Well, the text-as-image (with dithering) suggests that somebody is trying to take us back to 1998, but perhaps Kozmo 2.0 has only raised a small seed round. Once the $6 million Series A closes, they'll be able to afford to hire a top full-stack engineer in the Mission who can create a real landing page using Rails and Ember.js, or something cool like that.
I used to work at Kozmo launching their facilities and new markets, and I can say the brand still resonates with those that used it almost 13 years later.
I have a messenger bag from the firm which I use from time-to-time and every time I do, people stop me to say how much they loved Kozmo and of course point how dumb it was that they could order a Ben & Jerry's for $3 at 2 in the morning.
So ,of course, the model was fatally flawed, but for the average consumer who used Kozmo back in the day, they loved it. And so there is some brand value and a ton of PR that come with the name that someone could exploit.
Let's hope the biz model is just a bit better this time :)
Once I sat on plane next to one of the founders and told them nt only that I loved it - but how fantastic it would be to allow for me to define my location and then search for stuff nearby that I wanted Kozmo to bring: "Show me all indian restaurants within walking distance of me"
Yeah - that was coming... just not from Kozmo. I will totally support this resurrection.
Kozmo definitely still resonates with me. I was a huge fan of them while I was back in college. Where else can you order Ben & Jerry's at 11PM and get a refund because they were late on their delivery?
Has instant delivery been made feasible by some underlying change? (e.g. cheap GPS in phones of deliverers, people being more comfortable buying stuff online, etc). Or, has it been feasible this entire time?
I believe that the ubiquity of smartphones with GPS capability is an important driver. However at Postmates (I'm a Co-founder), we spent a lot of our time working on our dispatch algorithm, with the goal to constantly improve the way we match the current demand to the available supply.
Our challenges are slightly different than the ones Kozmo faced. One huge difference is that our deliveries are much more distributed since we don't deliver from just one or two warehouses but from locations all over the city. This model brings some advantages but also holds some very interesting challenges at the same time. ;) On a typical day, our couriers operate in the most efficient way during our peak demand times - during breakfast, lunch and dinner that is.
If Kozmo had trouble then, with an employee count of 3,300 and with Amazon barely the logistical superpower it is today, what makes the plan more viable today, with Amazon and Google reportedly getting into the game?
Kozmo was originally funded, at least in part, by Amazon. My first boss when I worked at Amazon was a dev for Kozmo (as I understood it, the while staff and possibly the company had been brought into Amazon).
I don't know if something similar is happening this time around.
I fondly remember sitting in my apartment in Boston sometime around 2001 waiting for Kozmo to bring me a new memory card for the Dreamcast, a pint of Ben & Jerry's From Russia With Buzz, and an Entenmann's Coffee Cake. This perhaps does not bode well for my wallet or my waistline.
Loved the concept back then, wished it would've made it (and hit more markets more effectively) - they folded up shortly after entering my market, and barely got to use them. Maybe they can make it a worthwhile venture this time around.
I've moved probably 6 times since they were in operation (including cross-country) and yet I still have 4 of their old delivery boxes that I use for storage and could use some more, those things last forever.
