These businesses that are not unique, not patentable only have scale as their moat. So you want the widest, deepest moat and fill it with customers. This is th

These businesses that are not unique, not patentable only have scale as their moat. So you want the widest, deepest moat and fill it with customers. This is the early 2000s and deindustrialization is in full effect. If you want a cheap warehouse near a top tier city they weren’t hard to find. So it’s quite possible a competitor could surprise you and do a 10 city expansion overnight. Everyone during this time was trying to ape the Amazon model. Which at this point still wasn’t profitable. No one was interested in going slow. Because there were irrational investors just looking to spend money on the next unicorn. If you weren’t taking it your competition would and you would be another dead company on a list. Trust me, there is nothing rational about how money works. Even the experts who were expecting recession any day now have decided to shut up about it. In retrospect it’s easy to see why a company failed: no viable plan, burn rate, expensive, etc. But a lot of it is just gambling and luck. We can could have worked. Cosmo could have worked. Yahoo could have bought Google. We’ll never know.