Webvan

“I think the best venture capital, I, someone asked me what's the best venture capital bets. I talk about a paradoxical one. I think it's Mike Moritz betting on Instacart. Why? Because he lost three hundred and seventy million on web van less than a decade ago.…”

“So you don't have to come up with new ideas. You can just look at the graveyard of ideas and ask, was the, was this a good idea, but just timing what was wrong? That's another way to do it.”

“Webvan ended up losing eight hundred million dollars and went bankrupt in 2001.”

“One benchmark, no pun intended, I guess, one measure of quality for the firm will be how good our failures are. Webvan was a really good failure.”

“So it's a seven million dollar round. Benchmark splits the deal with Mike Moritz at Sequoia. Sequoia does three and a half million. Benchmark does three and a half million. Moritz and Byrne join the board.”

“And then web van goes public. You know, during the go-go eras, it trades up to an eight billion dollar market cap.”

“And the reality was that was all wrong. It was just timing and exogenous factors that made that not work at the moment.”

“If there was the capital available to those startups, then the way there is today, then perhaps I wouldn't be ordering from Instacart yesterday. I'd be ordering from web van because they would have been able to stay the course because at scale, that business m…”

“So big basket, I think there were three things. One was that the founding team had done two startups before. I think the kind of, ah, challenges in a hard business like grocery, we felt was best handled by a team which had been there, done that, right? So, I m…”

“I believe Webvan, you know, 1.2 billion dollars of investor capital disappeared with the disappearance of Webvan in the day.”

“An analogy would be like if you were to judge Instacart a thousand percent on web fan, and some VCs do, but I find that it's important to specialize at least in some areas so that you can look under the hood because people eat in many different ways, and it's …”

“The MPS score for web band was always like ridiculously high, the highest of any product, I think.”