Sunday, October 6, 2013

Craving Those Good Old Dot-Com Days

KOZMO.COM is back!

You may not be as excited as I am to hear this news. You may not even remember Kozmo.com, the 1990s messenger service that came to symbolize everything that was nuts about the dot-com bubble.

That was a wonderful time. There were companies like Pets.com, which was going to change the way we buy cat litter, and eMerge Interactive, which was going to change the way we trade cattle. But Kozmo.com was going to change the way we buy everything, by allowing us to put in an order for just about anything and have it delivered by a bike messenger hefting a distinctive orange bag — within one hour. With no delivery charge.

How did it make money? That was the beautiful thing: it didn’t!

Kozmo.com exemplified the idea of going big fast and figuring out the profitability part later. When it was still being acclaimed as the next huge thing, and raking in hundreds of millions in investment rounds, I fantasized about things I would order from it. Ice cream, sure, but that’s for amateurs. I wanted to demand that some guy on a bicycle bring me a single stamp. An eMerge cow. An elephant’s-foot umbrella stand. An elephant. Heck, a dinosaur.

Then Kozmo.com was gone, along with the rest of the dot-com bubble. Life went back to normal, which is, let’s face it, a little dull.

Of course, life became exciting again when another bubble inflated and inevitably burst, taking much of the economy down with it. That was the housing bubble and the financial crisis and the Great Recession, none of which were very entertaining. The dot-com boom may have been pointless, but it was fun.

So I was thrilled when a Kozmo.com Web site blinked back into existence recently, saying, “Remember us? We’re relaunching soon with the vision to fulfill your online order incredibly fast, and on demand.”

At Wired magazine, the writer Marcus Wohlsen was skeptical about the announcement, calling the original company “the frothiest disaster of the first dot-com bubble.”

But Matthew Yglesias of Slate, ever the contrarian, suggested that Kozmo might be an idea whose time has come — again. “It was ridiculous,” he wrote. “And I think bringing it back is a wonderful idea.”

His reason had something to do with how we buy so many more things online these days, and he says the economy needs jobs, even delivery jobs. But maybe he’s just craving ice cream. Chunky Monkey is addictive!

When I sent an e-mail to the new Kozmo.com, a spokeswoman sent me a statement from Barnaby Montgomery, the chief executive of Yummy.com, an online grocery delivery service in the Los Angeles area.

“We think that the current retail landscape is ripe for disruption and we are excited to reintroduce a popular brand — this time with a proven, solid business model — in the near future,” he said. Yummy.com bought Kozmo.com, he said, so what it is really planning is to take what it has been doing for a while now and slap a famous name from the dot-com past on it, presumably before expanding.

This all sounds bubble-licious. So I asked an expert on the dot-com bubble for his opinion. This was Henry Blodget, whose enthusiasm for tech stocks of the 1990s as a Merrill Lynch analyst helped feed the frenzy — and who ended up getting into a little trouble at the time. Mr. Blodget paid millions to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle fraud charges, neither admitting nor denying the accusations, and agreed to exit the securities industry for life.

He now runs Business Insider, an online news franchise. (Who says there are no second acts in America?) And he was gracious when I approached him about this 1990s flashback — appropriately enough, via AOL Instant Messenger service, which was how I used to contact him back when Instant Messenger felt like the future. Just opening the Instant Messenger window gave me a huge nostalgia buzz.

Although Mr. Blodget’s enthusiasm is more restrained these days, he is positive about the new venture.

“The one thing that occurs to me, as everyone rushes to ridicule the basic idea, is how many concepts that were high-profile disasters during the dot-com boom have proven to be perfectly viable businesses,” he said. Webvan, another Internet grocer, crashed and burned, he noted, but FreshDirect, a more recent entry into the field, is doing fine.

I asked whether part of the problem might have been the astronomical sums poured into the early companies. He said, “Well, the money was being hurled at them, so it’s hard to call them stupid for taking it.”

Some investment theorists talk about the wisdom of crowds, but I’m a fan of those moments when the crowd should be kept in a rubber room. Let’s party like it’s 1999. Or as Alan Greenspan put it back in the day, “Irrational exuberance,” baby!

WHATEVER the merits of the new Kozmo plan, it can’t help but remind me of what we went through in the collective cliff dive of the 1990s.

That was when companies were throwing around cash like drunken sailors, or drunken hedge fund managers. They bought Super Bowl ads that made no sense at all. One of my favorites was from Epidemic.com, which was formed to enlist consumers in viral marketing campaigns by paying them to pass along links to advertisers in their e-mails. Its television ad, which should be seen to be believed, made it look as if it wanted to give you money for spreading diseases in public toilets. Or something.

Some of these companies, bless them, bought full-page newspaper ads.

I’m getting a little teary here.

But now Kozmo.com appears to be on the way back, and the stirrings of the stock market suggest that things might be getting exuberant again. Facebook had its initial public offering last year, and Twitter is preparing its own. So why stop at Kozmo.com? What the heck, while we’re at it, shouldn’t somebody finally bring to life the late, great mythical e-commerce Web site Pimentoloaf.com, referred to in a great ad for E*Trade broadcast, yes, during the Super Bowl? Unless Congress shuts down the entire economy along with the federal government, we might be on our way to puffing up a new and improved and highly entertaining bubble, the sort of thing that’s fun for cynical observers, if not investors.

But for now, I have an idea about something that the new Kozmo messengers might bring to people’s homes. How about newspapers? I mean, talk about getting a dinosaur delivered.

Print newspapers have had a little trouble, as you might have heard. But they have to be good for something — Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for one. And newspapers all but invented home delivery. Or maybe it was the post office, another institution that’s fallen on hard times?

No matter. Some of us believe that the secret Bezos plan is to make newspaper carriers the new delivery system for all of those Amazon products. It’s too brilliant for words, though I’m wondering how the carriers will be able to roll up the books, toiletries and lawn chairs to toss them into the bushes.

It’s a complicated and wicked world, unpredictable in the extreme. But if my own investment strategies fail, or this whole journalism thing doesn’t work out, I know that the new-new, really new economy will provide a great job for me: delivery guy for Kozmo.com.

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