Marc Lore, a successful entrepreneur who’s sold two companies for a staggering total in the billions, is planning to take his food delivery and takeaway venture, Wonder, public with an impressive $40 billion valuation.

In a recent face-to-face interview in New York, we managed to discuss not only his aspirations for Wonder and its goal to revolutionize meal planning, but also his unique insights into business management. The following excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Lore shared his views on the ‘founder mode’ concept, where CEOs and founders actively engage with not only their immediate team but also ‘skip level’ employees. This approach, adopted by many including Elon Musk, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and Sam Altman, aims to prevent small problems from escalating into major ones.

However, Lore’s approach deviates from this. His focus is on vision, capital, and personnel. He holds weekly meetings with his leadership team, devoting two hours to discussing the cornerstones of the company’s vision, strategies, organisational structure, capital plan, and performance management systems among others. Lore believes that having a team completely in sync with these aspects eliminates the need for his direct involvement in their tasks.

When it comes to recruitment, Lore places a high emphasis on hiring top-tier talent. He believes that it’s impossible to gauge a candidate’s potential in a one-hour interview. Instead, he relies heavily on their resumes to identify patterns of success, such as multiple promotions and significant leaps from one company to another.

Lore also stresses the importance of a well-structured performance management system to guide these high-performing employees, especially those from Generation Z who are keen on rapid promotions.

Finally, Lore shared his perspective on risk-taking in startups. He believes that many underestimate the risk of maintaining the status quo and overestimate the risk of change. He draws parallels with medical scenarios, where the gravest situations often warrant the riskiest interventions.

In contrast to large corporations like Walmart that focus on gradual improvement, startups have a high failure rate. Thus, Lore advises startup founders to embrace risk in order to reduce their chances of failure. He emphasizes that the greatest risk lies in complacency and inaction.