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Serialisation: eBoys - Part 1 - Go Big or Go Home
The early days of Webvan (II)

By editorial@silicon.com

Published: Thursday 05 April 2001

eBoys - Part 1 - Go Big or Go Home align=left HSPACE=10>

The hyperexpansion of the chain would come later, after Borders no longer was associated with the company - and after Kmart spun the unit off in 1995 to become a wholly publicly owned company. To an onlooker in 1997, the ubiquity of a chain of 175 stores may have seemed the embodiment of the eponymous founder's will to expand, but in fact, that was not the case. Not surprisingly, after the sale of the company, Louis Borders had not felt a residual fever. Already living in the Bay Area, he spent him time looking at business plans as a potential 'angel' investor and staying fit by playing a lot of basketball. He was not like Tom Wolfe's Charlie Croker, someone who tried to physically commandeer as much personal space as possible. Of medium height, with black hair and slightly protuberant eyes, he had a deliberately slow, quiet manner of speech tinged with a hard-to-place accent from boyhood (Louisville, Kentucky) and literary tastes that other mathematicians may not have shared (Nadine Gordimer was a particular favourite).

What interrupted this placid semiretirement was the arrival of the web, which had brought in its wake, unbidden, the Vision - of Oasis. He had approached Bruce Dunlevie the year before about his intention to start a new business that would sell and deliver to the home&everything. Soup to nuts, literally, but much more. Fresh fish, high-end consumer electronics equipment, CDs not to be found anywhere else, men's clothing, you name it. Three million separate stock-keeping units, or SKUs. When he had been in the book business, he had added far too many book titles, at least according to conventional wisdom, and it had worked out well why not proceed on the same assumption here? The plans also included neighbourhood stores, complete with kiosks providing a PC and connection to the web, for those who wished to place their orders from the store instead of from home.

Earlier that year, after Borders had left the Benchmark office following a presentation to the partners, Bob Kagle had laughingly confessed to Dunlevie his lack of enthusiasm for Border's grandiosity: "Fresh fish to washing machines? I'm just thinking too small." But Dunlevie had kept in touch with Borders, trying to persuade him to narrow the number of SKUs that he'd start out with from three million to one million, and to drop the idea of retail stores. It was a campaign waged at a low level of intensity. Borders was stubborn, progress was slow, and after these episodic discussions had rattled on for almost a year, there was still no deal in the offing.

Border's ideas, as laid out in the current plan that Beirne opened, were dangerously unconventional and quaintly nostalgic at the same time. Louis Borders was 49, not old enough to personally remember the halcyon days of home-delivery services, but old enough to remember older people remembering them. "In the old days, life was easier. When Mom needed groceries she would call the neighbourhood market and it would deliver groceries in an hour or so. The dry cleaners picked up and delivered on Thursdays. The milkman came on Tuesdays and Fridays."
He wrote longingly, too, of the way that neighbourhood stores used to be small and the clerks knew their customers personally. Malls and superstores greatly increased selection but at the price of destroying the personal touches of a retail system that used to deliver to the home. Now, Borders believed, advances in technology made it possible to restore what had been lost. "Logistics and materials handling technology create new possibilities for automated distribution. Expert systems and other artificial-intelligence systems enable the customisation of inventory to precisely fit a neighbourhood store or an internet customer."

Borders took the capabilities of such systems for granted, and lavished his attention on the neighbourhood store, which he conceived of as a combination café and retail store whose intellectual parentage could easily be traced back to Borders Books. "In contrast to malls and superstores," Borders wrote, the Oasis Store would "retain the comfortable ambience of a neighbourhood meeting place".