Of Course Instant Groceries Don’t Work
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More than 20 years ago, as the rubble of the dot-com boom was still smoking, Wired magazine published an autopsy of the grocery-delivery start-up Webvan. The company had just filed for bankruptcy after evaporating the better part of a billion dollars of investment funds in about a year and a half, and the tale of its downfall opens with a sentence that, in retrospect, is pretty funny: “In the sober days of 2001, it’s hard to imagine a time when a company with an untested plan for an online grocery shopping service could inspire private investors to instantly part with hundreds of millions of dollars.”
For a while, that was true—Webvan’s failure, along with that of its contemporaries HomeGrocer and Kozmo.com, briefly made food delivery the third rail of Silicon Valley. But in the 2010s, as consumers showed interest in delivery apps such as DoorDash and Instacart, mail-order meal kits such as Blue Apron, and ultra-fast delivery from Amazon Prime, the itch to once again invent Webvan began anew. Today, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists still seem convinced that the company, which
