红杉资本莫里茨再次出手投资食品电商

    红杉资本（Sequoia Capital）合伙人迈克•莫里茨在食品派送初创公司Instacart投资850万美元，在硅谷引起了轩然大波。这不仅因为这是莫里茨在超过一年多时间里进行的第一笔投资，也是因为红杉资本似乎忘记了在食品电商Webvan公司遭遇的失败——它是莫里茨在互联网时代的几个重大投资失误之一。

    莫里茨在阿斯彭召开的《财富》头脑风暴科技大会（Fortune BrainstormTech）上接受主题采访时被问到了Instacart与Webvan的对比。他的回答是：

    “Instacart在食品杂货派送中采取的是一种众包模式，因而可以避免资本基础设施负担。而在Webvan，这种负担却非常繁重和复杂。按照计算机领域的说法，Webvan试图设计基本的计算机架构、操作系统和内部运行的所有应用。而Instacart的做法则与租车服务公司Uber类似，公司有大批独立承包商，无需驾车就能满足人们的生活购物需求 。”

    问及这项业务是否缺乏进入壁垒时，莫里茨回应称，谷歌（Google）和亚马逊（Amazon）这些公司在初期同样不存在进入壁垒。

    鉴于莫里茨曾在贝宝（PayPal）等支付类公司进行过投资，因此我们想听听他对于比特币的看法。他的观点非常谨慎：“我认为比特币很难成为主流，理由有很多。可以说，我对比特币持有很大的怀疑态度。但它同样具有巨大的诱惑力，可以让支付更加简单，有望消除一些目前存在的障碍。”（财富中文网）

    译者：刘进龙/汪皓

    Sequoia Capital partner Mike Moritz generated some Silicon Valley buzz recently by leading an $8.5 million investment in grocery delivery startup Instacart. Not only because it was Moritz's first new board seat in more than a year, but also because the company seems vaguely reminiscent of Webvan -- one of Moritz's few major missteps during the dotcom era.

    Moritz was asked about the Webvan comparison today during a keynote interview at Fortune BrainstormTech in Aspen. His reply:

    "Instacart is a crowdsourced model for the home delivery of groceries, and it offers a way to escape the enormous capital infrastructure burden that was so tricky and complicated about Webvan. Weebvan was a company that, in computer parlance, was trying to design the underlying computer architecture, the operating system and a whole bunch of apps on top of it. Think of Instacart in a similar manner to a company like Uber where you have a lot of independent contractors who, instead of driving cars, will attend to your grocery shopping needs."

    When pressed on the apparent lack of barriers to entry, Moritz shot back that companies like Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN) also didn't have barriers to entry in their early days.

    Moritz also was asked for his views on Bitcoin, given his history of payment investments like PayPal. His sentiment was circumspect: "There are a whole variety of reasons why I think it's going to be extremely difficult for Bitcoin to get close to the mainstream. So I have great skepticism. But there also is great allure associated with making payments easier and removing a lot of the barriers that exist."