Watching about Winc to access at Chapter11 bankruptcy it’s really weird. Only 1 yr ago the company became a Public one, with 13$ for share at its debut. It raised $22 M one shot, and until 2021 had been funded with $54,2 M (source: Crunchbase) from many investors from California, Japan and Hong Kong.
Winc was founded in 2012 and reached 70 million dollars. The Q3 financial report showed the difficulties it was facing. Winc reported an overall decline in total net revenue, with DTC net revenue declining $2.8 million. In September the CEO Geoffrey McFarlane, co-founder, resigned; the role of CEO was provisionally entrusted to another co-founder, Brian Smith.
Up to now no official communication from the company, and the website is unreachable: the 1020 error means that the internet routes to the site’s url have been closed (to put it simply).
You can read something else in my blog, but news end here.
Investors are funding ever less companies, and that fund wine companies is an hard job am not me to say it; Winc had a good business model, so Pix had it, making only the last two examples. But it isn’t only a problem of wine tech, of course: all the VC market is keeping its money in the pocket.
It’s the end of innovative startups? It’s the end of the Silicon Valley’s way of life? I don’t know, in Italy these news are really far away from us. But VCs know that for 1 billionaire exit there’re 20 failures, so something else have to be changed. A lack of trust in pioneers? A lack of trust in the future? Repositioning in others markets? Are VCs afraid about strange digital innovations like NFT and cryptocurrencies?
Well, in my opinion the wine tech world and VCs have to speak each one another, but the problem doesn’t seem circled only in the wine business. So, this is the time to rethinking own model business, is the time for wine business to decide if all that technology they’ve bought in the last years is good for them or not, if they use it. If tech helps to grow their business.
I’d been at BTO2022 event in Firenze (Italy), the Be Tourism Online two-days-session. There was 10 panels about Metaverse, a thing that doesn’t yet exist, projects all like Second Life, but with drones and not with vector graphic. Very less expensive. And this was showed as the future of tourism, oenoturism, wine.
There’re no investors at this event, but in similar events where the topic was Blockchain, some yrs ago, they were there. Yes, it was before pandemic, before gas-crisys, before a stuff of things.
It’s this only the reason? What else has changed?