A Tale of Bruised Peaches: WebVan & Lessons about Scaling Too Quickly

A Tale of Bruised Peaches WebVan & Lessons about Scaling Too Quickly

A Tale of Bruised Peaches WebVan & Lessons about Scaling Too Quickly

I recently got to meet Coppy Holzman, former CEO of Webvan.com, one of the most famous dot com bust stories. It was an incredible experience, and I wanted to share the great advice I received from him.

Here’s the backstory you need to know: Webvan raised over $1 billion dollars in an attempt to do what FedEx did for shipping to the grocery business. They wanted to be THE grocery delivery service for people savvy onlne.

At one point the company was worth $9 billion, only to be worth a whopping ZERO billion within a short time. “A short time,” in this case, meant only a year or two. Continue reading