Taking a trip down memory lane with HomeGrocer.com |
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Taking a trip down memory lane with HomeGrocer.com
This is kind of cool. As part of VentureWire's 10 year anniversary, the email newsletter has put together an interactive timeline of hundreds of startup, venture capital and technology news events that occurred between 1999 and 2009. There you can see headlines like "Google promises not be evil in IPO filing" and "Napster Fails" and "Facebook valued at $15B after Microsoft invests."
You could literally spend hours digging through all of the news nuggets.
Also, as part of VentureWire's 10 year anniversary, the publication is revisiting some of the bigger news stories of 1999. And today, they dig into a company that was near and dear to many in the Seattle area: HomeGrocer.com. As Scott Austin reports, 10 years ago today the company famous for its peach-logo trucks announced $100 million from Amazon.com, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Martha Stewart and others.
Notes Austin:
That financing round was one of the largest raised during the dot-com bubble. It would also prove to be among the wildest miscalculations in venture capital history.
I know I am dating myself a bit here, but I was actually on the tech beat 10 years ago when HomeGrocer was putting that VC deal together. I remember the story well since I got wind of it early and reported in the Seattle P-I on September 17, 1999 that the company was looking to close on $100 million.
"We are growing faster and faster, so we have a voracious appetite for capital," Drayton told me at the time. Obviously, that plan didn't work out, and Drayton still cites the rapid growth as one of the big reasons why HomeGrocer.com failed. (In fact, there's some more reading on the topic in a paper from The University of Washington's Foster School of Business titled HomeGrocer.com: An anatomy of a Failure).
Of course, as we've reported more recently, Amazon.com is jumping back into the online grocery game with Amazon Fresh. Right now, the service is only available in Seattle, but last month TechFlash looked into whether the service might expand nationwide.
Hopefully, they've read the paper cited above and taken a close look at what went wrong at HomeGrocer. But, interestingly, Amazon.com now owns the HomeGrocer.com brand and visitors to that URL are now directed to a Web site on Amazon where shoppers can purchase cereal, coffee, popcorn and 45,000 other non-perishable items.
(By the way, congrats to VentureWire on the 10 year anniversary).
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