of all this getting tired of food delivery being soggy fries and not being able to get healthy options like fish and things that don't travel well and paying all those fees and things. And just thought younger generations are putting a higher price on convenience and not wanting to cook as much willing to pay a premium for it. And I just thought what does 2.0 of this food delivery look like?
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. So let's explain what it is.
It's not food delivery because that exists as door-to-door-ash and UberEats 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 Wonder? 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 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. Everything in between Chinese, Italian, Japanese.
We've got sushi nakazawa that we can bring right to your door. Pizza Ramosa from Nancy Silverton. Wow. We've got great chefs like Jose Andres and Marcus Samos and new restaurants coming soon.
This is basically a mobile restaurant. So inside there are the stoves and the verners and all of the equipment and the chef or two chefs maybe inside that. And they park in front of your house and start cooking for you? Yes.
It's much more technology than you might think. So it is a Mercedes-sprina van. So it's not very big. The one person drives and cooks and brings it to you.
It's only one person on the truck. So it's on demand because some people think you got to order weight in advance. You could go on the app. 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 usually on average around 30-40 minutes from the time you place the water you'll be eating food. And so that means that the truck is probably 10 minutes away from your door. It pulls up and then cooks the food in 15 minutes. In front of your house.
Wow. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back we'll hear more from Mark Lorie, founder of DATERS.com. JET.COM and now wonder. Stay with us for listening to How I Built This Lab.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest today is Mark Lorie, founder of DATERS.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 three and a half billion dollars. All right, here's the thing.
This is very complicated, right? Like you could with your experience and who you are. You can say, you know, 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. It's like a logistics business. It's a food business. It's a tech business.
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? 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 a grilled piece of cod, that is the real differentiator. 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 then we can come up from your house. It's not Jose coming out and serving you food, but it's his food. Yeah, the other thing to notice that the prices are pretty much exactly what you'd get in that particular restaurant. So if you went to Defarap pizza, it'd 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'd pay in the restaurant. So cheaper than the delivery aggregators and delivery companies.
And you're saving money because of the overhead. You don't have a massive stack. It's vertically integrated. Yeah, it's vertically integrated.
We build these restaurants from the ground up. We've got a central commissary kitchen where we'll Suvi and park 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. 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, 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. It's a long time. 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 and 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. Got it. And we're able to cook a Bobby Flase steak in five minutes.
Wow. Because it's already a sous vide in the central commissary. Gotcha. It's already been cooked sous vide.
So now they're doing the final touch. They're grilling. If you ate the steak, I mean, you wouldn't be able to tell that you weren't eating it in Bobby Flase Rush. In fact, Bobby Flase 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.
Wow, from a truck. And that's when it blows people away. And this is really you've started this business order 18 months ago, more or less? Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, that's when we really started to get into market. Yeah. And how many people do you guys have now?
I mean, total employees about 1700. What? You're 1700 employees already? Yeah.
And you're just in New Jersey right now, right? Correct. We're in Essex Union County and just went into Bergen County. And will the vans be, I mean, obviously Bobby Flay and Nancy Silverton host address their huge names and food?
The van will say Wonder on it or will it have the names of the chefs on it? Yeah. All the vans look exactly the same to Wonder Vans because on any night a van could be Bobby Flay or it could be host injuries. Got it.
So when you first approach chefs about this, I mean, was there any skepticism? This isn't where I'm like, I don't know, man. You got to have the kitchen. You got the team there, the prep cooks.
You got to be there. You can't do this in a truck. I mean, yeah, certainly when we started, there was a lot of skepticism. We had to prove it.
We had to actually just show the chefs the food and the quality. Yeah. And that's what did it? 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. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's going really well. The scores were getting excellent outstanding.
The repeat rates, 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 family. 70 dollars? Yeah. And yeah, it's going great.
The penetration continues to increase in Westfield. The first town were over 70% household penetration. Wow. So now 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 will be in Westchester County. 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, how do you make sure that what the customer is getting is because they're going to get 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. So how do you ensure that? That doesn't happen?
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 sieve 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. Wow.
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. In this case, it does. And same with pizzas. I mean, this oven also does pizzas.
That way it's not specific pizza oven. No, it does pizzas the same way. We will park cook the dough and you'll have the pizza and you won't know that it was cooking for a minute in an oven. Yeah.
The quality of the food is just what you would expect from the very best restaurants. That's the idea. Alright, 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. 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? 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. 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 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 the precise area. 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, there's a bit of COVID and then the restaurant is short staffed and it's tough. But even beyond that, just bringing people into working 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 the humans to do it? 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, when everyone feels like, yeah, they could share in the success.
But these are two different skills being a driver of a van and also being a food prep person and 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. 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're in a kitchen and you're cooking a food, you're not also serving it to the customer.
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 get to know the customer as well. And so there's that end to end experience that people really appreciate. I know I asked you about the staffing issues in your responses.
We offer this great package, which is important. But even that hasn't been enough in many cases from any restaurants. I mean, I'm here in the Bay Area. Some chipolays are offering $22 an hour because they can't find enough people Starbucks in the Bay Area.
Some of them are offering $20 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.
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, 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. You know, here's the thing.
I think this is an important point, especially for people who are listening to this in our 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 Jett and diapers.com. And you can basically take the approach like, that proved myself. I don't have any more proof.
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.
Yeah. It's fine. It has to be fun. If it's stressful or if it's not fun, then it's not going to happen.
You have to love it. I absolutely love building something from nothing and seeing it come to fruition. We're going to take another quick break. But when we return more from Mark Lorry, founder of diapers.com, and now wonder, stay with us.
I'm Guy Ros. And you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ros.
And I'm joined by a return guest, Mark Lorry. You might know him as the founder of diapers.com and check.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 have a bunch of people over. I'm like, hey, should we do Jose Entres or should we do, you know, Marcus Hangelson? And then the truck pulls up and makes dinner for 12 people.
But tell me about vision. And you mentioned there are 12 people, Guy, but it's like the primary use case is sort of every day of the week just for a 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. Yeah, I'm using it for the dinner party. I'm sorry. The chef's gonna go crazy.
I'm like, I got it at 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. 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 gonna 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 one day to be at the go-to solution for mealtime. 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 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. Right. Just like your model with diapers.com. That's it.
You start with diapers, but you move into other things. Absolutely. Yep. 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. Yeah. We've just launched 30 ready to eat meals, which you basically imagine a protein, side, potatoes, and it's in a tin.
And you basically just take the top off, put in the oven for 30 minutes and you've got yourself a great meal. And we can deliver it fresh same day. 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'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. Yeah, it's very capital intensive.
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 invested tens of millions of dollars in each chain in terms of the R&D and 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.
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 going to have to be patient, right? So it's going to be a while before this is a profitable business.
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. So it's very different than the 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 e-commerce.
But here you can 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. You must also be learning a lot about food, right? Like a lot about the science of food, how it travels.
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about what you learned about food, how it travels and how it works in a mobile setting.
Yeah, the big thing is you're having come from e-commerce where everything's commoditized, where you buy a box of diapers from Procter & Gamble. It's the same box. Yeah. Like there's no change.
And you don't expect it to change with food. It's more dynamic. You can be ordering salmon fillet and from a certain prepare and it's great. And then all of a sudden it's not.
And what happened? Right. You know, what changed. Like food is changes.
You know, it depends on the season. It depends on who the prepare 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 in an eight temperature or the steak was 10, but it was a seven-portion size. And so we've got 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 happened here. We were like, 9999 and this week 8.4. What happened? And you immediately say, oh, yeah, they changed the quality of the meat without telling us.
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. And then you have to know whether something went from a 9.0 taste to an 8.5 or an 8.6 even.
You know, the small changes would be hard to figure out. And that's one of the things that I really appreciate about food, about how challenging it is to get that right. How many 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 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 jump from one to the other? How do you organize your thinking to oversee these three different parts?
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 that was where I spend most of my time. 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. 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 not to compare to Peloton, but just to say it's very complex in that way.
You've got all of these different moving parts, including the possibility of car accidents. There's so many variables here. There's so much unpredictability around it. And I don't know, is your sort of you just embrace that chaos or embrace that uncertainty?
Because I would just have sleepless nights over any single one of those things breaking down. 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'd sort of take a step back and look at all the things at once, you'll get overwhelmed and 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 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. You're going to have to do over is 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 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 copycat. So copy. Yeah.
I want to ask you about e-commerce because you're such a pioneer in that space and e-commerce is obviously well matured. We all get our two day deliveries from Amazon or Walmart or Target or whatever it is. People are used to this and 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. What do you think e-commerce is headed? In 10 years from now, will we be using it pretty much in the same way we use it now? 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 search toaster and you get a long laundry list of toasters and you have to 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.
I do think it becomes a lot smarter and a lot more conversational 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 because I do this. I need it for this. Imagine having all that knowledge already built in so that you can do that via voice or text and be talking to somebody who is knowledgeable is 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.
It's not going to be ten years. Retail moves less slower than that. I think it's probably a 20 year plus before we really start to see that materialized but it's heading in that direction. You're talking about artificial intelligence.
Yeah, artificial intelligence and machine learning by that time should be a place where it's more commonplace and that's how people will be ordering product. What is it that drives you? What is it inside of you that is like a need to just build out all these things? Is there something 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 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 got to do this.
And that idea and that idea. I want to pursue them all. 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 in any company that I've built, we've hired a decent number of people. And I know I take a lot of pride 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 and the people that they touch. And so it's no one thing that really drives me. It's sort of a bunch of things. You are 51 maybe, I think, right?
51, right? And you've done all these things in such an amazingly short period of time and I feel short because you started these business in your 20s but so much. Now you're doing wonder. And if I was betting on the betting market, 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, last or third, last or fourth, last or fifth, last business, right?
Like you're gonna be starting more businesses. You'll do this for a couple of years, but you'll do something else and then something else. I think that's right. My goal is to be the oldest startup founder in history.
Is it really? Yeah. Yeah. So when I'm 90, you know, or 95 would be so fun to like do a startup from scratch completely from scratch.
A new idea. Just get out of the road, pitch in VCs at 95 with the cane and the wheelchair. And you're like 95 and you're like, this business won't be profitable for another 20 years. Right.
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. Thank you, Guy. That was great to be on.
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This episode was produced by Carla Estves with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Routine Arab Louis. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, Jay C.
Howard, Liz Metzger, Josh Lash, Sam Paulson, Katherine Seifer and Kerry Thompson. Niva Grant is our supervising editor, Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Roz and you've been listening. How I Built This?