Marc Lore, an e-commerce serial entrepreneur who has overseen the growth of Walmart's online presence in recent years, is planning to leave the retail giant to develop an entire city.
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The multidecade project will be "a city of the future" involving a "reformed version of capitalism," Lore told Recode, a Vox publication. "It's a new model for society we'll be testing."
Lore didn't offer details about where the city will be or a timetable for its development, though he did characterize it as a lifelong project. Walmart responded to a query from Bisnow with Lore's "vision statement" for the city.
“Imagine a city with the vibrancy, diversity and culture of New York City combined with the efficiency, safety and innovation of Tokyo and the sustainability, governance, and social services of Sweden," the statement says. "This will be our New City.”
Lore came to Walmart in 2016, when the retailer acquired his e-commerce company, the shopping website Jet.com, for $3.3B. He had launched the company a little more than a year earlier, and after the sale, he stayed with Walmart as head of its e-commerce division.
Lore had previously co-founded and headed Quidsi, the parent company of online shopping sites including Diapers.com. Amazon acquired Quidsi for about $550M in 2011, and Lore stayed on at Amazon for a few years, just as he would do later at Walmart, before leaving to found Jet.com.
During Lore's tenure at Walmart, the company managed to capture an increasing share of the total e-commerce pie, even as the entire pie expanded rapidly. Walmart.com recently became the second-largest e-commerce player in the market behind Amazon with a 5.8% market share, edging out eBay for that position, eMarketer reports.
As of the third quarter of 2020, Walmart's online sales totaled $46.2B year-to-date, up 65.4% compared with the previous year, while eBay's sales totaled $38.8B. Amazon is still No. 1 by an enormous margin, with $309.5B in sales for the period, or 39% of the total.
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