Okay, let's unpack this. We talk about failure
in business a lot on this show. We talk about
pivoting. We talk about the lean startup methodology,
you know, failing fast. But today, today we are
not talking about a normal failure. We aren't
talking about a lemonade stand that didn't quite
work out. We're definitely not. This is a different
category altogether. Today we are talking about
a failure so spectacular, so expensive, and just
so incredibly fast that it became a legend. It's
the kind of story that business schools use to
scare freshmen. We are talking about Boo .com.
That name, for anyone who lived through the dot
-com bubble of the late 90s, it just instantly
conjures up a very specific feeling. Right. What
is that feeling? It's a mix of nostalgia, disbelief,
and maybe a little bit of secondhand embarrassment.
It's just iconic. Exactly. It's synonymous with
the dot -com bubble bursting. But here is the
mission for this deep dive. And I want everyone
to really listen to this number because it just,
it defies the laws of physics. We are going to
figure out how a single company managed to burn
through $135 million of venture capital. $135
million. In just 18 months. It is a staggering
figure. And you have to remember, this is late
90s money with inflation that's significantly
more today. But even then, just raw cash. That
is a mountain of money to just, you know, vaporize.
In 18 months. That is. I mean, I've done the
math and we will get to the specific burn rates
later. But just on the surface, that is financial
immolation. It is. It's not just a business closing
its doors. It's a catastrophe. Yeah. It's like
watching a train wreck. But the train is made
of gold bars. It is. But I think it's really
important to frame this correctly before we dive
in. Because if we just look at it as stupid people
spending money, we miss the actual lesson here.
This is a case study in what the. economist Robert
Shiller called irrational exuberance. It's a
story about timing, about the disconnect between
technological ambition and the actual, you know,
the infrastructure that existed at the time.
Right. It's about trying to build a Ferrari when
the roads are still made of dirt. Precisely.
That's a perfect analogy. And to guide us through
this, we are looking at a stack of historical
records, various postmortems written by people
who were actually there, and specifically the
founder's own account from their book, Boo Hoo.
Boo Hoo. Great title. Chuckles. It is. So we're
piecing together the rise and fall of this British
e -commerce business to understand not just what
went wrong, but why everyone, and I mean everyone,
thought it was going so right until the very
last second. So let's rewind. Let's go back to
the late 90s. The internet is the Wild West.
Money is falling from the sky for anyone with
a dot com in their name. And the sound of a dial
-up modem is in every home. That screech. And
onto this stage walk are three protagonists.
The golden children, as they were called. Who
were they? At the center of the storm, you have
a Swedish trio, Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander,
and Patrick Hedelin. And here is where it gets
really interesting. And this is crucial for understanding
why they got so much money. They weren't novices.
They weren't just three kids in a garage with
a big idea. They weren't just random kids with
a PowerPoint presentation and a dream. No, not
at all. In the eyes of investors, they were sophisticated
Internet entrepreneurs. And that's because before
Boo .com, they had already built a company called
Bocas .com. Bocas .com. I'm sensing a branding
theme here. The dot com was the key. Very similar
branding approach. Yeah. Bocas .com was an online
bookstore. You can think of it as the Amazon
of Scandinavia. And was it successful? Very.
In 1997, it became the third largest book e -retailer.
They built it. It was a success. And they sold
it. They had an exit. OK, so that explains a
lot. That's everything. They walk into a boardroom.
They put their resume on the table. And they
can say, look, we've already done this. We beat
the odds once. Give us more money for a bigger
idea. Exactly. They had a proven track record
in a world where investors were throwing money
at people who just had a vague idea written on
a napkin. These three had a real tangible success
story under their belts. Right. That credibility
is what unlocked the vault. You have to put yourself
in the mindset of a venture capitalist in 1998
or 1999. Their biggest fear is not losing money.
Their biggest fear is missing the next big thing.
It's FOMO. Fear of missing out. Massive FOMO.
So when these three walk in looking cool, looking
European, fashionable with a success story already
finished, the checkbooks just opened almost automatically.
So they have the credibility. What was the vision
this time? Because they didn't want to sell books
again. They wanted something, I guess. sexier.
No, books were too small, too utilitarian. I
mean, books are easy to ship. They don't spoil.
They don't have sizes. They're simple. A solved
problem almost. Right. The vision for Boo .com
was to become the premier global online sports
and fashion retailer. They didn't want to be
a digital catalog. They wanted to build a lifestyle
brand. And who were they targeting with this?
Who was the customer? The demographic was very,
very specific. Young, wealthy, fashionable people.
Basically, the 18 to 24 year old crowd who had
disposable income and cared deeply about looking
good. The cool kids. It sounds less like a store
and more like an exclusive club. That was 100
percent the vibe they were going for. They wanted
to be the place where the cool kids shopped online.
But here is the kicker. And this is one of the
first major strategic decisions that arguably
set them on the path to ruin. Think about Amazon
for a second. We mentioned them. How did Amazon
start? Books. Just books. And mostly just in
the U .S. initially, right? It was a very focused
launch. Exactly. Jeff Bezos was obsessed with
logistics. He started with books because they
were a simple, uniform product. He mastered the
U .S. market before he even thought about crossing
the Atlantic. It was slow. It was methodical
expansion. So what did Boo .com do? They decided
to launch in Europe and America simultaneously.
On day one. On day one. Global domination from
the opening bell. That is, that's beyond ambitious.
Yeah. That sounds almost impossible. It's incredibly
difficult. Let's just, you know, break down what
that actually means. If you decide to launch
in the U .S., the U .K., Germany, France, Sweden,
and Finland all on the same day, what are you
actually dealing with operationally? Well, languages
for one. The site has to work in German, French,
English, Swedish. That's a huge translation job.
Correct. But that's just the interface, the easy
part. Think about the back end. Currencies. Right.
The euro wasn't in physical circulation yet.
Exactly. The euro exists as a financial concept,
but people in France are spending francs. People
in Germany are spending Deutsche Marks. People
in Italy are spending lira. You need a payment
processing system that handles all of that in
real time. And taxes. VAT, value added tax. Every
single country in Europe has different tax rules,
different rates. And then you have consumer protection
laws. The return policy required by law in Germany
is completely different from the one in the U
.S. So by saying day one global. They didn't
just build one company. They effectively tried
to launch, what, six or seven different startups
on the same day, all tied together by a website
that didn't even exist yet. That is the perfect
way to put it. They multiplied their complexity
by a factor of 10, maybe more, just for the vanity
of being able to say, we are a global company
from day one. It was an operational nightmare
from the jump. And speaking of vanity, let's
talk about the name. I found this little nugget
in the research hilarious. They didn't even want
boo .com originally, did they? No, not at all.
The original heart's desire was bow .com. B -O
-O dot com. As in, inspired by Bo Derek, the
actress. That's the story. They wanted that Hollywood
glamour. They wanted a name that sounded like
a supermodel. Short, chic. But I'm guessing Bo
.com was already taken. It was. And the owner
probably wanted a fortune for it, even back then.
So they pivoted. They just, you know, added a
note. They found a dealer selling Boo .com. And
they bought it for $2 ,500. Which, honestly,
for a three -letter domain name, even then. $2
,500 is a steal compared to what they spent on
everything else. It was probably the most efficient
money they ever spent in the entire 18 months.
In today's market, a three -letter domain like
that could be hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.
So, yeah, good deal there. Okay, so they have
the name. They have the famous founders. They
have this insane global ambition. Now, let's
talk about the execution, or more accurately,
the spending. We have to talk about... The burn.
The burn is legendary. It's what makes Boo .com
a business school case study. It's just mind
boggling. Let's start with the headquarters.
If you're a scrappy startup, where do you set
up shop? A garage? A cheap office park, maybe
a sublet basement somewhere. If you are Amazon,
you famously use a door on sawhorses as a desk
to save money. If you are Boo .com, you set up
your global headquarters on Carnaby Street in
London. Carnaby Street. That's not a tech hub.
That's the historic heart of swinging London
fashion. That is prime expensive real estate.
Exactly. It was a statement, a fashionable address
for a fashionable company. They weren't building
a tech utility. They were building a brand. And
the office culture, by all accounts, reflected
that. There are stories about the guru room.
The guru room? What's that? A dedicated meditation
space in the office. They had fresh fruit delivered
daily for everyone. They had a concierge service
for employees to help them book, you know, theater
tickets and dinner reservations. Concierge? Yeah.
For startup employees? Yes. It was the absolute
height of dot -com excess. They were spending
money to project an image of success before they
had earned a single dollar of profit. It sounds
like they were playing business rather than actually
doing business. In a way, yes. It was about the
image. And the staffing reflected that explosion.
They started with about 40 employees. A tight
ship. Manageable. Normal. But by October 1999,
just as they were ramping up to launch, they
had 400 employees. 400. Across how many offices?
Eight offices, London, Amsterdam, Munich, New
York, Paris, Stockholm. They were staffing up
these global hubs before they had even sold a
single pair of sneakers. That is a massive, massive
overhead. You're paying rent in midtown Manhattan
and central Paris with no revenue. And salaries.
And not just minimum wage. They were hiring cool
people. They were poaching editors from top fashion
magazines, photographers, stylists. People who
expected a certain lifestyle and a certain salary.
But the thing that really blew my mind, the statistic
that I had to read three times, just to make
sure I wasn't hallucinating, was the marketing
spend. The pre -launch marketing. How much did
they spend on advertising and PR before the website
was even live and able to take an order? $25
million. $25 million. Before they sold a product,
before the doors even opened. That is just, I
can't wrap my head around that. Think about the
psychology of that. You are creating this immense
global hype. You have glossy full -page ads in
Vanity Fair and Vogue. You have TV spots directed
by Roman Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola's son.
Yeah. They hired Hollywood royalty to make commercials
for a website. Yes. And the commercials were
completely abstract. They were just vibes. They
didn't really show the website. They just showed
beautiful people and beautiful locations doing
beautiful things. They were selling a membership
to a club that didn't exist yet. So imagine you're
the target customer. You see an ad for the coolest
store in the world. You get all excited. And
then you realize you can't actually go in yet.
It's not open. That was the experience for months,
and it was all based on this land grab mentality.
You have to remember the era. The prevailing
wisdom of the dot -com bubble was get big fast.
The idea was that the Internet is a winner -take
-all market. So if you can establish the brand
first, you win everything. Profits. That's a
problem for, you know, 2005. The only thing that
matters right now is capturing the mind share
first. That's spending $25 million. That puts
a ticking clock on your back that has to be deafening.
If you spend that much telling people you are
amazing, you better be absolutely perfect on
day one. Exactly. You are writing a check that
your technology has to cash. If you tell me you
are the greatest store on Earth for six months
and then I finally log on and I get a generic
error message or a loading screen, the disappointment.
is 10 times worse than if you had just been humble.
It creates this massive expectation gap. A chasm.
And that brings us to the overall financial picture.
We mentioned the $135 million total burn in 18
months, but let's look at the velocity of that
burn. Okay. In just six months, one six -month
period, they burned through 125 million pounds.
Wait, pounds. So that's even more in dollars.
Yes. So that's what? About $170 million at the
time in six months. I don't even know how you
physically write checks that fast. Did they have
a bonfire in the Carnaby Street office and just
throw cash in it? It comes down to operational
excess and just chaos. It wasn't just the ads.
It was the out -of -control payroll. The postmortem
suggests there was a total lack of direction
regarding how many staff were actually needed.
It was hiring for the sake of hiring. We are
a big global company. Therefore, we need 400
people. That was the logic. Plus, terrible communication
between departments meant money was just leaking
everywhere. Different offices buying their own
software, duplicating work. It was a mess. So,
you have a massive staff, a massive ad budget,
and massive office rent. But you're an e -commerce
company. The one thing you really, really need
to nail, the only thing you really need to nail,
is the website. The technology. And this is where
the tragedy really sets in. This is the heart
of the failure. We call this the technology trap.
The outline calls it ambition versus reality.
And I think that is perfect because their ambition
was Star Trek. And the reality was. Well, 1999.
Yes. Tell me about Miss Boo. Ah, Miss Boo. She
was the mascot, but she was more than that. She
was conceived as a sales assistant -style avatar
designed to guide users through the site. She
was animated. She had a personality. Like a digital
personal shopper. A much cooler version. A version
of Clippy the paperclip from Microsoft Word.
Yes, a fashion -forward Clippy, exactly. And
alongside her, they developed this... revolutionary
3D dressing room technology. The idea was that
you could literally drag and drop clothes onto
a 3D model and inspect them from any angle. So
you could zoom in on the stitching, spin the
shoe around to see the heel. Exactly. All of
that. Which, to be fair, sounds awesome. In 2025,
we have that. I use that all the time on retail
sites. It's great. We do. It's standard now,
but we did not have that in 1999. They were trying
to build 2025 technology using 1999 tools and
for a 1999 audience. Talk to me about the cost
of this coolness. What did it cost to build this?
The development costs for this proprietary virtual
technology was over $6 million. They built their
own 3D rendering engine from scratch. $6 million
just for the code? Yes, but the maintenance cost.
This is the kicker. It cost half a million dollars
every single month just to keep that 3D tech
running. Wait, let me just pause you there. $500
,000 a month just to keep the virtual dressing
room open. For a month, yes, because this wasn't
simple HTML code. This was incredibly server
intensive. Every time a single user spun a shoe,
a server somewhere in London had to crunch a
huge amount of numbers and send a stream of images
back to them. They needed a massive bank of servers
and a team of very specialized, very expensive
engineers just to keep it online. Put that in
context for me. If I'm a traditional retailer
in 1999, what does half a million dollars a month
get me? That's the lease on a flagship store
on Fifth Avenue in New York City and the staff
to run it. And Boo .com was spending that on
a single digital feature that, and this is the
most fruitful part, most of their customers couldn't
even load. And this is where we had to get technical
for a second. We have to talk about the pipe.
We do. We have to talk about bandwidth. The fundamental
limitation of the era. For our younger listeners,
or for anyone who has blocked out the trauma,
can you please describe the internet experience
in 1999? Okay, so you didn't have Wi -Fi. You
didn't have fiber. You had a beige box in the
corner of the room, your desktop computer. You
plugged a phone cord from the computer into the
phone jack on the wall, your only phone line.
So no one could call the house while you were
online? No one. You clicked connect and you heard
a sound, a very specific sound. song of my people
i can hear it now that sound is the sound of
a 56k modem establishing a connection 56 kilobits
per second to put that in modern terms downloading
a single high quality photo from instagram today
would take you about 30 to 40 seconds on that
correction painful Absolutely painful. Now, Boo
.com built a site that was 100 % reliant on heavy
code, specifically JavaScript and Flash. Flash
was this animation software that was notorious
for being incredibly heavy and slow to load.
To load just the front page of Boo .com, you
were downloading megabytes of data. So I'm at
home. I hear the ad on the radio. I type in Boo
.com. And then what happens? You wait. You just
see a loading bar. Maybe you go make a cup of
tea. You come back, it's still loading. We're
talking minutes, not seconds. And they knew this
was a problem, right? There was literally a warning
on the site. Yes. Right on the front page, in
small text, it had a warning. This site is designed
for 56K modems and above. And above. It's very
optimistic for 1999. It was excluding anyone
with an older, slower connection, which was still
a lot of people. But even if you had the top
-of -the -line 56K modem, it was unbearably sluggish.
Imagine standing outside a gap and the doors
locked for five minutes while they load the store
layout inside. You'd just walk away. You would,
and people did. The bounce rates were huge. And
even if you were patient enough to get in, the
interface itself was deeply flawed. Because they
wanted to control the look so precisely, they
used a fixed -size window. What does that mean,
a fixed -size window? It means the website didn't
fill your whole screen. It popped up in this
little designated square, maybe 800 by 600 pixels.
And because they filled that tiny square with
Miss Boo and the 3D dressing room and all this
branding, there was almost no room left for the
actual product information. The price, the description,
the sizes, it was all crammed into a tiny corner.
So I'm waiting five minutes to see a tiny picture
of a shoe with no information next to it. Pretty
much. And the navigation. It was a nightmare.
It was a hierarchical system that forced you
to click through multiple menus. Give me an example.
Walk me through buying something. Okay, so say
you want a running vest. You click sport. Wait
for the page to load. You click running. Wait
for it to load. Click apparel. Wait again. Click
vests. Wait again. I'm already bored just listening
to this. And here's the punchline. You finally
get to the page with the vest. Yeah. You find
your size in a drop -down menu. You select it.
And only then, after all those clicks, does the
system check the inventory database. Well, no.
And it comes back with a message, out of stock.
And then, what do I do then? You have to start
over. Go all the way back to the sport category
and begin the whole process again. There was
no back button that worked properly. That is
user hostile. That is actively fighting your
customer who is trying to give you money. It
violated every basic rule of usability. It truly
sounds like they built a website for the computers
and Internet speeds of 2005, but they launched
it on the infrastructure of 1999. They ignored
the reality of the last mile into people's homes.
They built a beautiful 3D interactive swimming
pool. But they forgot that everyone coming to
visit only had a drinking straw to experience
it with. That's it. That's the perfect summary
of the tech failure. So we have the insane burn
rate. We have the terrible technology. We have
frustrated users. Now we get to the crash. The
launch finally happens. Autumn 1999. And it happens
after what the press called highly publicized
delays, which already makes people nervous. It
makes investors nervous. And because of those
delays, that massive ad campaign, remember that
$25 million spend? A lot of it ran while the
site wasn't even ready. Yes. This is a classic
coordination failure. The marketing team booked
the magazine spreads and the TV spots months
in advance. The tech team slipped the deadline
by months. So the ads run. People see the ad,
they get curious, they go to the URL, and they
see a holding page. A coming soon sign. That's
money literally set on fire. You paid millions
of dollars to send people to a closed door. And
by the time the site actually launched, a lot
of that initial buzz had started to turn into
skepticism. The press started asking, so what's
the problem? Does this thing actually work? And
then the world turned. The entire macroeconomic
environment shifted under their feet. The dot
crash. Q2 of 2000, April specifically, the NASDAQ,
which is the stock market index where all these
tech stocks live, just fell off a cliff. The
bubble burst. Why does that matter so much for
a private company like Boo? They weren't on the
stock market yet. Because their entire business
plan, their entire philosophy relied on an endless
supply of venture capital. They were losing money
on every single sale, burning millions a month
in overhead. They assumed that they could just
keep raising more money, a Series B, a Series
C, a Series D, until they eventually went public
in an IPO and everyone got rich. So they're basically
a patient hooked up to a money IV drip. And the
Nasdaq Q crash ripped the IV out of their arm.
Investors suddenly got terrified. They looked
at their portfolios, saw they were down 50 %
in a month, and said, no more risky bets, no
more companies with zero profits and a crazy
burn rate. The funding freeze hit Boo instantly.
But were they selling anything? I mean, with
all these problems, was there any revenue coming
in at all? They were. And that's the real tragic
irony of the story. The sales were actually growing
rapidly. In the final fortnight before they closed
their doors, they sold half a million dollars
worth of product. Wow. So that's a million dollar
a month run rate. That's not nothing. That proves
the core idea that people wanted to buy clothes
online. It does. The concept was right. But the
expenses were eating them alive. And there was
one specific killer in the logistics that was
bleeding them dry. Returns. Returns are always
a headache in retail, especially fashion. Boo
offered free returns for customers. Which is
great for the user, right? It builds trust. But
Boo was paying their logistics supplier, Deutsche
Post, for every single one of those returns.
And because people couldn't really see the product
well on the site because the 3D model was blurry
or the color was off on their old CRT monitor.
The return rate was much higher than they expected.
So every time someone sent a jacket back, Boo
paid for the shipping both ways and lost the
sale. Every single return was just cash bleeding
out of the company. It's the classic unit economics
problem. old joke we lose money on every sale
but we'll make it up in volume and as that joke
proves that never ever works so the money runs
out may 18 2000 receivership liquidation it was
over 18 months yeah 135 million dollars yeah
gone gone up in smoke so let's look at the aftermath
the dust settles who got hurt the most here Well,
the list of losers is very long. The biggest
single financial loser was a fund called Omnia,
which was backed by the wealthy Hariri family.
They invested nearly 20 million pounds. Poof.
Gone. Completely wiped out. Then you have the
creditors. Who were they? Mostly the ad agencies.
They were owed about 12 million pounds. I never
saw most of that money, which is just deeply
ironic. The very people who built the hype were
the ones left holding the bag at the end. And
the people. The 400 staff members. Made redundant
immediately. And the reports from the Times say
many of them hadn't been paid in the last couple
of months leading up to the crash. They were
working on promises and hope. Wow. Imagine showing
up to that fancy Carnaby Street office every
day, seeing the fresh fruit bowls and the guru
room, but your own bank account is empty because
your paycheck hasn't come. That is just devastating.
Then came the fire sale. This is where the numbers
get truly, truly depressing. Yeah. They had to
sell off the parts of the carcass to pay back
whatever tiny fraction they could. Right. So
another company, fashionmall .com, swooped in
and bought the brand, the URL, and Ms. Boo. Yes,
they got the brand assets. But the technology,
the thing they spent millions and millions building,
that proprietary 3D engine. Who bought that?
A company called BrightStation, which was led
by an entrepreneur named Dan Wagner. And do you
know how much they paid for it? I have a feeling
it's a shockingly low number. $250 ,000. Wait,
pause. They spent over $6 million developing
it? They spend half a million a month maintaining
it. And they sold it for a quarter of a million
dollars. Yes. Pennies on the dollar. It was basically
a rounding error. That has to be one of the worst
depreciation events in the history of technology.
But here's the supreme irony. Dan Wagner took
that technology, he stripped away all the bloated
Miss Boo stuff and the terrible user interface,
and he used the core rendering engine to build
a new company called Venda Inc. Okay. Venda provided
e -commerce backend technology to other big retailers,
and Venda was later acquired by NetSuite for
$50 million. Oh, that hurts. That hurts physically
to hear. It proves that the technology, the core
of it, was good. It was valuable. But the business
model they wrapped around it, the huge staff,
the insane ads, the immediate global launch,
it was all toxic. The engine was a Ferrari engine,
but they put it in a bus made of solid gold and
tried to drive it through a swamp. So what was
the total earned from selling off all the assets?
Less than $2 million. They burned through $135
million and recovered less than $2 million. Wow.
And the postmortems started appearing pretty
much immediately, right? People wanted to know
what happened. They did. Tristan Louie, who is
the former interim CTO, wrote one of the first
big online postmortems of a tech company. It
was fascinating because it was one of the first
times we saw a tech insider just dismantle a
failure in public like that. He laid out all
the technical arrogance. And the founder, Ernst
Malmsten, he didn't hide either. No, to his credit,
he wrote that book, Boo Hoo. a dot .com story
from concept to catastrophe in 2001. At least
he owned the catastrophe part of the title. He
did. And CNET later ranked Boo .com as one of
the greatest dot .com busts in history. It cemented
its place in the Hall of Shame. Before we wrap
up and try to find the big lesson here, what
happened to the domain itself? Boo .com is a
catchy URL. It went on a strange journey. In
2007, a company called Web Reservations International
turned it into a travel site with hotel and hostel
reviews. That lasted for about three years. And
today, if I type boo .com into my browser right
now, where do I go? As of the last check in July
2020, it redirects to hostelworld .com. From
high fashion to hostels. From champagne on Carnaby
Street to a bunk bed in a shared room. That is
a humbling journey for a domain name. It is indeed.
And the people. Did anyone survive the wreckage?
A few. Interestingly, only one original Sev member,
a guy named Bill Burley, worked for both the
original Boo and the Fashion Mall relaunch. And
Kate Boogalm, who was an executive from Bloomingdale's,
tried to relaunch it in autumn 2000, but the
magic, or maybe the curse, was gone by then.
So here we are, decades later. Why are we still
talking about Boo .com? Why do I or why should
anyone listening care about a company that died
almost 25 years ago? Because it is the perfect
storm. It explains the entire era in one neat,
disastrous package. It had the right idea. Fashion
e -commerce is a massive trillion dollar industry
today. We all buy clothes online now. Companies
like ASOS, Zalando, Net -A -Porter, they are
all living the dream that Boo had. So they weren't
wrong about the what. People will buy clothes
online. They were just catastrophically wrong
about the when and the how. It was terrible execution
paired with a level of hubris that is just off
the charts. They failed to respect the technical
limitations of their era. You cannot force 2025
technology through a 1999 straw. It just doesn't
work. And the cash flow. The basic rules. The
basic rules of business always apply, even on
the Internet. You cannot spend $25 million on
ads when you have zero revenue and insane fixed
costs, assuming the venture capital tap will
never, ever run dry. It's a lesson in humility.
Hubris kills companies. It does, every time.
Okay, here's my final thought, and it's something
I want everyone to think about as we sign off.
If Boo .com had launched five years later. Just
five years. Let's say 2004, 2005. Broadband is
becoming common. The iPhone is just around the
corner. Social media is starting to bubble up.
Would Miss Boo be an Amazon -sized giant today?
Or was that management style, that spend now,
think later attitude, destined to fail regardless
of the internet speed? That is the ultimate question,
isn't it? Was it the modem or was it the management?
My gut says a management team that spends $25
million before opening the doors would have probably
found a new and exciting way to fail in any era.
But we will never really know. A fascinating
story. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive
into a true dot -com spectacular. My pleasure.
See you next time.