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by Peter High, published on Forbes
7-13-2015
Within the next week, Jet.com will officially launch. It promises to offer the lowest prices on the Internet. As Marc Lore notes in this interview, the key is to provide pricing that more accurately reflects purchase bundles and the distance that the goods need to travel. Lore spent the early part of his career as an investment banker, and has brought a depth of knowledge about financial models and algorithms to several experiences as an entrepreneur. Chief among those was Quidsi, the parent company of e-commerce websites Diapers.com, Soap.com, and Wag.com, among others. Lore co-founded the company in 2005 and sold to Amazon in 2011 for $550 million. Now Lore and Jet have Amazon squarely in its sites, hoping to under-cut the 800 pound gorilla of retail, and beat it in the marketplace space.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 13th article in the “IT Influencers” series. To read past interviews with Salman Khan, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sir James Dyson, Jim Goodnight, and Walt Mossberg, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin, Marc, with the background on the company name. How did you select Jet dot com as the name of your enterprise?
Marc Lore: It started out with some basic criteria we were looking for. We wanted a name that ,for starters, was easy to say, spell, and remember. That was kind of important given the amount of money we expected to spend in marketing—we wanted solid recall. We also wanted a name that was sort of an empty vessel that we felt we could brand into a household name that would work well for millennials. Something that was a little bit modern and forward-thinking, one that you could envision being for a new-age tech company. It fit all those criteria.
High: No doubt you probably had to procure that from some airline organization of some sort or another, I’d imagine.
Lore: Yeah, it was an individual who had it for a long time. It wasn’t cheap, the domain. I can tell you that.
High: You have said that Jet.com will take on the challenge of providing the lowest prices on the internet by overcoming what you’ve referred to as the “gross inefficiencies that hobble e-commerce today.” What are the gross inefficiencies, and how have do you plan to overcome them?
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