THE RESTLESS MIND OF THE SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR

MARC LORE AND HIS QUEST TO CREATE THE AMAZON OF FOOD DELIVERY

- JASON DEL REY

In his thirties and forties, when he was building the e-commerce businesses that would make him a billionaire, Marc Lore hardly ever made it home for weeknight dinners with his wife and two daughters. During the intense periods of fundraising that became his calling card, he sometimes wouldn't make it home at all.

His marriage suffered, and eventually ended. He gave up on hobbies and new friendships. "I sacrificed everything I felt I could," Lore (pronounced "LOR-ee") tells me, sitting in a conference room at the R&D center of his meal-delivery company, Wonder, in Parsippany, N.J. Scribbled on a dry-erase board is a three-year timeline, building up to an IPO in 2027. "I had nothing else left to sacrifice, because when you do this startup thing, you can't, like, dial it back or do it less. It just is what it is. You're eating glass every day, you're working 100 hours a week, and you're all in on it. It's the only way to make it work." Lore has made it work on a spectacular scale. His 2010 sale of Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.​com, to Amazon for $545 million netted him tens of millions of dollars. The $3.3 billion sale of another company he cofounded, Jet.​com, to Walmart in 2016 resulted in a personal windfall that even his grandkids' grandkids couldn't spend. By the age of 45, Lore, raised in a tumultuous home on blue-collar Staten Island, had a CV that would surpass many of the world's most successful entrepreneurs' bucket lists.

And at 53-with a net worth estimated by Forbes recently to be $2.8 billion, including his ownership stake in the Minnesota Timberwolves NBA franchise-he's far from done.