Compound Interest from Semafor Business

Marc Lore built Diapers.com, sold it to Amazon. Built Jet.com, sold it to Walmart. Now he’s trying something different: taking Wonder — his vertically integrated food-delivery startup — all the way to a public offering. Semafor Deputy Editor-in-Chief Shelly Banjo joins Liz to dig into how he’s betting that robots, influencers, and AI-directed meal plans can finally crack the code on profitable food delivery, what e-commerce taught him about attacking fat margins with automation, and why he’s also quietly searching for desert land to build a city from scratch. This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter. Image: Reuters/Mike Blake

Mark Cuban is on a mission to rid the US health care system of the middlemen he blames for soaring costs. Liz and Rohan dive into his approach with Cost Plus Drugs, which aims to disrupt the little-known middlemen driving up prescription drug prices. He also discussed soaring valuations in sports, his own regrets around the Dallas Mavericks sale, and offers a surprising assessment of TrumpRX. This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter. Photo Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

Colossal, the biotech startup working on de-extincting the woolly mammoth and the dodo, thinks it can make trillions of dollars — almost none of it from consumer-facing products. Liz and Rohan dive into it all with CEO Ben Lamm, who has already spun out four businesses as he’s built the bioscience business with a focus on serving governments and nations looking to build drought-resistant plants, plastic-munching microbes, and much more (some of it classified!) This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

John Arnold — one of the greatest energy traders of his generation — turned his sights on philanthropy nearly two decades ago, applying the same ROI-driven focus that made him billions to charitable giving. He walks Liz and Rohan through his vision for fixing higher ed, the problem with sports betting and prediction markets, and the Trump-driven chaos in the energy markets. This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

Oura, whose rings are the favored accessory of finance bros and Silicon Valley longevity-maxxers, is doing something unusual in tech: Running toward a heavily regulated market. CEO Tom Hale explains why the company’s future is in the clinical world, plus what he thinks wins the wearables war and what it’s like doing business with the Pentagon right now. This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

America needs millions more homes. Private-equity firms, red-tape nightmares, and homebuilders’ profit motive are all to blame. One startup, an offshoot from Airbnb, has a solution: fully-built, crane-plopped tiny homes in your backyard. Liz and Rohan dive into how Samara is trying to redefine what housing looks like, and whether it’s the start of a new asset class for Wall Street. This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

Private equity and private credit was long a perk for the rich and well-connected. But now Wall Street’s investment giants are pitching their products to everyday Americans, who have piled in — and are now piling out in a panic. Is this democratizing finance or a recipe for disaster? Liz and Rohan dive into that and much more with Alisa Wood, the KKR executive leading their retail charge. This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

David Ulevitch leads Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism fund, a $1.776 billion pot dedicated to defense, energy, public safety, and other national priorities. We talked about whether those industries deserve their conservative coding, why venture capital — with its roots in capital-light code — has a right to win in heavy industry, and why he doesn’t want the “moral liability” of deciding how the Pentagon uses the weapons Silicon Valley is building.  Sign up to get Semafor Business in your inbox. Compound Interest from Semafor Business is supported by Amazon Business.

Bilt Rewards launched in 2019 with a simple idea. If you can get credit-card rewards for buying a round of drinks, why can’t you get them for paying your rent? After a shambolic and short-lived partnership with Wells Fargo, the company is back with bigger ambitions: to be the platform powering 12% of the economy — housing services — plus a big chunk of what people spend on dining, workouts, healthcare, and other local services. It’s a little Amex, a little Shopify, and a little Square, and a test of a big question we’ve had about business today: Why does every company want to be a membership club? Liz and Rohan talk to Bilt CEO Ankur Jain to find out. Sign up to get Semafor Business in your inbox. Compound Interest from Semafor Business is supported by Amazon Business.

Uber changed the way people work and the way they move. Now CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is trying to figure out what role people play in his business, as AI and autonomous vehicles change the economics of transportation and impossibly, make it easier for people — or things — to get from Point A to Point B. He talks with Semafor about his AI-driven robotaxi mission control, what self-driving cars will look like, how we’ll interact with Uber ten years from now, his own forays into vibe-coding apps — and what it means for companies everywhere. NOTE: Khosrowshahi, who was born in Iran, reveals in this interview what he told Donald Trump, in person, about his views on the regime. We recorded with Dara last week, before the US launched its attack. Sign up to get Semafor Business in your inbox. Compound Interest from Semafor Business is supported by Amazon Business.

Business is changing in subtle and seismic ways. Every Tuesday starting March 3, Compound Interest from Semafor Business will pair journalists Liz Hoffman and Rohan Goswami with the operators, experts, and innovators behind the world’s most consequential companies, to decode why big parts of the economy work the way they do. Sign up to get the Semafor Business briefing delivered right to your inbox: https://semafor.com/newsletters/business Compound Interest from Semafor Business is presented by Amazon Business.