4 ms·

Exactly. These guys are the opposite of the lean startup. All air and venture funding with ambitious growth plans. No product, nothing tested, just on theory. T

• x0x0 12y ago
  amazon proves enough people will buy many things online costco (and even amazon prime) prove the membership model past experience proves the founder can build a large ecommerce company there is a little more validation than just theory
  • api 12y ago
    That sort of high level speculation has a mixed history at best. Anyone can model some numbers for a big market and make impressive Kurzweil shaped graphs.
  • eloff 12y ago
    That sounds good in theory, but there's no way to know if it will be like that in practice. Those are unproven assumptions when applied to a new entity. Many of the same things could have been said of Pets.com. Just like no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, no startup survives contact with its customers.
    • x0x0 12y ago
      No doubt it's a big gamble, but amazon's market cap is is $173B. That justifies a big gamble.
      • kolev 12y ago
        They have a very long way to reach Amazon and that's given that Amazon stays still all the years to come!
  • tjradcliffe 12y ago
    Except that there is a small but significant anti-correlation between running a successful startup in the past and doing so again. So having a founder with past experience in a successful company gives you a slightly lower chance of success than taking a random first-timer. The existence of wildly successful second-timers does not answer this fact. This slight anti-correlation predicts the existence of wildly successful second-timers. Just fewer of them than you'd get if you selected an equal number of random first-timers. Secondly, comparison to an existing major player is never a good move for a startup. One of the more frequent arguments I've had in startup environments has been countering the claim that "Microsoft (or Apple, or whoever) does it this way!" as justification for some particular business practice. It is surprisingly difficult to gently disabuse a sincerely committed individual of the notion that their ten-person zero-revenue startup is meaningfully comparable to pick-your-multi-billion-dollar behemoth with tens of thousands of employees, a universally recognized brand, a world-wide distribution network, and a generation of technical expertise. So there is in fact little more than theory to support the validation. Factual validation necessarily involves paying customers. Lots of them. 'Til then, this looks like a late entry into a market dominated by Amazon, with Amazon Prime already owning the membership space for online sales. Unless their execution is perfect in every detail (which is could be but more likely is not) and/or they offer some compelling advantage over Amazon's delivery model and Amazon Prime's membership model it's hard to see how they are going to put significant dents in Amazon's position. Maybe they don't have to, if they're lean enough and clever enough, but that's a pretty risky bet.
    • x0x0 12y ago
      amazon prime is itself taking a series of risky bets -- I bought into it as a fast shipping service. Over the last two years, they've made the shipping shitty with the rise of add-on items, and turned it into a backlist tv / movie service. I don't use, or really want, that -- I just want fast shipping, which has gotten a lot suckier. I'll give jet at $50/mo a try.
      • Xatter 12y ago
        $45/year not month