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The Wine.com Curse Strikes Again
from the drink-up! dept
If you're looking for a startup to avoid, may we humbly suggest Wine.com? There's just something about the name that seems to cause problems. The name itself has been bought and sold by a few different companies, all of whom eventually ran into trouble. During the boom years just about every major online wine seller owned the name Wine.com at one point or another through merger or buying it when an earlier version went out of business. A few years ago, the investors in the 2002 version of Wine.com (apparently, like with wine, Wine.com now needs to be named with the year of its vintage) forced out many of its investors with onerous terms that went beyond even the standard onerous terms in the post-bubble years. However, there's just something about that name, and no matter how many times Wine.coms fail, someone else comes along to try again. The latest version was rumored to be running into cash flow problems earlier this year, but had apparently put in place a lot of other successful initiatives. In order to deal with the cashflow problem, they were looking at various strategic alternatives, including a buyout. Now, Matt Marshall at the San Jose Mercury News has some of the back room details of how one investor quashed a good acquisition option at the last minute (as the cash situation became more dire) and forced the company to take a new round of investment at a much lower valuation, giving that particular investor control of the company. These types of things happen all too often in the startup world, but the stories rarely come out, so it's good to see Marshall and the Merc pointing the spotlight at it. Update: Marshall has a bit more info about the story at SiliconBeat as well.
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The Vintonesians
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it's not about selling wine online
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Re: The Vintonesians
The wine industry is not shrinking, just take a look at distributors like constellation.
If anything the market and sales of wine are growing. Just go to a good resteraunt and ask them how many bottles they go through in a night.
I work in a liquor store and we have been seeing an increase in wine sales in the last few years.
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