When Marc Lore, an e-commerce billionaire, left his position as the CEO of Walmart.com in 2021, he began to dabble in a variety of long-odds attempts to change the world. He backed a nuclear fusion startup, and another designing flying taxis. Frustrated with the current state of capitalism, he embarked on plans to build, from scratch, a Bjarke Ingels-designed city of 5 million in the American West.

Recently, though, Lore has put all that aside to focus on an even bigger moonshot: solving dinner.

Lore’s business ideas often begin with a widely felt consumer frustration and back into a solution. In the aughts, his company Diapers.com keyed in on the annoyance, for new parents, of having to constantly run out for more diapers; imagine if they could be delivered to your door? His latest scheme, a startup called Wonder, exists to tackle food delivery, which Lore believes too often disappoints customers by arriving too slowly.

Wonder’s opening salvo, in 2021, was flooding the New Jersey suburbs with hundreds of Mercedes Sprinter vans that could cook menus designed by celebrity chefs like Bobby Flay or José Andrés in customers’ driveways. Demand for food delivery is concentrated in cities, but Lore thought the suburbs held plenty of untapped potential; a van-based strategy faced more challenges in crowded urban environments, which the company planned to work up to.

Initially, after founding the company, Lore was involved only as an adviser and investor. Then in late 2022, shortly after a $350 million capital raise brought Wonder’s funding to $800 million, he took over leadership of the company, installing himself as CEO.

“This is once in a lifetime,” Lore said, with characteristically feverish zeal. “This could be the Amazon of food and beverage.”

On a recent Wednesday morning, Lore, 52, was huddled with his senior executive team at Wonder’s research and development facility in Parsippany, N.J., preparing for a board meeting. It had been a busy 2023: The company started the year by abandoning the meals-on-wheels strategy — the biggest problem, Lore said, was finding enough parking — and began cooking food the old-fashioned way, in kitchens.

Wonder built 10 locations in and around New York City, from Park Slope to Chelsea to Westfield, N.J. It more than doubled the breadth of its food offerings, bought the meal kit company Blue Apron, secured a $100 million strategic investment from Nestlé, and signed a deal with Walmart to build Wonders in four of its stores. It had also been expanding a part of the business that provides food and technology to food service operations at sites like sporting arenas, hotels and airport lounges.

The vision that Lore is now selling to his investors calls for Wonder to not just maintain that furious pace of growth, but ramp it up. Lore wants to have 100 locations open in the next two years. He has $200 million personally invested in Wonder, with a plan to commit $100 million more.

Lore said he’s targeting an initial public offering in three to five years, aiming for a valuation of $30 billion.

That plan is ambitious, to say the least. By way of comparison, it took Chipotle, the biggest restaurant industry success story in a generation, nearly 30 years to reach a $30 billion market cap. The salad chain Sweetgreen is hovering just more than $2 billion. After its recent IPO, Cava, a Mediterranean fast casual brand with 300 locations, is valued around $7 billion.

Previous upstarts attempting to reinvent food delivery have fizzled or flopped. Lore seemed unfazed. “There’s going to be a lot of failures,” he said. “And then somebody’s going to figure it out.”

The “super-app” of mealtime

Among the great many things there are to figure out at Wonder is how to describe to customers what it is. The business doesn’t fit neatly into an existing food service category. “Delivery company” implies just an app and courier network, like UberEats or Grubhub, but Wonder makes all its own food in its own kitchens, too. “Ghost kitchen” and “virtual restaurant” describe brands that exist only as a menu on an app, with no street-level commercial presence; Wonder has slickly designed locations where customers can order, pick up and, at least in theory, dine in at a handful of tables. Lately, the company’s internal creative team of seven has coalesced around the tagline “A New Kind of Food Hall.”

“I think that gets to the variety aspect,” said Daniel Shlossman, who left a role as the marketing chief at Sweetgreen to join Wonder’s senior leadership team in 2023. But also, he said, “we talk about it as the ‘super-app of mealtime,’ ” a description that sums up Lore’s ambition for Wonder’s app to sell and deliver food not only from its own kitchens but from other restaurants, as well as meal kits and even groceries. (Wonder’s offerings are not available via other delivery apps, which means customers will have to want its food enough to seek it out.)

Today, though, the main focus at Wonder is getting its own restaurants up and running. Its kitchens don’t require gas-powered stoves and exhaust systems to vent cooking fumes, making for cheaper, quicker build-outs. Everything on the Wonder menu is designed to be cooked using three pieces of electric equipment: a hot water bath, a rapid-cook oven and a fryer.

During a visit to Parsippany in January, Shlossman took this reporter to see Wonder’s research and development center, a series of gleaming test kitchens staffed with dozens of professional cooks clad in Wonder-branded chef’s whites.

Wonder prepares, and in many cases par-cooks, all of its menu items in large commissary facilities, then distributes the dishes individually portioned to its restaurants, where employees can finish the preparation in a matter of minutes, with little cooking skill required. This allows the restaurants to be staffed by what Lore calls “lightly trained labor.”

Haunted by ghost kitchens

For restaurants, commissions paid to online marketplaces like Uber Eats and DoorDash are large enough that, in some cases, they erase the business’ entire profit margin on the order. For the marketplaces, even those steep commissions don’t always cover the cost of completing a delivery. For consumers, getting meals delivered is expensive, and the food not infrequently arrives soggy and lukewarm.

Lore is the latest in a long list of entrepreneurs — most of whom, like him, have no prior experience in the restaurant business — to look at this state of affairs and see an opening. During the 2010s, new services like Maple, Sprig, Spoonrocket and Munchery popped up, serving meals that existed only for delivery. None were able to compete with the marketing muscle of apps like Seamless or Grubhub, and the wide array of options that they offered.

Then there are the ghost kitchens. CloudKitchens, Reef Kitchens and Kitchen United started out renting low-cost kitchen space to restaurants looking to expand their delivery output on the cheap; all three have begun to retrench, and the latter two companies have announced pivots to become software providers instead.

“A lot of the limitation for companies like this has to do with the fact that there’s only so much delivery in the market,” said Rich Shank, a senior principal at Technomic. Although delivery grew substantially during the pandemic, Technomic’s numbers show that demand has leveled off, and even contracted slightly.

The sector’s not-stellar track record can make it hard to see why investors such as Bain Capital, GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) and Accel have been willing to back Wonder with such large sums.

Gad Allon, director of the Management and Technology Program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said that Lore’s main advantage is just that: capital. Previous startups were working with far less — Munchery was by far the largest, with $125 million raised over its lifetime. “Munchery and all the rest of them, the moment they raised money, there was a lot of pressure to grow, not optimize and then grow,” Allon said. “Lore’s textbook from Day 1 is to take an idea that sounds crazy and do everything that’s possible to optimize it, and only then scale it.”

Going up against Bezos

Friends and business associates like to talk about Lore in almost mythic terms. There’s an oft-told story about the time Lore, a former college track athlete, challenged Jerry Rice, the legendary wide receiver, to race him in the 40-yard dash, and won (Lore was 47 at the time; Rice, 57). There’s another one about how, on a whim, Lore qualified for the U.S. Olympic bobsled team in 1996. He can count cards and has been barred from playing blackjack at many casinos.

“I call him a five-tool player, which is the highest compliment you can give in baseball,” Alex Rodriguez said. Lore and Rodriguez share part ownership in an NBA team, the Minnesota Timberwolves, as well as in the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx, and a venture capital fund they set up in 2021.

Lore, who grew up on Staten Island, N.Y., and in New Jersey, describes himself as a kid with lots of hustle but little interest in academics (he claims that, to this day, he has never read a work of fiction in its entirety). After Bucknell University, he worked his way up in the banking industry, working as the head of risk at Sanwa Bank by the time he was 27.

By that point, in the late ‘90s, the startup scene was building momentum. Lore abruptly quit his job and plowed the sum total of his life savings into creating an online trading card marketplace called the Pit, which he and his partners sold to Topps, the trading card company.

Lore’s next startup, Diapers.com, which he founded in 2005 with his childhood friend Vinit Bharara, was the one that made him rich — and yet, it was also a defeat.

His vision was to take diapers, an item that was already a loss-leader for brick-and-mortar stores, and lose even more money on them by selling them online with free, fast shipping. Lore believed that if you could use the diapers to create a loyal audience of new parents, you could then sell them enough higher-margin items over time to make a profitable business. That notion was a direct threat to Amazon, which was still establishing itself as a store for far more than books. Jeff Bezos made it his goal to force Diapers.com into submission.

Amazon first slashed its own diaper prices so deeply that the rival site could not sustain the growth necessary to continue raising capital, and would be forced to entertain a sale. Walmart made a competing offer for Lore’s company. Then Bezos’ negotiators reportedly threatened that if Walmart’s offer was accepted, Amazon would discount diapers on its own site even more steeply to run Diapers.com into the ground. Before Diapers.com had yet turned profitable, Lore sold it to Amazon in 2011 for $550 million. According to an account of the transaction in Brad Stone’s 2014 book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon,” Amazon’s offer was accepted “largely out of fear.”

Lore said the sale didn’t feel like a victory.

With his next startup, Jet.com, Lore came straight for Bezos. He aimed to create a new challenger to Amazon, luring away a segment of the retail giant’s customer base by offering lower prices on household basics in exchange for small compromises, like fewer brand choices or slower shipping speeds. Lore raised $800 million on the idea, even while estimating that Jet would burn through $3 billion before reaching the scale necessary to become profitable. The company was acquired in 2016, just 10 months after launch. Walmart, which was trying to build up its e-commerce, bought it for $3.3 billion.

Those wild, improbable exits have made Lore a figure of cult worship among aspiring billionaire types. As a guest on countless entrepreneurship podcasts, he lays out his win-big playbook, which centers on an atypical view of risk. Lore believes that while smaller investments can feel lower-risk because the stakes are lower, in fact, the momentum generated by large capital investments actually reduces their risk of failure. Lore’s strategy has served him well in the specific environment of big-money startups, yet neither of his big dot-com gambles managed to mature into stand-alone businesses that exist today.

“That’s the chip on his shoulder,” said Allon, of Wharton. “We know he can build a brand that sells to a larger firm. But can he build a brand that outlasts him?”