Webvan: What a Failed Business Can Still Teach Us
By Fiona van Iersel
Minerva Empowerment
Digital Marketing
11 September 2025

Calling Webvan a failure tells us how the business ended, but I do not think it tells us everything worth learning from it. When I was growing up, my father used to say that nine out of ten things he tried might be mistakes, while the tenth became a massive win that would never have happened without the other nine. The bigger regret, he felt, was not trying enough.

That stayed with me. It is part of why I respond to the emphasis on action and responsibility in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey, 1989). We do something, face the result and decide what to change. Learning requires more than congratulating ourselves when a plan works.

Webvan’s ambitious online-grocery model ended in bankruptcy in 2001 (CNN, 2001). The familiar criticisms concern rapid expansion and heavy investment. Those decisions deserve scrutiny. But the fact that the business did not survive does not make the underlying attempt to solve grocery delivery a pointless one.

How many rockets failed before humanity walked on the moon? The comparison is imperfect, but it captures what I mean. A failed test can expose an assumption that looked convincing on paper. Popper’s account of testing and criticism provides one way to think about learning from what does not withstand scrutiny (Popper, 1959).

When I look at later online-grocery businesses and automated fulfilment, I wonder which problems earlier experiments helped the industry understand. I cannot claim that every later success came from Webvan, or that nothing was wasted. People lost money and jobs. The useful question is what knowledge can be carried forward, and which costly assumptions should not be repeated.

So I see boldness and mistakes in the same story. Giving something your best shot does not remove the need for judgment, but fear of failure can stop an idea before it has a chance to teach us anything.

Maybe it is fitting that I married a risk manager. Innovation needs the people willing to leap and the people willing to ask what happens when they land. I want the lessons of the leap to live on.

References

CNN. (2001). Webvan files for bankruptcy. https://money.cnn.com/2001/07/09/companies/webvan/

Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 habits of highly effective people. Free Press.

Popper, K. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery. Hutchinson.