In this piece I tracked the travails of the UK's Lastminute.com as it tried to expand into being a pan-european travel site. The company's "plunge into Sweden offered a textbook case in digital hubris: bold market entry, local enthusiasm, and then, a swift unraveling." As American firms eyed similar global rollouts, Lastminute’s saga warned them: it wasn’t the business plan that failed—it was forgetting that international markets demand more than translation. (The piece was good enough to land me and my then-wife a book-deal offer, which we turned down because the timeline was too short and we feared it would destroy our relationship.) FWIW, Lastminute.com still exists, unlike virtually every other company that the Industry Standard was writing on - and the magazine itself. (See James Ledbetter's excellent memoir Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year.)
