Their average age was in the early twenties. Kozmo took orders over the Internet and promised one hour delivery of a wide range of products including an entire evening s complement of food and videos with no delivery fee and at a price roughly equal to what one would pay at retail. As it turned out the business model was really selling bills for . But kozmo also got its money including million from Amazon and managed to run through million of venture capital before shutting its doors just months later.
The next time I met the CEO was as a student in my MBA classroom. During my visits to Silicon Valley before the last high tech bubble the yardstick for acquisition price was also price per employee. The use of the measure seemed to subside when investment activity once again focused around startups rather than M A. But now that the most wildly successful of those startups Chinese Overseas America Number Data have accumulated a lot of cash themselves acquisitions and the price paid per employee are once again fueling headlines. A better yardstick might be price per user which in the case of WhatsApp was about for a service with no advertising and a revenue stream of per year from those users not getting it free. How will we know when we are near the end of the next high tech bubble When the Nasdaq finally makes it back to the highs it registered in perhaps this year.
When investors stop cheering acquisitions like that of Facebook s after the announcement. When the website kozmo announces that it will relaunch soon which according to Wikipedia it did last September When will the next dot bubble burst Or does even the use of the term dot date me What do you think COMMENTS RALFLIPPOLD CO FOUNDER HTXA HIGH TECH X AGENCY Bubbles in one way are necessary to level the difference between reality and vision on the other hand they destroy interwoven networks and processes. Creative disruption would be the best term to name it. The root cause of it has been always a knowledge differentation due to intransparency.