Lessons Learned From Webvan

from the talk-to-your-customers-before-you-spend-a-billion-dollars dept

The NY Times has a very interesting article looking at the failure of Webvan. They suggest (somewhat jokingly) at the beginning that the main lesson learned is that if it takes $2.5 billion to create a company in a way that's profitable to you, you ought to raise it all upfront. A better lesson that comes out later in the article is that if you're building a hugely capital intensive project that will require huge numbers of customers to make work - you might want to talk to a few of those customers to find out what they want. Two years ago, when Webvan was first announced, I questioned the idea saying that customers didn't seem to like online grocery stores and I wondered why Webvan would be different. Apparently, no one at Webvan took the time to figure that out themselves.