Zebeth Media Solutions

Marc Lore

‘Investors got scared off by Amazon’s attack’ • ZebethMedia

Way back in 2010, Marc Lore struck a more than half-a-billion dollar deal to sell Quidsi — the company behind Diapers.com and Soap.com — to Amazon. The blow-out acquisition helped turn Amazon into “the everything store,” but twelve years later, Lore described the sale as “upsetting.” “We sold out,” said Lore — who co-founded both Quidsi.com and Jet.com — at Disrupt 2022. “With Walmart, we were happy to sell; we saw that as a way to accelerate our vision,” said the billionaire of the 2016 sale of Jet.com to Walmart. The “Amazon situation was different. It was a forced situation. We did not want to sell,” Lore said on stage in conversation with ZebethMedia’s Ingrid Lunden. To stick it to the competition, Amazon “cut the price of diapers by 30%, right? Which is unheard of,” recalled Lore. But in the face of ratcheting pressure, the former Quidsi executive claimed his now-defunct business was “still growing nicely.” Lore claimed this was among the reasons why Amazon ultimately decided snapped up the brand. But before that point, Lore believed that Quidsi needed to raise at least $100 million more to adequately challenge Amazon— an especially hefty sum at the time. Only, he couldn’t secure it. (In all, Quidsi raised around $79 million in equity and debt from investors, including Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures.) “That’s what it would have taken to feel like we had enough capital to really do it,” said Lore. “And yeah, the investors got scared off by Amazon’s attack.” In a side note, Lore claimed that Quidsi also “had an offer from another company” for “like $100 million more,” yet the co-founder enigmatically declined to share additional details. A day after the Amazon-Quidsi transaction closed, Lore said that he and others from the company went to a bar, “drinking our tears away” over “how upsetting it was, because we sold out.” “We were building something really special,” Lore added, citing Wag.com and other sites under the now-extinct Quidsi umbrella. In the eyes of the co-founder, Quidsi’s customer experience back then “was a lot better than you’d find on Amazon or anywhere else.” But $100 million “was a lot of money” back then, and Lore concluded: “People were just scared of Amazon.”

Marc Lore shares exclusive details on Jump Platforms, his stealth sports ticketing startup • ZebethMedia

Today at ZebethMedia Disrupt, serial entrepreneur Marc Lore disclosed exclusive details about a new dynamic ticketing startup, still in stealth, that he founded with former New York Yankee all-star Alex Rodriguez. Called Jump Platforms, the company will sell access to seats that free up when people leave midway through a game. Fans already at the game are alerted when better seats become available. Pricing starts high and drops depending on demand in a reverse auction format.  Lore, who co-owns the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves with A-Rod, has applied for a patent that is still pending. He said he started looking into dynamic ticketing years ago when he was attending various sporting events.  “I just felt like wow, why are all the seats empty close to the field or close to the arena? And why, when people leave, like when they leave the baseball game in the eighth inning, and all these incredible seats — why do they have people that don’t let anyone go down?” he said, referring to event security staff. “Nobody’s sitting there.” “So I thought, why couldn’t you — this was the patent — dynamically in real time make these seats available so that people could could jump to any new seat so they would always be filled in. Everybody from the top would naturally come down because there would be a reverse auction,” Lore said. “I call it dynamic real-time ticketing. There’s lots of other things you can do with that technology.” Lore assigned the patent to the company and is an investor in the startup. Jump is still in stealth mode, according to CEO Jordy Leiser’s LinkedIn profile. According to incorporation papers filed in Delaware, the company was founded in August 2021.

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