Marc Lore's kinda insane AI-powered food delivery dream

Good morning.

First, a shoutout to all my fellow Knicks fans who have suffered along with this franchise for so long. Our guys really did it. It doesn’t feel real.

Back to business. This week’s newsletter is landing in your inbox later than usual as I predicted last week, in part because I spent much of the week helping host Fortune’s 25th anniversary Brainstorm Tech event in the mountains of Aspen, Colorado, and in part because I also suffered a ghastly Google Docs snafu. I’ll return to the regular Wednesday publication day this coming week.

In Aspen, I did enjoy a bit of outdoor time with a mountain jeep tour early on the morning of Day 1 of the event.

But I enjoyed my onstage conversations just as much.

You can catch my joint interview with the CEOs of live-streaming giants Twitch and Whatnot here; a panel discussion on the future of supply chains with C-suite leaders from C.H. Robinson, humanoid startup Agility Robotics, and Deloitte here; and my sit-down with serial entrepreneur and Wonder Group CEO Marc Lore here.

That last one is actually a primer for the conversation below. I hope you enjoy.

Now on to the good stuff…

I first met Marc Lore more than a decade ago, while he was building Jet.com and I was trying to break the story of what he was up to. I followed the startup closely for the next year, knowing it would either become one of the largest VC-backed flameouts in modern consumer history or a massive financial win, and it turned out to be the latter: I broke news of his $3.3 billion sale of Jet to Walmart a day before the deal was announced in 2016.

Lore went on to run Walmart's US e-commerce division for more than four years, making him a central character in my book Winner Sells All, the inside story of the Amazon/Walmart rivalry. More recently, he's been building Wonder, a food startup offering more than two dozen restaurant concepts for pickup or delivery from a single storefront, including menus from chefs like Bobby Flay alongside in-house brands. At Fortune last year, I profiled Lore and explored why he's still grinding through another high-risk startup after two huge prior exits.

Wonder has grown through a string of acquisitions, including Blue Apron, Grubhub, the restaurant robotics company Spyce, and New York City's Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, and now has over 100 East Coast locations with major expansion into Texas planned for next year, with 100 more storefronts slated to open in the state in 2027, 20 of which will start offering drone delivery in January.

The company has raised more than $2 billion in funding, including $300 million from Lore himself. The entrepreneur says the company will be ready to go public in 2027.

I recently spoke with Lore after our onstage discussion at the Brainstorm Tech event to go deeper on a few topics: Wonder's AI-powered meal planning system Mel; why he's not too worried about DoorDash's new voice agent; why he thinks physical infrastructure may be the most durable moat in the age of AI; and what he wishes had happened with Jetblack, the conversational commerce startup Walmart shut down before ChatGPT first launched and made that bet look prescient.

The conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.