Joining Forces to Win the Future of Retail
By Marc Lore, Co-founder and CEO of Jet.com
I couldn’t be more excited that Jet will be joining with Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, to create a new kind of shopping experience for millions of people.
An upstart retailer and an industry stalwart might seem like an odd pairing, but Jet and Walmart are united by a common sense of purpose. We both value treating others with fairness and respect and creating an entrepreneurial culture with a strong bias toward action. We both understand that our role in the world can be bigger than buying and selling things and that we can use our size and scale for good. We’re both building growth companies.
But most fundamentally, Jet and Walmart share a deep and abiding focus on customers. We’re both obsessed with saving people time and money, and we will do that together by offering a wider assortment, better prices and more delivery and pickup options.
Of course, after we close the deal, Walmart also brings tremendous physical resources, including the greatest store network and logistics system in the history of retail, to our existing business. More than 90% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Walmart store, and we will take advantage of that to serve customers in new ways.
We will also continue to build on the incredible foundation the Walmart.com team has built in San Bruno, California. Walmart.com is already one of the top online retailers, and is busy launching great new services like grocery pickup. Every Jet employee should feel extremely proud that such a prominent player would want to invest in our world-class talent and unique business model.
When we started Jet, we set an ambitious goal of getting to scale by 2020, and our partnership with Walmart will greatly accelerate our pursuit of that goal. But that’s just the beginning of what our companies are going to do together.
Our mission at Jet hasn’t changed — we plan to create the best opportunity to win faster by assembling the assets we need to revolutionize ecommerce. We already have an amazing team in place, and now we’re adding the most relevant resources, access to capital, and a huge canvas. We’re forming a partnership that will make both Jet and Walmart stronger.
We can accomplish so much together. That’s what excited me and the Walmart team. It’s a great time to be at Jet, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds.
