Tag: venture capitalists
Of Course Instant Groceries Don’t Work
More than 20 years ago, as the rubble of the dot-com boom was still smoking, Wired magazine published an autopsy of the grocery-delivery start-up Webvan. The company had just filed for bankruptcy after evaporating the better part of a billion dollars of investment funds in about a year and a half, and the tale of its downfall opens with a sentence that, in retrospect, is pretty funny: “In the sober days of 2001, it’s hard to imagine a time when
Lessons From the Retro-Future of the Internet
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Here is my confession: I’m traumatized by a David Letterman clip. It’s from November 1995, and Letterman’s guest is a young, bespectacled Bill Gates. The video starts with a question from the legendary late-night host: “What about this internet thing?” he asks. “What the hell is that, exactly?”
Gates, freshly minted as the world’s richest man, gamely tells the host about the wonders of the web—but Letterman isn’t having it. He pooh-poohs
What Is It About Peter Thiel?
Silicon Valley is not a milieu known for glamour and charisma. Still, Peter Thiel has cultivated a mystique. A billionaire several times over, Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook; he went on to co-found PayPal, the digital-payment service, and Palantir, the data-intelligence company that has worked with the U.S. government. He has co-written a business best-seller, “Zero to One,” and launched a hedge fund; he now runs three venture-capital firms. But Thiel’s aura emanates not so much from