From the beginning, Jet CEO Marc Lore has preached a gospel of transparency.
His startup promises to sell everyday products for prices that are 10-to-15% lower than competitors offer. It will accomplish this by forgoing all profits on the goods it sells — instead, it pledges to only make money from a $50 annual membership fee shoppers must pay in order to participate.
Internally, Lore posts every board meeting presentation online for his employees to view. He also talks openly about employee stock options and has a public pay-scale system; employees aren't able to negotiate salaries.
Lore's transparency extends to Jet's investors, too.
The site, which launched Tuesday, has raised $225 million from investors at a $600 million valuation. Next week, the company plans to launch an app called JetStream that will give investors real-time, detailed access to all of its financial information.
For the rest of us, Lore's already laid out the road map pretty concretely:
He says Jet's business model doesn't work and it won't start making money until the company reaches a big enough scale. Lore defines that "to scale" landmark as when it sells $20 billion in products per year and has 15 million paying customers. Lore says the site should hit that scale and become profitable by 2020.
In the meantime, Lore plans to spend $100 million on marketing in the next year, and The Wall Street Journal reports that he's planning to raise even more funding, at a $3 billion valuation.
"The pressure’s on top-line," Lore told Business Insider during a phone call Tuesday morning. "We know that in order to get break even, we need to get to $20 billion, so the pressure’s on there. And the pressure’s on every month to reduce the percentage of operating loss. We have this big negative right now and we need to get it down to zero in five years."
He laughs. "There's plenty of pressure."
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