Entrepreneurs Create Jobs in N.J.

It’s no secret that entrepreneurs create jobs, but there was living proof last night at the latest NJTech Meetup.

Marc Lore, founder and CEO of Jet.com, was the featured speaker at the event held at Stevens Institute of Technology. During an interview with Aaron Price, founder of NJTech Meetup, Lore talked about creating and scaling Jet, his latest venture.

Lore said he is hiring about 20 people per month to work at Jet, a new online marketplace. And these sounded like well-paying jobs; engineering was specifically mentioned as a primary need. This factoid was said almost as an aside during the hour-long interview, but it was in many ways the most important thing said last night. To understand why, you need to know a little about who Marc Lore is.

Lore is a Jersey guy and the first in his family to go to college—not unlikely many of our scrappy Montclair State students. He worked in banking, making good money, until he decided to pursue entrepreneurship. His first venture was The Pit, an online sports card “stock market,” and he had a successful exit selling it to Topps Company. Then Lore partnered with childhood friend and fellow Jersey guy Vinit Bharara to launch Diapers.com, whose parent company was Quidsi. The premise of Diapers.com was simple: buy diapers at Costco for $1, sell them for 90 cents, develop a customer base and then make money by selling lots of other high-margin things to those customers. Lore and Bharara never really got to the stage of selling lots of other things because Amazon was so unnerved by Quidsi that it bought the company for $550 million. As part of the deal, Lore became an employee of Amazon, no doubt making a nice salary on top of his share of the payout from his successful exit of Quidsi.

That background is important because Lore could have moved to the Caribbean, and never worked another day in his life or, if he preferred, done his Amazon job from a laptop while sitting on a beach. Instead, Lore decided to stay in New Jersey and do the hard work of starting all over again with a new venture, Jet. Granted, the Jet startup is easier because he’s now Marc Lore of the half-billion-dollar successful sale to Amazon who was on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek, instead of Marc Lore, some unproven entity who used to work in banking. For example, Jet has already raised more than $200 million in funding.

Jet is based in Montclair now—where Quidsi was also based—because Lore said last night he liked that Montclair has commercial space, trains to Manhattan, and great restaurants within walking distance (he talked in this story about going to lunch with Bharara at Aozora during the Quidsi days). Alas, Jet is moving to Hoboken soon because the Mile Square City has more commercial space than Montclair, and Jet wants to be able to expand and grow.

Because Jet is hiring, all because Lore decided to stay in New Jersey.

There were also three early-stage startups who spoke last night: Jacob Katsof, CEO and co-founder of AppCow; Byron Druss, chief revenue officer of eureQa; and Damien Rottemberg, co-founder of Klassroom. These men are where Marc Lore was years ago: guys with an idea, and the passion to pursue it. And Katsof, Druss and Rottemberg could one day be where Lore is now, although perhaps on a smaller scale: hiring people and creating jobs at a company that didn’t exist until they dreamed of it.

Even better, Lore said his 15-year-old daughter is already an entrepreneur, selling stickers in a venture she created. Let’s hope she stays in New Jersey, just like her father did.