Webvan
Webvan was an online "credit and delivery" grocery business that went bankrupt in 2001. It was headquartered in Foster City, California, USA, in Silicon Valley. It delivered products to customers' homes within a 30-minute window of their choosing. At its peak, it offered service in ten US markets: San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Sacramento, and Orange County. The company had hoped to expand to 26 cities.
In June 2008, CNET named Webvan the largest dot-com flop in history, placing it above Pets.com and eight other sites on its list. It is now owned and operated by Amazon.com.
History
Webvan was founded in the heyday of the dot-com bubble in 1996 by Louis Borders, who also co-founded the Borders bookstore in 1971. Venture capitalists, including Benchmark Capital, Sequoia Capital, Softbank Capital, Goldman Sachs, and Yahoo!, invested more than $396 million in Webvan. They encouraged it to rapidly build its own infrastructure (the first-mover advantage strategy popularized by Amazon.com) to deliver groceries in a number of cities. Some journalists and analysts considered this a serious error of judgment, and blamed it on the fact that none of Webvan's senior executives (or major investors) had any management experience in the supermarket industry, including its CEO George Shaheen who had resigned as head of Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), a management consulting firm, to join the venture.
Podcasts:
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by Bad Religion
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by Bowling For Soup
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by Half Man Half Biscuit
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by Throwing Muses
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by Staind
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by Jill Scott
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by Mushroomhead
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by The Echoing Green
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by Circle Ii Circle
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by La Oreja De Van Gogh
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by Passafire
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by Ocean
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by Chrisette Michele
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by Word Alive
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by Flesh Field
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by Emil Bulls
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by Revelation
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by Sweeney Todd
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by Angel Taylor
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by Altar Boyz Soundtrack
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by Juggaknots
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by Just Like Vinyl
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by Appogee
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by A Joker's Rage
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by Stephen Sondheim
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by Lord Of The Lost
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by Echoing Green
Epiphany
by: Bad ReligionA new age of reason
Brain treason to trick the mind
What good is searching
if nothing's there to find
We arrive at this place
of no return my brothers
Only to discover that our minds have led us away
so far from the painful truth
of who we are
What's right is wrong
what's come has gone
what's clear and pure is not so sure
It came to me
All promises become a lie
all that's benign corrupts in time
The fallacy
of Epiphany
Come forth bear witness
see the profit from your loss
Beg for forgiveness
only after you tally the cost
We arrive at this place
of no return my sisters
Only to discover that our values ran us aground
on the shoal in the sea of what
we could be
What's right is wrong
what's come has gone
what's clear and pure is not so sure
It came to me
All promises become a lie
all that's benign corrupts in time
The fallacy
of Epiphany
If it's real for me do I have to prove it to you
Why do revelations fade to cold blue untruths
It's oh so relative
Subservient in total to one's perspective
What's right is wrong
what's come has gone
what's clear and pure is not so sure
It came to me
All promises become a lie
all that's benign corrupts in time
The fallacy