Re:Wasn't Kozmo turning profits in some areas? (Score 1)

During the height of the dot.com, I attended the seminar where the founder of Kozmo, Joseph Park, as a guest speaker. His original dot.com concept was offer instant gratification. I recalled he said that he wanted to buy a book on Amazon, but was dismayed that it would take a day for delivery. He wanted it NOW! To make his idea profitable, Kozmo originally offer a narrow but profitable line of merchandise, buy in bulk, sell at retail, limit the customer base to a densely populated well-heeled area that can afford the necessary volumes of $15 minimum purchases (say, wall street) to make 'last mile delivery service' feasible and profitable. Also, not having overhead costs associated with running a brick and mortar convenience store was didn't hurt kozmo's business model. As many know, profitability took a backseat to national expansion, and rest is history. I came away learning a few things about kozmo and dot.coms in general. 1. Warren Buffet was right. If you can't figure how they're making money, don't invest. 2. Never sacrific long time profitability for short term promotional hype. 3. You don't need to be technical to create a startup. Prior to kozmo, the founder didn't know how to setup a web page, but he did a whole rolodex of clients from his days of being a Internet startup financial analyst at Goldman Sachs. 4. kozmo was named after the drink, not the character on seinfield.