In conversation with Marc Lore, Founder and CEO of Wonder Group

Marc Lore, Founder of Wonder Group, aspires to be the go-to solution anytime you want to eat a meal. They’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to cook food (without a kitchen) across all cuisines with just a push of a button. It’s Culinary Engineering. Marc is a serial entrepreneur who also has sold patents to other companies of his, such as his co-partnership with A-Rod. The Jump Platform uses a reverse auction to allow sports game attendees to move seats when they free up midway through the game.

To sell or to sell out

Marc Lore has a few claims to startup fame:

1. He sold Jet.com to Walmart for $3B with the purpose of making Walmart a formidable #2 player against Amazon. The acquisition grew Walmart’s market share 5x in 4 years. “With Walmart, part of the reason why we sold it, a big reason was we felt like we had a vision to compete with Amazon and be a formidable number two player in that market. And we felt with Walmart, we had the potential to get there faster.”

2. He sold Diapers.com to Amazon, which played a major role in Amazon becoming an everything store.

Two large acquisitions with similar outcomes, but one was a preferred next step for Marc, while the other, even after a $550M exit, left Marc feeling like he had “sold out.”

Amazon wanted to buy Diapers.com. However, Marc was not sold on selling the company to Amazon because he was certain he had a strong strategy for success. As he tells it, with Diapers.com, Wag.com, etc., he was creating a platform (see what Jason Browder from DoNotPay.com says about platform businesses).

Marc put up a fight against Amazon, even winning the diaper battle when Amazon cut the price of diapers by 30%. Their growth slowed a little, but it became clear to Amazon that “this business is not built on price; they have a real brand.” This made Diapers.com even more attractive to Amazon. With a $100B company coming after them, investors got scared off, and Marc didn’t have the capacity to raise the needed $100M to fight the Goliath.

As a result, Diapers.com was sold for $550M but felt like it had sold out because they knew their strategy would have ultimately created even more value. “The day after we closed on the money, we went to the bar and were so upset. We were near tears drinking our tears away because we sold out. We were forced to sell it. We were building something really special.”

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Making Healthcare Actually Work with Co-Founder and CEO of Cityblock Health, Toyin Ajayi

Toyin Ajayi, co-founder and CEO of Cityblock Health, raised $400M in 2021 (a total of $900M to date) which brought her company’s valuation to $5.7B! We’ve discussed how little VC funding goes towards Black and Latinx women, so we have to take this moment to shout out sis. She is one of 9 Black/Latinx women who have a company valued at $1B or more. We see you Toyin!

Scaling high-touch healthcare

Cityblock Health is a primary care, behavioral health, and social care company focused on low-income, marginalized populations and predominantly people who get Medicaid and Medicare. As the website describes, Cityblock Health “seeks to be as unique as the individuals in the communities we serve.”

For communities that have been severely and historically underserved, creating a system of deep care is imperative. The company has a grassroots approach to entering a new market. First, they connect with the community hubs and second, the leaders get grounded in the best ways to engage and support its people.

In the company’s first cohort of members, they saw a 15% reduction in emergency room visits and a 20% reduction in in-patient hospital stays.

Toyin discussed the three main ways the company uses tech to scale their work and their care:

• Leveraging Data to Build Trust: The first is in data, understanding what to do for whom. It's a great application for data science. With the right data, Cityblock is able to get to their folks as quickly as possible, with the right modality, at the right time, and earn their trust.

  1. Cater to diverse populations: Young folks older folks, folks with disabilities, folks with mental health challenges. I have to engage all of them.

  2. Provide nuanced outreach: Who do I go after first? Who do I call first? Who's going to go to the emergency room tomorrow unless they get a phone call from us? Who's not home today because they're likely out working? Who's likely to be engaged on the weekend?

• Zeroing in on the hierarchy of care needed: The next thing is then, what do you do for them? “If a person has a multitude of challenges, like many of the folks we care for, what's the most important unlock for them?” Folks who are living on the streets, marginally housed, or unhoused, before you do anything else, you've gotta get them a safe place to sleep. “There's no point saying, I'm gonna write a new prescription for X or Y, I'm gonna make a referral to Z, if they literally have no place to sleep.”

• When asked about revenue as a recession was being predicted, Toyin shared how Cityblock manages an allocation per month per member that allows them to deeply care for each person and invest in the population based on needs. “More than anything, this moment in time calls for businesses like ours that are addressing folks who would get left behind otherwise. We know the need for social support will increase, which creates for us more opportunity to prove our model.”

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Where Matters: Building on the Location Layer of the Internet with Gary Little, CEO of Foursquare

Gary Little, the current CEO of Foursquare is focused on building advanced technology in an easy-to-use package so enterprise companies can improve their user experience. From direct routing (e.g., how to get to the loading dock) to using AI to query your Google Maps by simply describing what you’re looking for when you don’t know the name, the technology could radically support companies across industries like transportation and logistics to reality.

Foursquare is working in the background

Remember Foursquare? Well, it is literally in everything we do, powering how we connect with the outside world around us – from tagging a tweet to hailing an Uber.

It started out as a consumer check-in company and now has begun to focus on being that location and geospatial platform that significantly improves the user experience across companies. “We're the building location layer of the Internet.”

Gary Little, CEO of Foursquare discussed that they care most about knowledge graphs: “ There are social graphs and there are knowledge graphs. Location-based knowledge graphs help Foursquare know, what is the density of things you care about [points of interest] that can be surfaced in real time?”

For example, Gary and Myriam, the moderator, shared that “maybe if you are using Redfin, as you're walking down the street, it could pop up something saying, Hey, you were looking at this house. It's literally right here.”To take this example even further, Foursquare data could be pulled by other companies that know what you are interested in so you know where to go to accomplish some of your regular or favorite tasks.

Gary sees their legacy as a big reason why their customers are so invested in the success of Foursquare, “[It’s] very hard to get to that place where your customers are invested deeply in your success. And so part of that undoubtedly is the fact that many people are still app users. We still have consumer apps in the universe, and people still are very passionate about them.”

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