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Spencer Levy
Some entrepreneurs create their own recipes for success, and the one you're about to meet is essentially writing a cookbook of his own. He made his name in the e-commerce space, building companies worth billions and helping to change how consumers purchase goods. Now he's setting his sights on the restaurant industry. On this episode, a serial entrepreneur reveals the secret ingredients of his newest venture: a mix of tech, logistics, real estate and, of course, food.
Marc Lore
I didn't know anything about food. It's obviously much more challenging than e-commerce as I've come to learn. But that was the original thinking. Just, big opportunity.
Spencer Levy
That's Marc Lore, who built startup success stories such as Diapers.com, which was sold to Amazon for $550 million, and Jet.com, which was sold to Walmart for $3.3 billion. Among other ventures, he also owns the NBA's Minnesota Timberwolves, which he recently purchased with baseball legend Alex Rodriguez. We'll get into all of that. But primarily, these days his main focus is cooking up a restaurant startup called Wonder, which made headlines recently with its nine figure acquisition of Blue Apron in late September and also just closed a $100 million investment from Nestle. Marc will take us inside some of the bold decisions he's made as CEO and tell us why some of the world's most famous chefs have signed on to the mission. Coming up, disrupting mealtime with Wonder. We visit the New York City apartment of entrepreneur Marc Lore, who's out to transform the way we order food. I'm Spencer Levy, and that's right now on The Weekly Take.
Spencer Levy
Welcome to The Weekly Take, and this week I am delighted to be sitting with Marc Lore, the founder and CEO of Wonder. Marc, thanks so much for coming out today.
Marc Lore
Thanks for having me.
Spencer Levy
Well, Marc, we're sitting here in your lovely apartment talking about Wonder, this incredible concept that you've come up with and is now growing like, well, like Wonder. Tell us about it.
Marc Lore
Yeah. Wonder, in short, is a vertically integrated food delivery service. So unlike the delivery food services out there right now, where they go to our local restaurant, pick up the food and bring it to you, we actually own all the restaurants on the delivery platform. So we've invested a ton of money now into the culinary engineering and food science to be able to cook as many as 30 different restaurants across every cuisine type in a single 3,000 square foot location. So obviously, the vertical integration allows us to bring people very hot food, very fast. It's our own courier network, it's our own technology. We own the brands. We don't pay any royalties. So the economic model is very solid. But more importantly, the customer experience is exceptional. We've got a 70 net promoter score. We're delivering orders in 27 minutes, from the time you order until the time arrives at your door. It only delivers about 6 minutes from the location. So we set a really tight delivery radius. That's really what ensures that the food's hot and great quality when it gets to you.
Spencer Levy
And I should note, Marc, that we did a little due diligence before today. We ate at Wonder on the Upper West Side on Broadway. It was fantastic. And we had the Bobby Flay steak, we had the barbecue and we had the poke bowl. You know, poke bowl to steak, so we tested it out.
Marc Lore
One of the big advantages of the model is you can order from all the different restaurants in a single delivery.
Spencer Levy
Yeah.
Marc Lore
So it's great to hear that you actually ordered across three different restaurants in a single sitting.
Spencer Levy
Well, if you think about it, how many families have different tastes in food? Like, everybody. And so when you go to your concept, you have that ability to order across multiple platforms.
Marc Lore
Exactly.
Spencer Levy
So tell us how you came up with this idea.
Marc Lore
I've been in ecommerce for a long time. Had a couple of successful exits and was the CEO of Walmart e-commerce, and just been a long time, you know, chasing Amazon and watching what they did to retail, beginning in the late nineties and into the next couple of decades, and really wanted to think about like, was there an opportunity like that? Was there a big, multi trillion dollar market still left that was ripe for technological disruption? And the restaurant space just notoriously has not invested a lot in technology. If you look at kitchens, they don't look that different now than they did 100 years ago. And at the same time, over the last ten years, you had food delivery exploding. The younger generations are willing to pay a big price for convenience and want to cook a lot less than previous generations. So the delivery market has boomed to about $100 billion today, just in the U.S., going to 500 billion over the next 13 years. And all with, I would say, arguably not the best customer experience, just in terms of the food quality, the heat on the food and just the customer service in general. Like the net promoter scores are not great and it reminded me a lot of early days of e-commerce, when you had marketplaces and then Amazon, you know, disrupted it with a complete upgrade to the experience by owning the first party and owning the customer experience end to end. I just thought, like, is there an opportunity to do that in food? Didn't know anything about food. It's obviously much more challenging than e-commerce, as I've come to learn, but that was the original thinking. Just big opportunity, big TAM, growing market. I mean food delivery, and how do we disrupt the market with a robust, end to end, first party experience.
Spencer Levy
So given your background, this is, even though this is a primarily a real estate market, this is a tech story. Do you agree?
Marc Lore
Mm hmm. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, we are a tech, food tech company. We've invested a lot in technology. We've built all the kitchen software, all the courier software, their own couriers, all the food manufacturing software, the logistics software, all the machine learning we do and forecasting and all that. I mean, it looks very much like a tech company as much as it does a food company.
Spencer Levy [00:06:07] And I note, in addition to us eating at the location today, we also saw the back of the house. And I thought the back of the house was pretty incredible, how you had something like 15 or 20 restaurants and each of them had their own way of being prepared. You have the food that comes from I think you have a preparation place that is in Parsippany, New Jersey, is where you...
Marc Lore
In Cranford.
Spencer Levy
Cranford, New Jersey.
Marc Lore
We have a few places, but that's the biggest one.
Spencer Levy
And so just walk us through the process of how you go from your distribution center, which does the initial prep, to the customer's plate.
Marc Lore
Yeah, the ability to cook 20, 30 restaurants in this really small space, it requires that there's some significant prep work happening far from the customer. And so we opened up a big food manufacturing facility/commissary where we part-cook, sous vide the food. And we, using food science, are able to preserve the food fresh for somewhere between six and thirteen days, depending on the meal. That fresh food gets then sent to the location close to the customer. And the goal is that everything that comes in there can be cooked with very lightly trained labor in sub 5 minutes, almost everything cooks in less than 5 minutes. Everything from a Bobby Flay steak to pizza, burgers, barbecue, chicken, fish. It's all meant to be cooked very fast with light labor, meaning it's consistent. And that was the key. If we wanted to be able to scale this to thousands of locations across the country, we couldn't rely on labor to make sure it's consistent. It had to be sort of very easy to cook. And so we spent a lot of time and money and many years doing that. And we got it to the point now where all 30 restaurants can cook on just three pieces of all electric equipment. We kept trying to figure out, how do we cook this using just these three pieces of equipment? And we're finally there, years and hundreds of millions of dollars later. But it was a lot of innovation that went into that. We don't have any hoods or gas. It doesn't look like a typical kitchen from that standpoint. And in the coming, in the next two months, we're launching a complete upgrade to the kitchen. We're calling it Kitchen 4.0, which has got conveyors and a lot more automation. And I think that's going to take us to another level. And then we just keep iterating from there, seeing how far we can push, throughput and speed and accuracy.
Spencer Levy
Let's go back to the origin story, a little bit, of Wonder. I understand you started actually in trucks, trying to deliver this same concept, but you've recently, or relatively recently, shifted to brick and mortar real estate. Tell us about that evolution from trucks to bricks and mortar real estate.
Marc Lore
Yeah, I think that the first party experience, originally the thinking was, the best way to improve speed, quality and heat is to cook the food right outside somebody’s home. So we had these Mercedes sprinter vans, and we’d put these three pieces of equipment I'm talking about in the back of a Mercedes sprinter van, and because it was meant to be cooked with lightly trained labor, we actually had the driver do the cooking, so they would just drive to the house and then in a very quick 5 to 10 minutes, turn around the entire order and bring it to people's doors hot. And since you had to pay for delivery anyway, the thinking was, the person who’s driving to the home, that's a delivery that would need to be made even if the food was cold. And then the actual cooking time outside the door is the same as the cooking time in a restaurant. And so it's sort of a wash, but you get much higher quality food. And it was working really well. We had 450 trucks on the road. Customers absolutely loved the experience. We had just turned the corner on the economics turning positive. But at the same time, we had tested a brick and mortar late last year, brick and mortar, to see if we could utilize that same technology and put all the restaurants in one single location with a really tight delivery radius to see if we could match the net promoter score and the customer love for it. And it turns out if the delivery radius is tight enough, you can match the customer experience and get the heat and quality. But the one big advantage, that you have multi restaurant ordering, you can order from all the restaurants in a single delivery, which you couldn't do on the truck. So the customer experience, trucks versus brick and mortar, went to brick and mortar. Like, brick and mortar won the customer experience. On the financial side, you had a much higher return on capital in the brick and mortar. You had lower labor, you had lower waste because you had less volatility because you had more volume coming out of every single space. Financials: double check. And then on expansion, our ability to expand with the brick and mortar is much greater. Like we can find locations a lot more easily. We can be urban, we can be suburban, we can be rural, we can flex the size of the location. We can have 30 restaurants in 3000 square feet. We can have eight restaurants in 800 square feet. You can put the location in a shoe store. You don't need gas and electric. It doesn't have to be on the perfect street corner. So, literally the number of locations we can go into are endless. And so our ability to scale versus the trucks which required us to find parking lots where the trucks parked overnight to charge, which proved to be one of the most challenging barriers to scale. So, better customer, much better financials and much better ability to scale. So it's sort of a no brainer. We had a month's worth of data in December. I became CEO in October. We had month's worth of data. The trucks had just clicked over. It was a very tough decision to basically tell the organization, on a dime, with one month of data, that we're stopping all the trucks, selling every one of them, and in 2024, I'm sorry, 2023, we're doing nothing but locations and we're going to start the year, this is December, we're going to start the first one we're going to try to get done by the end of February. Live, open, three months. And then we're going to do nine more, and finish the year with ten. People thought I was crazy, I say at that time. We did launch one at the end of February Herculean effort to get something from nothing to open in 90 days. And we'll finish the year with ten. So, that's your currency as a startup founder. Your currency is doing what you say. And knock on wood, the year is not over yet, but, they're all in construction and kind of toward the end, final phases. So we're feeling really, really good about that. But it definitely was not an easy decision. But once you realize that was the right decision, we moved very fast to transition the model. We didn't have the luxury of doing both models at the same time and waiting. It was either pick one, you know, that's how, in my head, what I was thinking. Okay, you've got limited capital. Can't do both. Pick one. And as soon as I said I'm picking the brick and mortar. Once I said that, that was like, you know, a month's worth of data. That's it. And once you pick it, you've got to go as fast as possible to transition. That's what we did. We literally stopped the trucks on a dime at the end of the year. Just done; 450 trucks, off the road, sold to trucks. And now, you can't mention trucks in the office. It's done. It's done.
Spencer Levy
I'll ask one more question just about the actual restaurant portion, and then into the real estate side of it. First, just give us a flavor for some of the brands that are occupying Wonder today. How you picked them and why it helps Wonder overall.
Marc Lore
We literally just had a team go across the country and try food in every cuisine to try to find the best restaurants, best chefs to try to bring them to the Wonder platform. So we've got on the restaurant side, you know, Tejas Barbecue from Tomball, Texas. That was the best barbecue we could find in the U.S. It's doing incredibly well on Wonder. Fred's Meat and Bread: burgers and cheesesteaks from Atlanta. We've got Maydan, a michelin star Middle Eastern restaurant from Washington, D.C. And on the chef side, we've hooked up with, you know, well-known chefs like Bobby Flay, Jose Andres, Marcus Samuelsson, Nancy Silverton, Jonathan Waxman, Mark Murphy, Michael Simon. We've got an incredible roster of chefs and restaurants. We've got fast-fine, as I mentioned before, which is sort of like more higher end restaurants. But we've also got great fast casual restaurants. You know, we've got the fast casual Mexican. We've got a fried chicken concept, a burger concept, a salad concept. It's really the combination of the fast casual and also fast-fine, in one place.
Spencer Levy
And speaking of that place, the place that we went to was in a dense residential neighborhood. Are you going to stick to that type of location or because… where I’m really going with this is, the entire office market is being disrupted right now and people don't know where to go to lunch. People don’t come into the office. So are you going to stick to the residential areas or are you going to go into some of the business districts as well?
Marc Lore
Both. Yeah. We have a model that basically predicts what the revenue is in a particular area within the appropriate delivery radius. And then we work backwards. Depending on the revenue, we'll figure out what size we can put in there. Is it, there’s five different sizes. We call it D-1 is the smallest and D-5 is the biggest. And we just figure out based on the revenue projection what size we put in. So there could be an office park, we run the model, and it says just in this park right here, within 5 minutes, it's 5 million in revenue as the projection. Great, we'll put a D-2. That's kind of the way we're thinking about it. Our model right now shows that we can have 7500 locations in the U.S. where this model would work. We feel pretty good about that. And then in the future, as the market grows, there could be more locations, but that's kind of what the model would spit out today.
Spencer Levy
And just rough numbers, D-1 is how big and D-5 is how big?
Marc Lore
So D-1 is, call it, 2 million, and D-5 is, call it, 10 million. So there's 2 million, 4 million, 6 million, 8 million, 10 million. Those are the conservative side of what the estimate is. We tend to build them about 10% smaller than what we really expect. So like the ten, we think we'll do 11, but we'll build it to 10 so that we get a good return on CapEx. But that's kind of roughly the size. Like all the ones in Manhattan, they’re all D-5’s. They’re all $10 million locations. Our first two locations, well, the first one in New York City is already over 5 million. It opened in February. And the one in New Jersey is over 4 million and opened in June. So, these things are going to start to really generate serious revenue as we start to open them up.
Spencer Levy
So Marc, ten stores in one year starting from zero, or I guess starting from a lot of trucks, completely transitioning to 7500. Walk us through your timeline to get there.
Marc Lore
Just to be clear, I’d love to have 7500. That's what the model says are viable locations. It's going to take a long time to get there. I just want to be clear and be realistic about that. But we do, we did, as you said, you know, in ten months, basically we'll have done ten locations in ten months from a cold start. So we feel pretty good about that. We'll take a breather next year and just launch 20 new ones. So end the year at 30. And then things really start to accelerate. We'll start to try and do four or five a month going into 2025, and we'll see where that takes us. We'll constantly push the envelope on how fast we can grow reasonably, but it's nice to know that there are 7500 locations out there that are just waiting for us to show up, you know?
Spencer Levy
So let me ask you a question. And this is not a negative, this is just a – you know, a consideration when landlords are looking for tenants. Any consideration or concern about other restaurants that are nearby in terms of competitive pressures, not only on you, but on them?
Marc Lore
Yeah, I mean, because we have 30 restaurants in, like, D-5, and it's doing 10 million, each restaurant on its own averages 333,000. So it's pretty small. And so if you have a restaurant there that's doing 2 to 3 million and we come in with 300,000. Maybe it cannibalizes at best, $100,000. Maybe not even anything, honestly, because a lot of it’s delivery. So we don't really feel like we're competing in that way. It's the diversification of the menu items and of the restaurants that carves out, I think, a niche, but a really big niche for us. It’s not going head to head with any one restaurant, although we're competing a little bit with everyone.
Spencer Levy
Sure. And so in your conversations with landlords at this point, has anybody brought that issue up?
Marc Lore
There's definitely places that we've gone in, where they have a clause that says, hey, you can do whatever you want, but you cannot do Indian, for example, because there's an Indian restaurant next door. And either we'll push back and say, okay, how about this? We won't do more than $300,000 of Indian and see if there's something to work out there, because that's all we're going to do anyway. And oftentimes, with the right level of negotiation, we're able to get that in. And if we don't, we'll just make the 30th restaurant, another Greek restaurant or something. We have a lot of flexibility. We don't need to put the same exact restaurants in every location. In fact, that's one of the beauties of the model is that we can match the restaurants to the demographics of the area. And if a restaurant doesn't work, we could take it out overnight and put a new one in. And down the road, and this is really very different than a restaurant, let's say we had 1000 locations. We can go and buy a famous single restaurant brand and we could overnight, buy that brand, and literally put it in a thousand locations without $1 of CapEx. It just cooks on the same system, flows to the commissary, to the location, the same way. And on the app, the menu is lit up. And we think that's really powerful down the road, once we have a lot of locations to buy content, similar to Netflix, the way they go and buy content and then distribute it. We would be buying the best restaurant content and then distributing it across the country, consistent with our mission of making great food more accessible.
Spencer Levy
Well, if you think about it, food tastes change a lot. The restaurant business historically is very volatile because of that: changing formats. And you can literally transform your food delivery service, your restaurant, into a new restaurant almost instantaneously.
Marc Lore
Well, you pull one out, put one in, literally, I say overnight, but I mean, like in maybe six weeks. We've engineered just about all different types of food. If there is some hot trend, you know, taco burgers, you know. It became hot on Instagram and TikTok and within a few weeks, we had a restaurant dedicated to that. You know, it's pretty cool that you could pick up on trends and roll them out, not in one location, but thousands potentially, simultaneously, in a very short period of time.
Spencer Levy
So what's the big picture? What's the long range plan for Wonder?
Marc Lore
Our mission is to make great food more accessible. We believe that the model we have allows us to bring a wider assortment of restaurants to places that don't have access. We believe in time, we can really bring down the price point on what we're calling fast-fine delivery, which are more premium restaurants, Michelin star, even, that you wouldn't typically get delivery from because it's too expensive, it's not food that you would typically buy via delivery. Our technology allows us to cook that food really fast, consistent every time, like a Bobby Flay steak. And because we can do it fast and easy like that, we can actually bring down the cost. There's no reason why you have to pay restaurant prices for a filet mignon steak. The cost of that steak is way less than what you’re charging, but you have the overhead of a restaurant and things. If we can cook 12 steaks in 6 minutes in a small oven, which is what we do, then you can bring the price down. So making great food more accessible. And also our vision is to become the super app for mealtime. So any time you want to eat, you want great food delivered. You want a meal kit. You want a ready to heat meal that you just put in your oven, or you want a special diet based on health goals you set. The idea is that you would come to the Wonder app any time you want to eat. That's sort of the big vision that would require thousands of locations across the country.
Spencer Levy
So a couple of years ago, the concept and I hope this term – I mean, I'm sure you're familiar with the term ghost kitchens, about people going into a different type of restaurant, maybe having some basically subletting part of their kitchen for part of the day. But a lot of these ghost kitchens are also located in what I would call industrial areas. Like not located main and main, near the customer. Your location, or at least the one that I visited, and I suspect the other ones in the tri-state area, are located in fairly dense residential areas so you can deliver. So, when you were considering where to locate, what was the key consideration of going to a traditional retail location versus what might be a ghost kitchen or industrial type location?
Marc Lore
It all started with the customer experience. The idea was we wanted to be close to the customer and not only be close physically with the brick and mortar, but also set a tight delivery radius so we can get it to them faster. That's our, sort of what we call the Wonder Wheel. The idea is that the closer you get to the customer, the hotter the food, the faster the food, the better the customer experience. And that customer experience drives top line sales, drives repeat rates. The more sales that you do in that location, the tighter you can make the radius. So then I thought, okay, that's the Wonder Wheel. That's the virtuous cycle. But how do you do that? How do you do 5 million, 10 million, $12 million of revenue out of 3000 square feet? It requires first to have the breadth of assortment to get to those revenue numbers from a demand perspective. 30 restaurants. Then how do you cook 30 restaurants in 3000 square feet? You have to invest hundreds of millions into culinary engineering and food science to be able to cook this food really fast with light labor in a small space. So those are the requirements. But compared to a ghost kitchen, there's basically five, I would say, big buckets that would define ghost kitchen or what we're doing. Three is sort of like table stakes, and then two are sort of more special. On the three table stakes, and there are ghost kitchens that have one, two, maybe three, but not all five. On the three sort of more straightforward ones, it is, do you have your own app and is it your customer relationship or are you using third party delivery aggregators to deliver it? A lot of ghost kitchens use the 3P. We use 3P, but very little. Like more than 85% of our sales come through our own app. That's check one. Do you do your own delivery or do you rely on someone else to do the delivery for you? We do our own delivery. Is your brick and mortar available for sit down and pick up, and is it on the high street? Check those three things. If you do all three, you're a pretty darn good ghost kitchen. But the two that really separates us, where I think the magic lies in Wonder is in the invention, the innovation around culinary engineering and food science, and the ability to put 30 restaurants in 3000 square feet. That's number one. And the second is, going out and buying the very best restaurants and hooking up with the very best chefs in the world to bring this incredible content that we own the rights to, we don't pay any royalties, to round out the value proposition. We're the only one that we know of that has all five. But you’ll definitely, there are different versions that will have one, two or maybe three, but certainly not all five elements.
Spencer Levy
Well, given your back story of well before Wonder and your first company, which you sold to Amazon, you had Jet.com which sold to Walmart. How are you using those experiences and translating them to Wonder? You're building on these experiences to now build Wonder, and you know, how are you funding Wonder going forward?
Marc Lore
Yeah, so it's a great question. I think just like e-commerce, this business relies a lot on logistics; moving product from point A to point B, whether it be from the commissary production facility to a distribution to the physical location near the customer, and then the last mile courier delivery. So all that's very well known. Using robotics and AI inside of the kitchen is something that we use inside of the fulfillment center. We're sort of creating the kitchen to look more like a micro fulfillment center, especially in the 4.0 design I mentioned that's hitting in two months, and we'll continue to further that. All the technology that we built is definitely more of an analog with E-com tech than it is a restaurant. So there's a lot of things. What's new, of course, is food, which I don't say that lightly because it's really, really hard. We used to think e-commerce was hard. And just looking back, I laugh because we would buy the box of diapers from Procter & Gamble. It would come in, doesn't expire, and then you put a label on it and hand it to FedEx. You know, it doesn't sound that hard. It was hard when you had millions of SKUs and stuff. But when I think about that now, you're buying, you know, broccoli. Every time you get it, it's slightly different. It has a shelf life. You have to cook it before it expires. And then after you cook, it has an expiration date. You have to sell it before it expires. And you have to maintain the quality in cold chain throughout the whole process. Like it is a whole other level of complexity. When you layer that on top of all the logistics and the foundational tech and things. Fortunately, the logistics and foundational tech and all those things we know so well that you have a good solid foundation. Now we can just focus on the food piece of it, and we've hired close to 100 now, really good culinary food scientists, engineers in the food space that have been great. That have bolstered the tech with this layer of culinary engineering on top. But I think it would be impossible to have done this while we're also learning how to fly the plane on tech and logistics and then add food, you know. It was sort of like you had that foundation to build off of to focus on the food piece.
Spencer Levy
So each one of your prior business ventures is really a stepping stone to where you are today. It could not have been done.
Marc Lore
I don't think, no, I wouldn't have been able to do it without the experience, for sure.
Spencer Levy
I understand you entered into a incredible new partnership with Nestlé, one of the largest food companies in the world. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Marc Lore
Yeah. Great. It's been, over the last six months, been talking to Nestlé and working on an incredible commercial agreement that I think will benefit both companies on the B2B side of the business. So, in addition to everything we talked about B2C, we're also leveraging our culinary technology, the ovens, the programming and the food kits that we create to do deals with hotels, hospitals, arenas, things like that where we would send our equipment and food and they would operate it. And it could be Sodexo, Legends, Levy Group. All these companies that typically would manage it still manage it, just using our equipment. And I think Nestlé was very interested in pizza and pasta in particular. They felt like there was a really big opportunity. They had their B2B professional business and so we did a commercial agreement where we partnered up and they're going to do the manufacturing using our formulation and we're going to together sell it and hopefully create a big joint business together. And along with that, Nestlé invested in the company. So they're shareholders now and, you know, observers to our board of directors, and we think there's a lot of things we can do together. And we were very impressed with how visionary the company is, and the CEO, in particular. Both the CEO of the B2B business, but also the CEO, Mark, in Switzerland, to sort of see the technology and see where the puck is going and to sort of get ahead of it and hook up with us. I was really impressed with the vision and the speed at which they moved to get this done.
Spencer Levy
So let's go back to the most recent Blue Apron acquisition. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Marc Lore
Yeah, I think it's an incredible company. It's a brand most people know well. It's got 80% market awareness. It's one of the pioneers of the meal kit space. And we saw incredible synergies and opportunities to partner with them through acquisition, to make those meal kits more accessible to customers via our Wonder app, where we can deliver the food fresher, faster, with no packaging, which is one of the pain points, and at the same time help accelerate their business, just through some of our e-commerce learnings. The company looks very much like an e-commerce company today because they've sold off all their production to FreshRealm. So they don't actually do the production anymore. It's really a marketing front-end product company. And I think that's the business that our team has got a lot of experience in, and we can help their team to accelerate that business. And we just see incredible opportunity. We think strategically, our vision, as I said before, is to become the super app for mealtime. And so people eat on Friday and Saturday night. They order in. They're willing to pay a premium to have the food cooked. Other days of the week, you want to make the food yourself, pay a little bit less. So we'll have both. We’ll have Friday, Saturday night, have the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday meal kits for you. And the idea is that every night you want to eat, you can come to the Wonder app and we can satisfy what you're looking for. And then on the financial side, you know, we have a courier network that delivers food. They have unutilized parts of the day. Because meal kits don't have to be delivered on demand, we can utilize those unutilized parts of the day to deliver the meal kits. So it becomes very synergistic from a financial perspective, as well.
Spencer Levy
So Marc, in addition to your tremendous success in business, you also have a big sporting background. We were talking about horse racing just prior to this. You're an owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Tell us about… I mean you have these two worlds. You have this unbelievable tech background and you have this sporting life, is the way I would put it. How do you bring them together?
Marc Lore
Honestly, I don't do a good job. I'm very, very focused on Wonder. I'm 24/7 on this and this is my passion. I love it. The Timberwolves-Lynx was a childhood dream. I grew up in Staten Island, New York, you know, playing sports, watching sports. Was a huge Knicks fan growing up. Tortured for 40 years, basically, being a Knicks fan. And I thought the only way to stop being a fan was to buy a team. So that was, that was the motivation. I’m just kidding.
Spencer Levy
And by the way, we’re both tortured Knicks fans, and we're about the same age. And I grew up, I remember the frozen envelope with Patrick Ewing, and then Patrick Ewing broke my heart, but he ran into Olajuwon and Jordan's primes. I mean, what was he going to do?
Marc Lore
Yeah, that's right. That's right. No, I think, it's not the kind of thing that's easy. I have a hard time with balance, you know, We've got an incredible team, a great CEO, a great President of Basketball. And, you know, now it's at a point where they're running it. We spent a lot of time going through this sort of our foundational principles with A-Rod, and we feel like we're in a really good spot. And now it's more, you know, enjoying it, you know, finding the games, going to Minnesota, coming back the same night. But I'm very focused, you know, on Wonder right now. So it's hard sometimes to enjoy it as much as I probably would if I wasn't as focused.
Spencer Levy
Well on behalf of The Weekly Take, I really want to thank you. Marc Lore, CEO and founder of Wonder and so many other things. Thank you for being gracious and hosting us in your home, and go Wonder.
Marc Lore
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Spencer Levy
If that whet your appetite for more, we'll be serving up new programs on topics such as retail and multifamily housing. Then we’ll cap off the season with our annual year in review for 2023, followed by a whole new year of programming. Until then, you can always find more information, check out related content and catch up on archived episodes. Just visit our website at CBRE.com/TheWeeklyTake. And don't forget to send us your feedback… as well as subscribe rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the show. Thanks for joining us. I'm Spencer Levy. Be smart. Be safe. Be well.
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