Jet.com president Liza Landsman to exit the retailer

Liza Landsman, president of Jet.com for the past two years, is reportedly exiting the retailer in the next couple of months. After a long career in finance, Landsman pivoted to retail at the urging of Jet.com founder Marc Lore in 2015 ahead of the company’s beta launch.

Landsman was on the ground floor of helping Jet.com get up and running and grow from its inception. She was elevated to CEO when Lore took the helm at Walmart e-commerce in September 2015.

Recode reports Landsman has decided to move on to a new role to be named later at another company. Walmart e-commerce chose not to comment on the departure when contacted by Talk Business & Politics Friday (Jan. 26). Jet.com did confirm the transition will take place in the next couple of months. There is no word on who might replace Landsman.

Mike Hanrahan, also a Jet.com co-founder, is overseeing an initiative called Project Kepler at Jet.com that is aimed at competing against the cashier less store recently opened by Amazon.

Landsman, a native of Philadelphia, is graduate of Cornell University with a degree in physics. Retail was a new area for her as she spent the bulk of her career working in finance for E*TRADE, BlackRock and IBM.

Speaking at a women’s leadership conference in Northwest Arkansas last summer, Landsman said the honed her math and analytical problem solving skills from an early age spending a lot of time with both grandfathers. One was a rocket scientist for NASA, though he never finished college and was a “fascinating” guy. The other grandfather was a bookie who spent a lot of time at the horse track. She said she learned to handicap the horses when going to the track with her grandfather after school.

Landsman also said prior to joining Jet.com the largest thing she had ever shipped was a credit card. She said figuring out the supply chain was a passion of hers in the early days after joining the retailer.

Recode reports the frenetic pace of e-commerce retail over the past three years was the reason Landsman sought a career change.

Landsman said she had her doubts about working for a large entity like Wal-Mart, and said she initially was waiting for the retailer to pull back a mask. She said that hasn’t happened. The one complaint Landsman voiced about working for Wal-Mart after saying everyone is genuinely nice, was “I just wish we could curse more.”