On the way back in 2010, Mark Lor hit more than half a billion A dollar deal to sell Quidsi – the company behind Diapers.com and Soap.com – to Amazon. The explosive acquisition helped transform Amazon intoshop everything,’ but twelve years later, Laure described the sale as ‘disturbing’.
Laure – who co-founded both Quidsi.com and Jet.com – said in disable 2022.
“With Walmart, we were happy with the sale; the billionaire from . said 2016 Sale of Jet.com to Walmart. “Amazon’s situation was different. It was a forced situation,” Laure said on stage in a conversation with TechCrunch’s “We didn’t want to sell.” Ingrid Lundin.
To stick with the competition, Amazon slashed the price of diapers by 30%, right? Laure remembers. But in the face of mounting pressure, the former Quidsi CEO claimed his now-defunct company is “still growing well.” Lore claimed that this was one of the reasons why Amazon eventually decided to snap up the brand.
But before that point, Laure thought Quidsi needed to raise at least $100 million more to adequately challenge Amazon — an especially huge sum at the time. Only, he couldn’t secure it. (In all, Quidsi has raised approximately $79 million in equity and debt from investors, including accelerationAnd the Bessemer Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures.)
“That’s what we should have felt like we had enough capital to really do it,” said Laure. “And yes, investors were afraid of Amazon’s attack.”
On a side note, Laure claimed Quidsi also “had an offer from another company” for “like another $100 million,” but the co-founder mysteriously declined to share additional details.
A day after closing the Amazon-Quidsi deal, Laure said he and others from the company went to a bar, “drank our tears away” over “how upset we were, because we sold out.”
“We were building something really special,” Laure added, citing Wag.com and other sites under the now-extinct Quidsi umbrella. In the co-founder’s eyes, Quidsi’s customer experience at the time was “much better than what you might find on Amazon or anywhere else.”
But $100 million was “a lot of money” at the time, and Lowe concluded, “People were afraid of Amazon.”
