The wild risks and beautiful mind that brought Marc Lore to Glen Taylor’s door

Rich Eisen’s voice was laced with incredulity as he tried to process what was happening, and who could blame him? Sitting just to his right in the guest chair at Eisen’s radio studio in New York was Marc Lore, a 5-foot-10(ish), 48-year-old Italian-American math whiz who was looking Eisen straight in the eye and telling him he wanted to race the great Jerry Rice in the 40-yard dash.

“I told him, Marc, you want no piece of that man,” Eisen said.

At the time, in 2020, Lore was the head of Walmart’s eCommerce operations and was returning for a second year at Eisen’s “Run Rich Run” event at the NFL Combine to raise money for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. After donating $100,000 to the cause and running a 5.37-second time in jeans and a blazer in 2019, Lore told Eisen he wanted to make the event bigger and better the second time around. He wanted to go head-to-head with Rice, who was 57 at the time but still known to be one of the most ferocious competitors to ever put on a uniform.

“I warned you what you might be messing with when you wanted that bull that’s got some serious horns,” Eisen teased him before the race. “Whoever those people you’ve come across in business as competitors, nothing compared to Jerry Rice.”

Lore sat in the chair chuckling humbly, a knowing smile turning at the corner of his mouth.

“I’ve been training the last few months, doing some sprints,” he told Eisen on the radio show. “So we’ll see.”

The sheer audacity of the idea could not be overstated. Who would dare call down that kind of thunder from Jerry freaking Rice only to get smoked with cameras recording and his friend Michael Rubin, sports apparel magnate and co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils, gleefully betting Lore $250,000 (to be donated to St. Jude’s) that he would get embarrassed? But in a theme that has helped him amass the kind of business success and wealth that has him on the doorstep of joining Alex Rodriguez as eventual successors to Glen Taylor in owning the Minnesota Timberwolves, there was a calculated method behind Lore’s apparent madness.

Lore mapped it all out with life-long friend and business partner Vinit Bharara as he prepared for the showdown. Lore was a New Jersey state champion sprinter in high school and a standout at Bucknell in college. Sure, that was 30 years ago, but Rice had been retired for 15 years himself.

“He knew what Jerry Rice had run and modeled out how speed degrades over time as you age,” Bharara said. “It might sound crazy, but we would talk about it in advance over time. And we would just go over the numbers. ‘OK, he ran this at that age, I’m running this right now. I know he’s going to be in this range, I have to beat that range.’”

On the day of the race, Lore showed up at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, and it was clear he meant business. He wore a form-fitting track suit, stretched like an Olympic athlete and even had someone using a massage gun to help get his legs warmed up. Then he ripped off a 5.15-second 40 to put the pressure on Rice, who only managed a 5.25.

Eisen almost couldn’t believe it as he looked at the stopwatch. Marc Lore had won.

“The numbers don’t lie,” Eisen said in a phone call a few days before the NFL Draft. “The 40-yard dash is the ultimate eye in the sky. Cris Carter said the 40-yard dash is a test and you can tell who studied.”

When news broke on April 8 that Taylor had finally found a group that he trusted to set up a succession plan for ownership of the Timberwolves, Rodriguez stole most of the headlines. The three-time MLB MVP is a brand unto himself and a polarizing figure in the professional sports world who has been scrutinized, covered, interviewed and examined for 25 years.

Then there was Lore, who hasn’t exactly been anonymous as he has built his fortune as a serial entrepreneur. But it was easy for the unassuming, mild-mannered entrepreneur to get lost in the shadow of a statuesque 6-foot-3 slugger who was, at the time, engaged to Jennifer Lopez.

In some ways, Lore has been overlooked and underestimated for much of his life, first as a 10-year-old transplant at a small school in New Jersey who was laughed at for his Staten Island accent and aversion to school work. He was the 19-year-old slipping past security at Atlantic City casinos and then clandestinely counting cards to rake in money at the blackjack tables. He was the 25-year-old who, on a whim, participated in a promotional event in Battery Park in New York City in which he performed so well that he earned a trip to Lake Placid and, eventually, qualified for the U.S. Olympic bobsledding team ahead of the 1998 Winter Games. Just last weekend, the 2021 “Run Rich Run” aired during the NFL Draft

Then he was the 48-year-old who dared challenge perhaps the greatest football player to ever live to a race. Now, just days away from his 50th birthday, Lore is hearing the skepticism again as he and Rodriguez work to complete negotiations with Taylor and position themselves to take over one of the NBA’s long-struggling franchises.

“Anybody wondering about his level of competition and if he’s going to try and make the Timberwolves work, if he’ll put the proper amount of literal equity and sweat equity into it, I’ve personally seen this guy wants to win,” Eisen said. “He wanted to beat Jerry Rice. He wanted to beat all his friends. He wants to win. I saw it with my own two eyes.”

Lore declined to be interviewed for this story as he and Rodriguez are still working with Taylor to finalize an agreement as their 30-day exclusive negotiating window winds down. All parties involved remain confident that a deal is on track to be completed, sources told The Athletic, which would bring the close friends on as limited partners for the next two seasons before they took over as the general partners for the 2023-24 season.

Those who know Lore well say the Timberwolves would be adding a tenacious competitor and creative thinker, one who is envisioning how to build the city of the future and reinvent capitalism and who prioritizes empathy and transparency in the businesses he has built over the last 35 years. Now he is hoping to fulfill a lifelong dream to own a professional sports team.

“He doesn’t put himself in a position to fail,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, the high-profile entrepreneur and social media maven who has been a friend and business partner to Lore. “Now he’s at an interesting part of his career where I think he’s going for bigger bets. Flying cars and sports teams. Now I think he’s probably in his ‘let my stretch myself’ mode.” 

Lore was born on Staten Island to a working-class couple, the oldest of three children. His mother, Chiara, was a professional bodybuilder who also trained Julianna Phillips, who was Bruce Springsteen’s wife at the time. Marc got his entrepreneurial bent from his father, Peter, who was involved in several ventures, including a computer consulting company called Chadmarc Systems, after his two sons.

In a podcast with Vaynerchuk, Lore recalled telling his grandmother when he was very young that he wanted to be a farmer “because they grow stuff from nothing,” and so the seeds of entrepreneurship were planted. 

The family moved to New Jersey when Marc was in fifth grade, enrolling him at the Ranney School, a small private school that graduated Lore with 33 other students. The move from a largely white neighborhood on Staten Island to culturally diverse Ranney was an adjustment for Lore. With his mind racing a mile a minute, Lore had little patience for studying. But he befriended two Indian-American boys, Bharara and Lax Chandra, who became influences on him to get more serious in school so he could go to a good college. The three were sports card fanatics and started a business in high school called The Mint, where they would buy baseball cards wholesale from the manufacturer, assemble full sets and then sell them at trade shows for a profit.

“Anything he’s focused on, he goes all-in,” Chandra said. “He has this ability to go deeper than anyone else will. If he starts doing something, he goes deep. He has this ridiculous will. Where that comes from, I couldn’t tell you. But it’s been there since I’ve known him.”

Lore has said he would do odd jobs around the neighborhood — picking weeds, delivering newspapers, setting up a lemonade stand — for hours on end, trying to earn money to put into his business ventures. What drove him, friends say, is an analytical mind that can process numbers at warp speed.

Sonya Guardo, a friend from Ranney, said they were at dinner one night when Lore told her to name any day in recorded history. After each one, July 22, 1843, for example, Lore would tell her the day of the week that particular day fell on. He nailed every one, until Guardo asked him about a date in the distant future. The only one more stunned than Guardo that Lore was stumped was Lore himself. Guardo said Lore spent the next few minutes staring at the wall and working through what went wrong in his head before it clicked. Now he proudly tells friends that he can go thousands of years into the future.

“I loved that moment because it was a two-minute encapsulation of how meticulous his mind is mathematically and how he is able to shift,” Guardo said. “He just figured it out on the spot in his head without a piece of paper how he had to change the analysis.” 

Photo of Marc Lore courtesy of Peter Hurley Photography

One of Lore’s most lucrative side hustles involved teaming up with Bharara and Chandra for trips to Atlantic City. The three teenagers found some cheap suits that were a few sizes too big, Bharara said, in hopes of looking older when they approached the casino, which didn’t allow patrons under 21. Again, Lore’s unimposing figure probably allowed him to slip through without much notice, and once the friends were in, they would execute elaborate card-counting routines to tilt the odds in their favor.

“He taught us the rules, how to do it. It’s all above board,” Bharara said. “We’d practice it before we got out there. We would go to each other’s houses and go to the basement and just practice it. It’s quick math on the decks and doing these calculations. He’s much better at it for how fast he can do it.”

It was right in Lore’s wheelhouse from a math and risk perspective. When they were 14 years old and starting The Mint, Lore was the one to urged Chandra not to buy just one case of cards from the manufacture, but five or six in an attempt increase their volume and profit. At the blackjack tables, it was Lore who called the shots, 

“For me and Vinit, we were a little more conservative,” Chandra said. “We’d be like ‘jeez we’re really staying in?’ But we had a lot of faith in Marc. We were able to overcome our conservatism.” 

For Lore, it was all about the discipline to ride out the valleys. He knew the odds and understood that if they stayed in the game long enough and got a good enough read on the cards left in the deck, that their chances would increase. For three kids who still didn’t have much disposable income, the rhythm of the games and the chances of losing put them on a thrilling razor’s edge, and Lore was the coolest one at the table.

“The first thing is getting in. The next thing is getting a seat. Then it’s withstanding the losses that you have. Then making sure the guys can’t see what we’re doing,” Bharara said. “It worked. We won. We came out of there in our blazers laughing and cracking up.”

Lore went into banking after college, quickly moving up the ranks in the risk-management divisions of prominent institutions in New York, Boston and London. By the time he was 27, Lore was making $500,000 per year when he walked into his boss’s office one day and told him he was leaving to become an entrepreneur.

He did not have a plan or an idea at the time, but he eventually teamed with Bharara and Chandra in 1999 to found The Pit, a sports collectibles business that bought and sold trading cards and memorabilia. The company started with $5 million in investment capital and was eventually sold to card maker Topps for $5.7 million despite the market crashing.

The friends moved on to found a company that eventually became Diapers.com in 2005, using the internet as a way around going to brick-and-mortar stores for diapers, wipes, formula and other infant needs. Lore and Bharara would drive vans around to wholesale stores Costco and BJ’s and buy up the diapers so they could sell them online. Once again, Lore faced skepticism from those who believed you could not make money selling diapers outside of a store. But after a long fight to convince Proctor & Gamble to sell directly to them rather than force them to pick up inventory at the store, Diapers.com became a monster and was sold to Amazon in 2011 for $545 million.

Then it was on to Jet.com, another e-commerce site that Lore co-founded, this time with Nathan Faust and Mike Hanrahan, advertised itself as a way for shoppers to find the lowest prices on all manner of goods. The company went public in 2015 and was bought up by Walmart a year later for $3.3 billion. Lore joined Walmart with the acquisition and helped the retailer rise to No. 2 in online sales behind Amazon.

Lore gained a modicum of retribution by helming Walmart and helping it cut into Amazon’s market share. When Amazon bought Diapers.com, the e-commerce behemoth did it to swallow up the competition. It didn’t take long for Amazon to shut the site down, a move that didn’t sit well with Lore.

“That was a pretty big blow to Marc in some ways. You can get frustrated and annoyed,” said Jenny Fleiss, the co-founder of Rent the Runway who worked with Lore at Walmart. “Then he was like, let’s go build something huge for Walmart and crush it. That’s what makes entrepreneurs. Seeing the opportunities rather than dwelling on the past.”

As Lore gained more experience in starting and leading companies, he started to form a value set based around empathy, empowerment and transparency. His longtime mantra of VCP — vision, capital and people — is aimed at the importance of hiring the best people, laying out a vision that is easy for them to process and then letting them do their work.

“He gives his teams a ton of leeway and trust, which makes you even more inclined to want to deliver,” Fleiss said. “If you’re given a ton of trust and rope to run, you have a greater incentive.” 

When he was at Diapers.com, Lore would organize scooter races around the campus for the hundreds of employees to lighten the mood and inject some adrenaline into the day. Two years ago, Lore started a mentoring program called Startup Standup, which is aimed at helping women founders raise venture capital for their businesses and addressing what he says are biases in the distribution of money to female entrepreneurs. He has also reportedly partnered with his brother on a high-end, on-demand food truck business called Wonder in Westfield, N.J.

“Some people take it very personal and you can’t have a real relationship with them if you’re competing,” Vaynerchuk said. “I think Marc is gracious. I think he has that gear in him where he is very competitive but gracious.”

In Rodriguez, Lore has found another partner in whom he has complete trust. The two have been in business together for years through their halo company, VCP. They recently took public Archer Aviation, a company designing and building fully electric aircraft that can vertically take off and land. The pair, along with Lopez, tried to buy the New York Mets last year, but lost out to Steve Cohen.

Just as in his business dealings, Lore has no plans to be denied of a dream that he has had since he was in high school.

“Being around him makes you want to do bigger things and be as big as you possibly can be,” Fleiss said. “It’s addictive. I’m excited to see what that does in the world of sports.” 

Lore grew up a Knicks fan, and it is possible that the NBA’s reputation for forward-thinking and adaptation may better suit Lore’s personality. He told Eisen that he is already thinking about the technological advancements he and Rodriguez can bring to Target Center, one of the league’s oldest arenas.

But the fit in Minnesota is an interesting one for the New Yorker. The thoughts of an outsider coming in to take over a team that has one playoff appearance since 2004 and has only advanced out of the first round of the postseason once in more than three decades has naturally brought concerns for the Wolves’ long-term future in Minnesota. Lore and Rodriguez have yet to make any specific comments about the team in the market, but Taylor has said emphatically that the team isn’t going anywhere.

Glen Taylor appearing with @ChadHartmanShow saying more emphatically what I wrote yesterday about the prospects of the Timberwolves relocating if/when Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez take over:
“The NBA will not approve the Timberwolves moving from here to Seattle.”

Full exchange: pic.twitter.com/dJEahFRfBh

— Jon Krawczynski (@JonKrawczynski) April 13, 2021

It remains unclear how binding any language to keep the Wolves in Minnesota would be in a potential deal. But Lore’s friends indicate that he at least has a fondness for the Twin Cities that is worth noting.

“I asked him, ‘You’re gonna be in Minnesota in the dead of winter?’” Fleiss said with a chuckle. “He said, yep. He’s in it. He is super excited and game for this next chapter.”

“I think that was one of the important things for him, that it is a good city,” Chandra said. “I don’t know that he would’ve felt the same about every city.”  

In addition to the $1.7 million he helped Eisen raise at this year’s “Run Rich Run,” Lore has already engaged with Wolves guard Josh Okogie on some fundraising efforts for the family of Daunte Wright, who was shot and killed by police in Brooklyn Center last month as he looks to engage in the local community. He and Rodriguez have been speaking regularly with Taylor, Wolves President of Basketball Operations Gersson Rosas and several players to start building some rapport in anticipation of a deal.

As easy-going as Lore appears to be in business, it doesn’t take long for anyone who knows him well to bring up the competitive fire in his belly.

“I don’t think he’s buying the Timberwolves because he’s just looking for an investment,” Eisen said. “I think he’s a sports fan who wants to win. He wants to raise that trophy. I’ve seen that, just in this small competition here.”

That competition was bigger this year, with Lore recruiting seven other entrepreneurs to run the 40 with eight NFL legends, including Ray Lewis, Torry Holt, Terrell Davis and Rice. One of the headlines generated from the event was that Michael Vick still ran a 4.72 at 40 years old. Those close to Lore chuckle a bit that Lore playfully wondered why everyone was so enamored with Vick’s blazing time when the 49-year-old Lore’s 4.97 beat every other former player who ran that day.

If they complete the transaction in the coming days, there will still be plenty of people counting Lore out. The Timberwolves are a distressed asset, albeit one that looks a little better lately as D’Angelo Russell and Karl-Anthony Towns have spent extended time on the court together and Anthony Edwards seems poised for stardom. Lore and Rodriguez have no experience in sports ownership, so it is anybody’s guess how this would go.

“I have more drive now than I’ve ever had in my life,” Lore said on Vaynerchuk’s podcast. “The fear drives you. If you’re scared to do it, and you do it, you’re going to put in the best you’ve got.”

Soft-spoken as he may be, those who know him best believe Lore is soaking up those doubts. They rarely have seen him happier in business than when one of his ideas that was dismissed out of hand at the outset pans out. He is not one to say “I told you so,” but the smile on his face means he doesn’t have to.

“I literally would never bet against Marc. Ever, ever,” Guardo said. “He is like the king of manifestation. I don’t know how else to put it. He is just really special in that way.”

From sneaking into Atlantic City underage to count cards to leaving a high-paying banking job to strike out on his own to racing Jerry Rice, Marc Lore has had a lot of crazy ideas in his life. But teaming with Alex Rodriguez to buy the Minnesota Timberwolves for $1.5 billion? That one has to be right up there. Just like all of the others, Lore did not arrive at this one until that computer between his ears processed the risk and the reward.

“He does these things that are wild and crazy, but they’re usually grounded in quantitative modeling, so there’s a basis to it,” Bharara said. “He always has a plan and the plans are really good.” 

(Top photo of Marc Lore: Peter Hurley Photography)