Buy, Lie, and Sell High: How Investors Lost Out on Enron and the Internet Bubble

Get-It-Right Instead of Get-Big-Fast

A few start-ups bucked the trend by trying to get-it-right before they tried to get-big-fast. A key example is Streamline, another start-up in the online grocery, or home-delivered grocery, market. Seeing that it made no sense economically to send pickers into the crowded aisles of grocery stores, and less to try to take an unproven concept across all demographic segments and areas of the country, Streamline's executives refined their business model in Boston's well-heeled suburbs before trying to expand rapidly. When it worked, they decided it was time to get-big-fast. But they had taken too long. The company expanded rapidly out of the Boston area, but the taste of investors for get-big-fast had evaporated ...