In the airy great room of his three-story penthouse in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, Marc Lore has covered one of the walls of floor-to-ceiling windows with hundreds of colorful Post-it Notes—pink, orange, yellow, green—stuck to giant white sheets of paper, in cascading patterns like pixilated rainbow waterfalls. • “I call this my war room,” says Lore. Next to him on one of the broad, white sofas sits Kristin Reilly, the chief people officer of Lore’s four-year-old food-delivery startup, Wonder, one of several companies he’s currently building and the one that requires most of his attention. Their project: dismantling and rebuilding Wonder’s org chart. “In all my experience as an entrepreneur over the past 20 years,” he says, “this is the most underappreciated, underrated, most powerful thingthat any entrepreneur could focus on: the org chart.”
Where previously the company had been built around traditional functional units, it will now be built around key metrics. It’s just the kind of thing Lore gets excited about, and he can’t suppress a grin as he unravels the reasoning. He points to ayellow Post-it representing an executive who oversees delivery-truck ops, whose responsibility Lore describes as “minimizing nonrevenue-generating time, when drivers are not actually on the road, and maximizing their scores on a number of factors—their stop time, or whether they make mistakes.” Those are vital performance measures for the company, and yet in the prior org chart, HR handled the recruiting and training of drivers, even though the exec in question was responsible for their performance. That allowed for finger-pointing if things were to go wrong. Lore, instead, wants to establish what he calls “end-to-end ownership,” so the lines of responsibility are clear.
Lore, a trim 51-year-old with a bald head, a square jaw, and Tom Cruise-worthy teeth, has been working on the reorg for two weeks, and today he and Reilly have been holed up in the war room for hours, debating strategic groupings, moving Post-its around, staring at the wall, and moving things around some more.
Driving it all is a fast-growth philosophy Lore has honed over the course of a legendary career as a serial founder, most notably of Diapers.com parent Quidsi (which he sold to Amazon in 2011 for just over half a billion dollars) and Amazon challenger Jet.com (which he sold to Walmart in 2016 for well over $3 billion). Dubbed vision-capital-people (VCP) by Lore, the philosophy is essentially a road map to achieving a startup’s purpose. Under each of those three pillars lie four strategies, and under each of those lie specific metrics to measure whether the organization is succeeding.
It’s a framework
