Kozmo.com

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Kozmo.com

Type	Defunct
Founded	1998
Headquarters	New York
Key people	Joseph Park Yong Kang
Industry	Retail
Products	Online store, delivery service
Slogan	We'll be right over.

Kozmo.com was a venture-capital-driven online company that promised free one-hour delivery of anything from DVD rentals to Starbucks coffee in the United States. It was founded by young investment bankers Joseph Park and Yong Kang in March 1998 in New York City. The company is often referred to as an example of the dot-com excess.^{[citation needed]}

Kozmo promoted an incredible business model; it promised to deliver small goods free of charge, typically by using bicycle messengers. The model was criticized by some business analysts, who pointed out that one-hour point-to-point delivery of small objects is extremely expensive and there was no way Kozmo could make a profit as long as it refused to charge delivery fees. The company countered in part that, in their target markets, savings due to not needing to rent space for retail stores would exceed the costs of delivery.

Its headquarters were located in New York City. The company raised about $250 million, including $60 million from Amazon.com.^[1] It entered a five-year co-marketing agreement with Starbucks in February 2000, in which it agreed to pay Starbucks $150 million to promote its services inside the company's coffee shops. Kozmo.com ended its deal in March 2001 after paying out $15 million. In July 2000, at the height of its business, the company operated in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Boston, New York, Washington, San Diego and Los Angeles.^[2]

While popular with college students^{[citation needed]}, the company failed soon after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, laying off its staff of 1,100 employees and shutting down in April 2001. 18 locations nationwide and their Memphis distribution center were liquidated by a veteran entertainment wholesaler from Florida. Kozmo had filed an IPO with Credit Suisse First Boston before the layoffs, but it never went public. According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in 1999 the company had revenue of $3.5 million, with a resulting net loss of $26.3 million. The documentary film e-Dreams (2001) portrays the fate of the company.

In April 2005, former CTO Chris Siragusa launched a similar service in downtown Manhattan specializing in the delivery of food, wine, DVDs and essentials called MaxDelivery. MaxDelivery is still in business with expansion plans in 2007.