Webvan was an online "credit and delivery" grocery business that went bankrupt in 2001. It was headquartered in Foster City, California, USA, near Silicon Valley. It delivered products to customers' homes within a 30-minute window of their choosing. At its peak, it offered service in ten U.S. markets: San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Sacramento, and Orange County. The company had origina...
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Webvan was an online "credit and delivery" grocery business that went bankrupt in 2001. It was headquartered in Foster City, California, USA, near Silicon Valley. It delivered products to customers' homes within a 30-minute window of their choosing. At its peak, it offered service in ten U.S. markets: San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Sacramento, and Orange County. The company had originally hoped to expand to 26 cities.
In June 2008, CNET hailed Webvan as one of the greatest dotcom disasters in history.
It is now owned and operated by amazon.com.
Webvan was founded in the heyday of the dot-com boom in the late 1990s by Louis Borders, who also co-founded the Borders bookstore in 1971. Webvan's original investors included Goldman Sachs and Yahoo!, who encouraged it to rapidly build its own infrastructure (the first-mover advantage strategy popularized by Amazon.com) to deliver groceries in a number of cities. Some journalists...
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