Back in 2010, Marc Lore struck a deal worth more than half a billion dollars to sell Quidsi, the company behind Diapers.com and Soap.com, to Amazon. The big acquisition helped turn Amazon into a “the store of everything”, but twelve years later, Lore described the sale as “disturbing”.
“We sold ourselves,” Lore, who co-founded Quidsi.com and Jet.com, said at Disrupt 2022.
“With Walmart, we were happy to sell; we saw that as a way to accelerate our vision,” the billionaire said of the 2016 sale of Jet.com to Walmart. Amazon's “situation was different. It was a forced situation. We didn't want to sell."
To keep up with the competition, Amazon “dropped the price of diapers by 30%, right? Which is unheard of," Lore recalled. But under mounting pressure, the former Quidsi executive claimed his now-defunct business was "still growing very well." Lore claimed that this was one of the reasons why Amazon ultimately decided to buy the brand.
But before that point, Lore believed Quidsi needed to raise at least $100 million more to properly challenge Amazon, an especially hefty sum at the time. Only she couldn't tell. (In total, Quidsi raised about $79 million in equity and debt from investors including Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures.)
"That's what it would have taken to feel like we had enough capital to really do it," Lore said. “And yes, investors were scared off by the Amazon attack.”
On a side note, Lore claimed that Quidsi also "had an offer from another company" for "like $100 million more," but the co-founder cryptically declined to share any additional details.
A day after the Amazon-Quidsi transaction closed, Lore said he and other members of the company went to a bar, "drinking our tears" over "how upset it was, because we sold out."
“We were building something really special,” Lore added, citing Wag.com and other sites under the now-defunct Quidsi umbrella. In the co-founder's eyes, Quidsi's customer experience back then "was so much better than what you'd find on Amazon or anywhere else."
But $100 million "was a lot of money" back then, and Lore concluded: "People were just scared of Amazon."
