Is there any reason to believe the modern day incarnations are more sustainable then their dot-com counterparts? It certainly feels that way but the article is very light on evidence.
The dot-com era was full of companies getting heavy funding with zero sales, zero product, zero track record and absolutely no real market evaluation.
Companies would literally spend days of meetings trying to figure out what colors to paint their huge offices and have massive catered lunches.
I worked at one company that had ZERO revenue and had secured $20 million in funding, and immediately hired 200 people. When the money ran out, they got another cash infusion of $40 million from a pending buy out, and when we were being told this by the CEO, I joked to a coworker that we would need to spend twice as fast this time to run out at the same speed...the very next thing that came out of the CEO's mouth was "so we're going to be doubling our staff right away". I found out later that we had TWO actual programmers in our company (I was one) and 10 "managers" for every actual "employee".
It was ludicrous. I think there are issues with today's 'VC' fueled market, but it's nothing like back in '99.
I'm not entirely sure what their long term plan is, but I'm hoping this is just an attempt to establish a monopoly that can then be exploited to turn the operation into a profit.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/marketforceslive/2014/ju...
A pity to see even they're running so lean on the profit margins - I've found them to offer the best organised process for actually getting the groceries inside, where all the crates are staged first, then the bags unhooked and hefted inside, taking very little time at all, versus the loose bags or even completely loose items of the other supermarket delivery operations.