ABSTRACT
Zach Buckner, the founder and the CEO of RelayFoods.com hung up the phone after a brief thank-you call with his lead investor. ough he and Arnie Katz, president and COO, had come within weeks of running out of cash, they had now successfully closed a round of equity –nancing that would fund the company through the end of the following year at current projections. Buckner’s innovative model for addressing the last-mile challenge in Internet grocery retailing seemed to be working. After less than 2 years, the Charlottesville, Virginia, pilot was generating annualized revenues at a rate in excess of a million dollars. More critically, projections indicated that it would be cash ®ow positive before the end of the next year. e three-month-old pilot expansion into Richmond, Virginia, was generating three-digit monthly sales growth but still consuming cash. However, with a market seven times larger, Richmond should soon outperform Charlottesville.
