The fastest internet fatcats on wheels

By Adam Platt
The New Yorker, February 7, 2000

In the helter-skelter world of Internetstart-ups, employee loyalty can be a fleeting thing. But Danny Uhl, whocareers around the streets of Manhattan on his bicycle for a living, recalls,with a kind of Jedi clarity, the moment he became a company man. He waspedalling his personally retooled KHS hybrid mountain/street bike up thewest side of Fourth Avenue after dropping off a batch of videos for theinstant Internet delivery service Kozmo.com. " Riding the streets, youget a little feeling in your belly  when things aren't quite right."he said the other day. " A cab cut right in front of me, and, the nextthing I know, I smack into the back of this double-parked van." The cabdriver never stopped, and Uhl, who learned his riding tricks growing upin Flushing, Queens, broke his nose and three front teeth. "Most times,when a messenger wrecks himself on the street, he's out of luck," he said,smiling a big smile. "I've still got to go back for my root canal, butKozmo fixed me up; they paid for everything."

One day last week outside the Kozmo.comwarehouse, on Twelfth Street, the weather was "brick" (really, really cold,in rider terminology), so messengers came and went bundled in Kozmo-issueGore-Tex wind suits and blue Kozmo watch caps. The company is the brainchildof Joseph Park, a twenty-seven-year-old ex Goldman, Sachs banker, who grewimpatient siting around waiting for his Internet book and CD purchasesto arrive. In two years, Kozmo.com has mushroomed into a national enterprise,with frenetic deliverery operations in Seattle, Boston, Washington, D.C.,San Francisco and soon, L.A. and Chicago. Three hundred riders are on callin Manhattan alone, delivering anything from tandoori sandwiches ($6.95),to pregnancy test-kits ($15.99), to high-tech Sony DVD players ($295) withinan hour of a cyber order.

The bike messenger - after years of abusefrom cops and irate cabbies, and, thanks to the fax machine, near obsolescence[near obsolescence? another example of media ignorance - M] - isundergoing a renaissance in wired Manhattan. "If you're a professionalmessenger it's a gold rush out there," says Michael Theodore, a rumpledHarvard M.B.A. who is the general manager of Kozmo's New York office. Gruffbike renegades with street names like Caz and Valentin are being wooedwith higher salaries, health benefits even a whiff of stock options.

Kozmo.com marketing technicians estimatethat their riders circulate a thousand Krispy Kreme doughnuts around thecity on any given day. Aside from videos and computer games, the most popular"minimart" items are AA bateries ($3.79) and Ultra Thin Trojan condoms($1.99). Riders are instructed no to peek at their deliveries, so custimerswon't get embarassed.

New Kozmo riders attend orientation seminarson the benefits of establishing eye contact, among other consumer-friendlytechniques. "These are type-A guys who'll do anything to make their run,"says Theodore, a start-up veteran. "So far, nobody's died. We've had afew guys "doored": you'tr going down the street, and a parked car opensits door [of course with the aid of the guy siting in the car-M],and you run into it. We've had guys break arms that way. They come backto work with bruises and cuts, saying 'Give me a bike, I'm ready to go.'We tell them the customer may not really want to see them standing on theirdoorstep with blood all over their parka."

Kozmo.com hasn't gone public yet, but inearly January a group of investors, including Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos,purchased twenty-three percent of the company for a hundred million dollars.Now Kozmo executives are looking for more warehouse space. They envisiondelivering a smorgasbord of appliances, even clothes, to their houseboundpublic.

"We appeal to the professional couch potato,"said a rider in the lounge who called himself Green. Green chose his nickname,he said "because I make a lot of money" and had been calculating differentstock-option angles. "Say we go public within a year, and the market trendsfor I.P.O.'s hold up. The way this company's growing, I see the stock splittingwithin six months." Danny Uhl listened and shook his head. "Stocks is apipe dream," he said as riders kept clattering in from the cold, wrappedin their messenger shoulder bags and heavy Kryptonite chain locks. "Yougotta be a rock to ride out there today," he said. "I give anyone creditwho makes it through the winter."