Quidsi founder Marc Lore sold his next company, Jet.com, to Walmart for $3.3 billion [1]. Both Quidsi and Jet.com were never profitable, meaning Lore was also playing the game of venture predation, so hardly any pity from me.
To add, Lore's current startup is a premium food delivery service called Wondery that raised $350 million at at $3.5bn valuation last year [2], and it's not profitable too. None of Lore's companies have ever turned profits but he's made enough money to buy the Minnesota Timberwolves...he's the perfect example of venture predation, lol
Being a business owner with actual profits from technology by selling a useful product, I can never understand the bizarre emergent properties of our current financial system that lets folks like Marc Lore to exist.
> Both Quidsi and Jet.com were never profitable, meaning Lore was also playing the game of venture predation
I don't know about the books in this specific case, but losing money doesn't mean you're into venture predation. You could very well be losing money but also have sound unit-cost to price.
> You could very well be losing money but also have sound unit-cost to price.
If you have that and still loose money then you are doing other things that get you ahead of your competition that need to sustain their operation with those prices. Either way you use somebody's money to cheat your competition.
> Either way you use somebody's money to cheat your competition.
That's the principle of investment.
The difference between using money to improve productivity, or make the product more appealing to the consumer, or whatnot, and price-dumping, is that investing is supposed to generate long-term returns, which can benefit the company or consumers. Price dumping, on the other hand, doesn't generate future returns. It generates costs that the consumer will have to repay later.
In the first situation, consumers may benefit from that competition. In the second situation, they inevitably end up losing.
To add, Lore's current startup is a premium food delivery service called Wondery that raised $350 million at at $3.5bn valuation last year [2], and it's not profitable too. None of Lore's companies have ever turned profits but he's made enough money to buy the Minnesota Timberwolves...he's the perfect example of venture predation, lol
1- https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2016/08/08/walmart-ag...
2- https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/17/marc-lores-food-delivery-s...