“We always knew that our business model was different from Boo’s. What we also realised is that you need a big scale for it to work. If your model needs you to build a huge server and process, but you only take 50 orders, you may as well hire a temp instead.”Hoberman also attributes Lastminute’s survival to the fact that he and his co-founder quickly learnt the realities of business. He recalls the initial refusal of the Savoy group to work with him. “Now they use us as a case study.”As fiscal discipline and expansion into other business areas have brought Lastminute closer to a full-year profit, the shares have also begun to turn. At their nadir in 2001, they were 96 per cent below their opening-day price of 480p. By the end of 2002, the stock was the best performer in the FTSE 250.Hoberman, meanwhile, is determined to remain a rare dot-com success: “The business is not yet looking the way I imagined it,” he says.
“You always think it is going to take much less time than it actually does, and that was one of the big problems with the dot- com bubble. I want you to be using us five times a week within a few years.”Martha hates the word ‘utility’ but I like it – it is about making Lastminute part of daily life.”. Jeff Bezos Three years after the peak and subsequent crash of the inter- net market, Jeff Bezos is still a paper billionaire. Considering he is the founder of a so-called “e-tailer”, Amazon, this is some feat. During the dot-com boom, virtually anyone with a half-baked idea to sell things on the internet received funding. But the crash, which claimed high-profile names such as WebVan and eToys, revealed Amazon as a genuine winner.
Founded in Seattle in 1995 by Mr Bezos, a former Wall Street hedge fund manager, the business today makes a slim profit and is the internet’s biggest brand with 27 million active customer accounts. Henry Blodget One much-criticised effect of the bubble was the speed and ease with which big, well-regarded investment banks became snake-oil salesmen. Having failed in journalism, Henry Blodget joined a small New York brokerage and was then snapped up by Merrill Lynch, where he became one of the big three internet “guru” analysts on Wall Street. In 1999 and 2000, as investors stampeded to buy dot-com stocks, Blodget’s voice was egging them on. Investors from day traders to huge institutions hung on his every word.But as the bubble burst, and investors got badly burnt, acclaim turned to blame. Mr Blodget was sued by a private investor who claimed one of Merrill’s “buy” notes was misleading; Mr Blodget was revealed to have privately described one of his stock picks as a “piece of crap”. That in turn gave way to a much wider series of probes into the true independence of investment banking research.
