Webvan: A Dot-Com E-commerce Failure

Hey Madi,

I hear ya but it kind of bugs me that it’s seen as a failure because, when I was growing up something that really stayed with me was something my father told me, out of every 10 things he’s does 9 may be mistakes, but one is a massive win that wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been nine mistakes before that and that the only mistake a person can make in life is to not make enough mistakes, those are the real regrets in life. That stayed with me and popped up in different ways like reading Henry Ford said that the only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing (Ford, cited in Positivity Blog, 2023). Theodore Roosevelt said that the only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything (Roosevelt, cited in Positivity Blog, 2023). Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People shows us that effectiveness and growth only come when we step out, act, and learn from the results (Covey, 1989). And one of my favorite poems, Instantes, so often misattributed to Octavio Paz but in truth from Don Herold, says it directly: if I could live again, I would make more mistakes.

That is why I do not see Webvan as a story of failure. To me this was groundbreaking. They gave it their best shot. They dared to do what nobody else had yet imagined possible. In science, every discovery is preceded by trials that break down. How many Rockets exploded before humanity walked on the moon? but those explosions were not meaningless. They were the written cost of reaching beyond the known (Popper, 1959).

Webvan was exactly that kind of trial. People said they scaled too quickly, invested heavily, and consumers were not yet ready (CNN, 2001; The New York Times, 2001). But every system they built, every challenge they faced, and every insight they gathered became part of the blueprint that later made Instacart and Amazon Fresh succeed, have you seen the new Ocado factory? It’s now the standard. Nothing was wasted. The people who worked on Webvan left with knowledge and experience that made them invaluable.

So I cannot call this a mistake. I call it necessary. I call it bold. I call it progress. In life you have to give it your best shot, and Webvan did exactly that. Maybe it is fitting that I married a risk manager, because innovation always requires both: the visionaries who dare to leap and the pragmatists who make sure the lessons of those leaps live on. What do you think?