The fastest internet fat cats on wheels

By Adam Platt
The New Yorker, February  7, 2000

In the helter-skelter world of Internet start-ups, employee loyalty can be a fleeting thing. But Danny Uhl, who careers 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 was pedalling his personally retooled KHS hybrid mountain/street bike up the west side of Fourth Avenue after dropping off a batch of videos for the instant Internet delivery service Kozmo.com. " Riding the streets, you get 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 next thing I know, I smack into the back of this double-parked van." The cab driver never stopped, and Uhl, who learned his riding tricks growing up in 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, but Kozmo fixed me up; they paid for everything."

One day last week outside the Kozmo.com warehouse, on Twelfth Street, the weather was "brick" (really, really cold, in rider terminology), so messengers came and went bundled in Kozmo-issue Gore-Tex wind suits and blue Kozmo watch caps. The company is the brainchild of Joseph Park, a twenty-seven-year-old ex Goldman, Sachs banker, who grew impatient siting around waiting for his Internet book and CD purchases to 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 call in Manhattan alone, delivering anything from tandoori sandwiches ($6.95), to pregnancy test-kits ($15.99), to high-tech Sony DVD players ($295) within an hour of a cyber order.

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

Kozmo.com marketing technicians estimate that their riders circulate a thousand Krispy Kreme doughnuts around the city 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 custimers won't get embarassed.

New Kozmo riders attend orientation seminars on the benefits of establishing eye contact, among other consumer-friendly techniques. "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 a few guys "doored": you'tr going down the street, and a parked car opens its 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 back to 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 their doorstep with blood all over their parka."

Kozmo.com hasn't gone public yet, but in early 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 envision delivering a smorgasbord of appliances, even clothes, to their housebound public.

"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 different stock-option angles. "Say we go public within a year, and the market trends for I.P.O.'s hold up. The way this company's growing, I see the stock splitting within six months." Danny Uhl listened and shook his head. "Stocks is a pipe dream," he said as riders kept clattering in from the cold, wrapped in their messenger shoulder bags and heavy Kryptonite chain locks. "You gotta be a rock to ride out there today," he said. "I give anyone credit who makes it through the winter."