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Futuristic Startups that Failed after the Dotcom Bubble Burst
By siliconindia
Fremont: The dotcom bubble saw the rise of numerous startups, which were looked upon from revolutionizing the experience for internet users. These companies committed grave marketing sins, which led them from the acme to their graves. Here are a few startups, which though ahead of their time, saw a spiraling downfall resulting in their death after the dotcom bubble burst.
Webvan
The online "credit and delivery" grocery business was founded BY Louis Borders in the late 1990s. It got backing from investors like Sequoia Capital, Goldman Sachs, Yahoo1, Benchmark Capital, and Softbank Capital, who helped it to rapidly build its infrastructure. It offered to deliver products to the doorsteps of the customers within 30 minutes (Does the Dominos' 30 minutes else free ring a bell?) During its peak, Webvan placed a $ one billion order with the engineering company Bechtel in order to build its warehouses, bought 30 Sun Microsystems Enterprise 4500 servers, dozens of Compaq ProLiant computers and several routers model 7513 and7505 from Cisco. Some journalists and analysts feel that none of Webvan's senior executives had any experience in the supermarket industry. These expenses far exceeded their sales growth, which made the company run out of money.
Webvan's 30 minute delivery ignored the needs of working customers, who preferred to get their groceries delivered at night. The other grave mistakes made by Webvan were the assumption that people would ditch the conventional groceries to buy stuff online, something new and different. It was the lack of customers which put the company (believed to be some 10-20 years ahead of its time) into trouble.
The final nail on the coffin was hammered in 2001 with all the non-perishable food being donated to local food bands, thousands of its shopping bins sitting in the customer's basements, and a yearly $375,000 severance package for its ex-CEO George Shaheen. The lesson learnt from the rise and fall of Webvan is that even a good idea should grow slow and steadily, instead of a rapid expansion.
