‘Investors scared by Amazon attack’ • TechCrunch

In the year In 2010, Marc Lore made a deal worth more than half a billion dollars to sell Quidsey — the company behind Diapers.com and Soap.com — to Amazon. The explosive acquisition helped turn Amazon into an “everything store,” but twelve years later, Lowrey described sales as “disappointing.”

Lorre – who co-founded both Quidsi.com and Jet.com – said he was “sold” on Disruption 2022.

“With Walmart, we were happy to sell; we saw the 2016 billionaire sale of Jet.com to Walmart to accelerate our vision. Amazon was a different situation. It was a compelling situation. We didn’t want to sell,” Lorre said in an interview with TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden.

To keep up with the competition, Amazon “cut the price of diapers by 30%, right?” It’s unheard of,” Lorre recalled. But in the face of pressure, the former Quidici executive says the now-defunct business is “still growing very well”. Lorre says that’s one of the reasons why Amazon decided to snap up the brand.

But before that point, Lowrey believed that Quidsey would need to raise at least $100 million to sufficiently challenge Amazon — an especially large sum at the time. Only, he couldn’t secure it. (In total, Quidsi has raised about $79 million in equity and debt from investors including Acell, Bessemer Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures.)

“It was going to take us feeling like we had enough capital to do this,” Lorre said. “And yes, the investors were scared by Amazon’s attack.”

On a side note, Lore Quidsey has also been offered “like $100 million more” from “another company,” but the co-founder surprisingly declined to share more details.

A day after the Amazon-QuidC deal closed, Lowrey said he and other people at the company went to a bar “drinking our tears” about “how upset we were about selling.”

“We were building something unique,” added Lorre, referring to Wag.com and other sites under the now-defunct Quidsey umbrella. According to co-founder Ain, the Quidc customer experience back then was “much better than what you’d get on Amazon or anywhere else.”

But at the time, $100 million was “a lot of money,” and Lowrey concluded, “people were just afraid of Amazon.”