Walmart’s Three-Billion-Dollar Hire

Last year, an entrepreneur named Marc Lore announced that he was going to get people to do their online shopping on a new Web site he had created, Jet.com, instead of on Amazon. It was a bold claim—even Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer by far, hadn’t managed to touch Amazon when it came to online retail—but people took Lore seriously because he had a track record. Earlier, he’d co-founded Diapers.com, sold it reluctantly to Amazon for more than five hundred million dollars, and gone on to work at Amazon; he knew more than most people about not only how to compete with Amazon but also what went on inside of that secretive and enormously successful corporation. Lore was able to raise a huge sum of venture capital to fund his project; Bloomberg Businessweek put him on its cover, with the headline “Amazon Bought This Man’s Company. Now He’s Coming for Them.”