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August 17, 2012 04:30 am GMT

Kayak For Textbooks: How BIGWORDS Raised $80M, Went Bankrupt, Then Got Profitable Again

0_61_082609_bigwordsIn 1998, seeing an underserved niche in the textbook market, Jeff Sherwood and his three co-founders launched BIGWORDS. By the beginning of 2000, they had grown from a team of four to a team of 250, had a warehouse in Kentucky, raised close to $80 million in outside funding, made a few commercials featuring Tom Green and even had a $100 million acquisition offer from a young Amazon. Although it stings a little in retrospect, Sherwood tells us that the board shot the offer down because it believed BigWords could be a billion-dollar company. Not to be. The bubble burst, and less than a year later, the company was bankrupt and was forced to close shop -- a familiar tale for those who went through the dotcom crash. And like so many others, the BIGWORDS team dispersed after the company closed shop and was left to pick up the pieces and

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