Webvan, Pets.com, eToys.com, Kozmo.com…all these dot com busts maxed out at less than 0.3 billion dollars in investment/IPO scale before they went under. A good amount of these share similarities with the AI bubble with a lot of them promising to be the e-commerce infrastructure of the future with “unlimited potential” as brick and mortar purchases were all predicted to move online. Webvan was going to be the automated warehouse of the future, for example.
Even the successful giant unicorns look minuscule in comparison. YouTube’s total investment was under $12 million before Google bought it for $1.65 billion, which looks like peanuts compared to these Hertz rent-a-server companies.
SoftBank dumping $8 billion into Uber looks positively quaint by comparison.