Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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The hilarious part to me is how Webvan as deployed represented a cutting of scope. Originally they were going to sell everything. Groceries were the start-small compromise!

One valuable lesson here is that being correct but too early is the same thing as being wrong. Webvan vastly overestimated the speed of change. 20 years later and I still get most of my groceries from the corner store. I have friends who do mostly delivery, but that's still far from a perfect experience.

Another is that any startup should ask questions like: what do we think we'll learn, and can we learn that for less money? They spent $800 million finding out the answers to things like, How much do people want to buy groceries on line? and What are sustainable economics for grocery delivery?

They could have gotten the answers they did for less than 1% of what they spent. Build a web site, rent a few trucks, buy most of your groceries from the nearest grocery store, launch a limited test in your most favorable zip code. They would quickly have learned how viable it was, and the other $792 million could have gone to startups with more of a chance of delivering sustained customer value.

There was a grocery delivery startup called Grocera that operated in Waterloo region for a little while a couple years ago (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grocera). It's defunct now, but my wife ordered from them a few times, and was pretty sure it was one of the founders who showed up at the door, pulling the order out of the back of their own hatchback.

So much value in learning first hand about the experience first hand, both for the customer and the staff person.

> So much value in learning first hand about the experience

I couldn't agree more! I'm working for a startup doing alcohol/cannabis delivery. Before there was funding, our founders rode their bikes to do these deliveries (and have still done some deliveries in the past 6 months).

There was so many lessons learned from doing our deliveries. One such example: we had a bug where our push notifications told the customer we had arrived, but were actually still pretty far away (GPS math sure is fun :P)

This totally depends where you are. Here we are talking about the US but in the UK for example all the major supermarkets offer delivery for a small fee. In Canada Save-on-foods has a delivery service.

Sure, grocery delivery is commonly available here too. But what percentage of groceries are sold through delivery? That was the real thing material to WebVan's business plan. They were betting the rate of change was much higher than it turned out to be.

And I'll note that WebVan was betting on replacing supermarkets, so they needed much more dramatic numbers. A supermarket already has 90% of business up, running, and paid for. WebVan spent hugely just to get to approximate infrastructure parity -- something that turned out to be totally unnecessary.

Parent is extremely insightful. It shouldn't be downvoted.

I remember trying to plan a startup with a guy who did similar things. He'd let his imagination run away, and then try to compromise on something far beyond realistic.

I should have walked away sooner than I did... We went nowhere because every week it was another "Groceries were the start-small compromise."

Yeah, this is a common entrepreneur failure mode. You need to be ambitious and visionary to start a new thing. And investors love to hear the grand plans! Tempering that is one whole other skill.

That guy sounds like he was trouble from the beginning. But if you get in this situation again with somebody less crazy, one thing I've done is to draw a graph with a dot just above the zero point and then a circle at the top right. I get them to talk about their grand 20-year vision, and I explain that's the circle in the upper right.

Then I draw a bunch of tiny line segments that walk erratically toward the circle. I explain that each week we need to take one step in the direction of the vision. The I ask them to focus real small, and think of the tiniest thing we can do toward the goal, something that fits in a week. Once the have a few of those, I'll ask, "How can we prove that this step really went in the right direction?" (It can also be useful to pull in the Lean Startup framework of validating hypotheses here.)

Sometimes that's enough to get visionaries to start breaking it down. And sometimes it exposes that the person is only good at dreaming big, but is unable to actually execute. Either way, it can yield valuable info.

Wish I saw your reply sooner. That's a great technique. You're probably a serial entrepreneur, or someone very close to that.

> And sometimes it exposes that the person is only good at dreaming big, but is unable to actually execute.

In my case, I figured out the problem when we tried to write a business plan. We've kept in touch for years since, and seeing where he's gone, that assessment is pretty accurate. He always has big dreams, but he succeeds when he focuses on mundane tasks.

It's silly, because he had a hit with an app, but spent too much money developing it and lost money. If his dream wasn't as big, he'd be profitable.

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