Word: kozmo
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...dream that was Kozmo continued for years. They opened their service in Boston our first year, and by sophomore and junior years, we’d caught on. Little orange men on orange bicycles appeared at entrances to Houses like clockwork...
...collapse so did Kozmo’s business plan. The company instituted a minimum order of $10 (how many Sour Patch Kids is that again?) and before gasping its last breath, finally started charging for delivery. Harvard kids returned to 7-Eleven in droves, and in April 2001, Kozmo made its final delivery way, way behind schedule: 1,100 pink slips...
Conventional wisdom now holds that such failures were not only expected but welcome. Kozmo was yet another dotcom, in the ignominious tradition of Pets.com, eToys.com, and ifilm.com, that thought it could make more of a business out of the web than was really possible. Investors are now loathe to touch any stock whose name ends in .com, and the prevailing opinion is that such failures have been a cathartic experience for the technology industry. In a few years, the industry will be healthy and robust again, precisely because no one is wasting time and money founding companies with names like...
...case of Kozmo, we know the business might have succeeded with different management because we have a control case. In Los Angeles, there is a small, private company called PDQuick (formerly Pink Dot), which has been around since 1987—a lot longer than the Web. The company delivers groceries and prepared meals to the Los Angeles area and is currently looking to expand nationally. Even before the Web—Pink Dot took orders through an 800 number before launching its web site—the company found a way to be profitable. Its solution? Grow slowly. Pink...
...Right now, we’re in the dark ages of the Internet era. Many of the dotcom pioneers, like Kozmo, are dead, with others like Napster currently crippled by the combined weights of the legal system and the music industry. Nevertheless, these companies, despite their flawed business models and execution, proved beyond argument consumer demand for Internet-enabled services, especially those that catered to people’s desire for immediate gratification. New entrants into these markets may not receive the tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding that Napster and Kozmo got, but they might...