>At least five former employees who spoke to Rest of World say that this rapid expansion came at a hefty cost and was not executed properly — ultimately contrib

>At least five former employees who spoke to Rest of World say that this rapid expansion came at a hefty cost and was not executed properly — ultimately contributing to the company’s unraveling. >Inside these warehouses, there was a lack of essential business acumen, strategy, and vigilance in the way inventory was managed >often had to navigate sudden inventory surges caused by automated systems This seems to be a pretty familiar story in the pandemic startup scene. You have a completely new market born overnight (either COVID testing, med equipment, delivery, etc) with essentially a captive consumer base. Founders and management usually realize that the pandemic won't last forever, and try to prepare to pivot, but do this by over-investing in existing revenue streams, trying to capitalize on this once-in-a-lifetime (hopefully) golden goose. Unfortunately they don't have the experience to realize this stretches infrastructure too thin and breaks down communication chains, and what results in messes like these. A manual, 15 min fix for a bug that occurs once few days is allowable when you're at a small scale, but you can't 20x that infrastructure overnight because you'll now be spending several hours troubleshooting and have no time left to build any solution. While founders don't necessarily need to know _how_ much duct tape holds their company together, you can at least assume a lower bound and give your engineers and managers time to improve things and build out. Combine this with onboarding new employees, who haven't been fully trained, haven't become swayed by your charismatic founder, and are disgruntled by the dubious infrastructure and what happened at Airlift is a pretty familiar case study. >In a blog post, Gul highlighted a quote from Walton’s biography: “It was the lowest point of my life. I felt sick to my stomach … I had built the best variety store in the whole region and worked hard in the community. I had done everything right and now I was being kicked out of town.” It sounds to me as though Gul wasn't a malicious person or even particularly unsavvy (at least with regards to charming his team and investors), but the early success caused an overestimation of him and his company's ability and this miscalculation spiraled all the way down the chain of command. Doing "everything right" is completely different depending on when you're in a boom time and when your market is disappearing.