Wine.com is finally toast. For those of you who’ve used the service, it takes a pathetically long time to get your order because it’s actually shipped from old-school wine distributors to your local wine merchant, who then ships the product to you.
In this case, everybody takes a cut, which doesn’t leave much room for uh… Profit.
It’s all because they didn’t think it was very important to actually become licensed as wine merchants themselves. This exhibits your typical Silicon Valley thinking-they-shouldn’t-have-to-do-the-legwork bullshit.
How these guys could think that they could escape overlooking such a critical business component is beyond me. The fact that they could convince a VC to give them better than $150M is an embarrassment to all of us.
-Ian.