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Entrepreneur Marc Rohr talks 'founder mode', bad hires and why risk aversion is deadly

TechBrunchBy TechBrunchNovember 24, 20245 Mins Read
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Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold both companies for a combined billion dollars. He now plans to take food delivery and takeout business Wonder public within the next few years at an ambitious valuation of $40 billion.

We recently spoke with Lore in person in New York about Wonder and its ultimate goal of making meal planning easier, but we also touched on Lore's business philosophy. Below is some of what he had to say about the latter, lightly edited for length and clarity.

The lore of so-called founder mode is that founders and CEOs proactively collaborate with their direct reports as well as “skip-level” employees to ensure that small challenges don't become big ones (as Brian Chesky puts it). Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, etc.):

Well, the Founder Mode story didn't really resonate with me, because I do things differently. I place particular emphasis on the ideas of vision, capital, and people. We have weekly meetings with our executive team, and we spend two hours each week just talking about the basics: vision, strategy, organizational structure, capital planning, performance management systems, compensation systems, behaviors, and values. Something that seems to have already been set.

“Oh, yeah, we already did behavior. We already had values. We already had performance management. We have a strategy.” But growing and rapidly It's amazing how much it evolves over time, and you want to stay on top of it…and you want to keep talking about it.

If everyone is fully aligned and you have really good people, you can just let them do it. No need to get involved at all. So I don't get involved in what people are doing, as long as they know the nuances of strategy and vision. When you reflect that on your team and they reflect that on their team, it keeps everyone moving in the right direction.

How does Lore think about hiring the right people:

I'm really big on hiring rock stars. it's everyone [I hire]. I used to think that if I interviewed someone, I could tell within an hour whether they were a rock star or not. I really thought so, and I'm sure others think so too.

That's not possible. I've employed thousands of people. An hour-long interview won't tell you whether someone is a rock star or not, and will often end up in the honeypot. You wonder why someone talks about a good game, sounds good, says the right things, has the right experience, and it doesn't work.

I went back to resumes and tried to draw correlations and found that superstar resumes have distinct patterns that distinguish them from non-superstars. That doesn't mean someone who doesn't have a superstar resume can't become a superstar. I miss those guys, okay. But when you see someone with a superstar-like resume, they're almost always a superstar. When I interview them, I already know that I want to hire them. And that's just to see if there's anything I'm missing in terms of behavior, culture, values. We hope to match there.

However, your resume should show a demonstrable level of success in all your previous jobs. That means multiple promotions. That means staying at a company long enough to get promoted, but it also means a big move when you leave and move on to another company. Superstars don't move sideways. You can't fall from a good company to a bad company. Bad companies have to pay more money to attract people, so they can shake off not-so-good people who just want to go for the money.

But you will find someone like that [in the top] 5%, and if you look at their resume, it looks like this. Boom, boom, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion and big jump…promotion, promotion, big jump. Once I have a resume that shows a clear level of success, I'll take it and pay them whatever they need. It's very important to me to have that superstar in there. And you build a superstar company.

A proper performance management system must be in place so that employees understand exactly what they need to do to reach the next level. Superstars are highly motivated. They want to know what they need to do to reach the next level, especially Gen Z. They know that and want to get promoted every six months.

Finally, while this approach may seem counterintuitive to many, Lore talks about his belief that taking greater risks is the way to secure a startup's future. is as follows:

People always underestimate the risks of the status quo and overestimate the risks of making changes. I see it over and over again.

If you have a life-threatening medical condition and your doctor says, “You have six months to live,'' at that point, even if it's very dangerous, you can't use an investigational drug or anything. [is going to look good]. Essentially, you're looking for opportunities to take risks in order to avoid inevitable death.

Suppose you are very healthy and everything is going well, and someone says, “Take this experimental drug. Take this drug.” If you do that, you might live longer.” [a lot of people will say]”You know what? It's too risky. I'm really healthy. I don't want to die from this drug.”

But startups are very different from large companies. When you're at a big company like Walmart. [whose U.S. e-commerce business Lore ran after selling it one of his companies]the key is incremental improvement. There is no incentive to take risks.

As a startup founder, you can die. I'm probably going to die every day of my life doing this startup. The probability is 80%, but the probability that it actually works is only 20%. Therefore, you should take that into account when making decisions. To reduce the risk of death, we must look for opportunities to take risks. Maintaining the status quo is the worst thing you can do. Doing nothing is the biggest possible risk.



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