You said “largely” and I think that’s painting with too broad a brush. The dotcom world included a bunch of companies which are still around (or were acquired later after surviving the collapse), and it wasn’t hard to tell who those were even at the time. There was a lot of lazy boosterism and criticism painting the whole field as the same, and that was a disservice to readers who could’ve used a more thoughtful triage approach. That’s especially the case for companies like Kozmo which actually had a popular idea and had the potential to be profitable (they were in most urban markets) but made the mistake of expanding too quickly or taking on more debt than they could service.
You’re sidestepping the core point. Of course some companies had fundamentals, even Kozmo had product market fit in a narrow sense. But the broader ecosystem was bloated with capital chasing flimsy ideas, and most dot-coms had no viable path to profit. That’s not “too broad a brush”, it’s backed by the collapse itself.
Kozmo is a great case study: decent demand, terrible unit economics, and zero pricing power. They didn’t just scale too fast, they scaled a structurally unprofitable model. There was no markup, thin margins, and they held inventory without enough throughput.
Many of these companies may fail but it’s a much different environment and the path to profitability is moving a lot quicker.
