pets.com

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy
by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson
Published 30 May 2016

And just months earlier, it had appeared as a thirty-six-foot float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Founded in August 1998, Pets.com launched with an aggressive marketing plan and the goal of getting big fast. This was the M.O. of many Internet companies at the time, for which scale was the business model. Pets.com went public less than two years later on February 9, 2000, shortly after its Super Bowl commercial aired. Its public offering raised $82.5 million and the stock began trading on the NASDAQ at $11 a share under the symbol IPETs. Despite its mascot’s enormous popularity, Pets.com had a problem: Its business model was broken. Its assumption, one shared by many prominent venture capitalists who invested in Pets.com and similar companies, was that if the company got big enough fast enough, it would be able to turn a profit.

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For one, at the time the market for people wanting to shop online only for pet food and related products was smaller than the company had estimated. Pets.com also invested in a large warehouse to store its products, meaning the company had high fixed costs. Even worse, Pets.com had to price low to compete with existing pet stores, even though many of these stores already had razor-thin margins on pet food. As a result, the company actually lost money on most of the sales it made. This combination of high costs and nonexistent margins was ultimately unsustainable. And it didn’t take long for the company and its investors to figure this out. On November 6, 2000, Pets.com declared bankruptcy—only nine months after its initial public offering.

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It belted out an off-key version of Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” for some 30 seconds, imploring you to buy pet food online. Why? So that you wouldn’t have to leave your heartbroken pet at home when you go to the store. The company, of course, was Pets.com, then at the pinnacle of its reign atop the dot-com pyramid. Following the football game, the USA Today’s Ad Meter ranked the sock puppet’s Super Bowl commercial number 1 in its list of Super Bowl ads. Pets.com was the most memorable company from what would come to be known as the dot-com Super Bowl. The commercial, which cost $1.2 million, was a runaway success, as was the company’s mascot. The sock puppet even made an appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America and gave a long interview on Live!

Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts
by Mark Mahaney
Published 9 Nov 2021

What happened? Well, first let me tell you the story of Chewy. No, first let me tell you the story of Pets.com. Pets.com was a true dog. There weren’t enough pooper scoopers to pick up the mess that company and that stock (IPET) left behind. The bankers, analysts, and investors who were involved in that public offering should have been sent to the doghouse . . . permanently. OK, enough of the bad jokes. Pets.com IPO’d in February 2000 at $11 and traded up almost 30% to $14. (IPO trades can be so deceiving.) Pets.com went public with a lifetime revenue of $6 million—$6 million! That’s the entire amount of revenue it had generated up through its IPO.

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Despite a memorable Super Bowl commercial (a $1.2 million ad that brought national fame to the Sock Puppet—one of which I keep in my office as a useful warning), Pets.com went belly-up nine months later, with its stock at $0.19 the day of the bankruptcy announcement. Pets.com was one of the most egregious examples of the excesses and the folly of the dot-com bubble. Kozmo was another. Kozmo offered free one-hour delivery of “videos, games, DVDs, music, mags, books, food, basics, and more.” Kozmo did better than Pets.com. It lasted three years before going bust. With the tremendous visibility of hindsight, Pets.com and Kozmo had a lasting impact on tech investing because: (1) they helped create an almost permanent Wall of Worry that new tech companies are still climbing today, and (2) they paved the way for Chewy ($40 billion market cap as of mid-2021) and DoorDash ($60 billion market cap as of mid-2021).

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And yes, comparisons with Pets.com were abundant. An article on CNBC’s website the day of the Chewy IPO couldn’t help but point out that Chewy was joining a long list of unprofitable companies (including Uber, Pinterest, and Survey Monkey) that were going public and that the percentage of companies going public that were unprofitable was “topping numbers seen even in the Dot-Com Bubble.” But Chewy was and is different from Pets.com. Not in its market opportunity or in its basic customer value proposition. But in its scale (definitely) and in its management team (almost definitely). Whereas Pets.com went public with $6 million in trailing 12-month revenue, Chewy went public with $3.5 billion in trailing revenue—which would be 583 times bigger than Pets.com.

Market Sense and Nonsense
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 5 Oct 2012

On the contrary, if you were out of dog food or cat litter, waiting for delivery of an online order was not a practical alternative. Given these realities, Pets.com had to price its products, including shipping, competitively. In fact, given the large shipping cost, the only way the company could sell product was to set prices at levels below its own total cost. This led to the bizarre situation in which the more product Pets.com sold, the more money it lost. Despite these rather bleak fundamental realities, Pets.com had a market capitalization in excess of $300 million following its initial public offering (IPO). The company did not survive even a full year after its IPO. Ironically, Pets.com could have lasted longer if it could just have cut sales, which were killing the company.

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The Price Is Not Always Right A cornerstone principle underlying the efficient market hypothesis is that market prices are perfect. Viewed in the light of actual market examples, this assumption seems nothing short of preposterous. We consider only a few out of a multitude of possible illustrative examples. Pets.com and the Dot-Com Mania Pets.com is a reasonable poster child for the Internet bubble. As its name implies, Pets.com’s business model was selling pet supplies over the Internet. One particular problem with this model was that core products, such as pet food and cat litter, were low-margin items, as well as heavy and bulky, which made them expensive to ship.

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Ironically, Pets.com could have lasted longer if it could just have cut sales, which were killing the company. Pets.com was hardly alone, but is emblematic of the dot-com mania. From 1998 to early 2000, the market experienced a speculative mania in technology stocks and especially Internet stocks. During this period, there were numerous successful IPO launches for companies with negative cash flows and no reasonable near-term prospects for turning a profit. Because it was impossible to justify the valuation of these companies, or for that matter even any positive valuation, by any traditional metrics (that is, those related to earnings and assets), this era saw equity analysts invent such far-fetched metrics as the number of clicks or “eyeballs” per website with talk of a “new paradigm” in equity valuation.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

See “Excerpt from the Speech by Greenspan,” New York Times, December 7, 1996, and Richard W. Stevenson, “A Buried Message Loudly Heard,” New York Times, December 7, 1996. Pets.com: Jennifer Thornton and Sunny Marche, “Sorting through the Dot Bomb Rubble: How Did the High- Profile e-Tailers Fail?,” International Journal of Information Management 23, no. 2 (April 2003): 128, 130. 77, But it would be a mistake … Many of the same ideas would resurface: For example, Webvan was a forerunner of Instacart and Amazon’s grocery delivery service, and even Pets.com has been reincarnated as Chewy. 78, In his analysis of capitalist … Marx on “formal” and “real” subsumption: “The Results of the Direct Production Process,” included in Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans.

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“It’s rare to see an industry evaporate as quickly and completely,” a CNN journalist remarked. And 2001 brought more bad news. The dot-com era was dead. Today, the era is typically remembered as an episode of collective insanity—as an exercise in what Alan Greenspan, during his contemporaneous tenure as Fed chairman, famously called “irrational exuberance.” Pets.com, a startup that sold pet supplies online, became the best-known symbol of the period’s stupidity, and a touchstone for retrospectives ever since. Never profitable, the company spent heavily on advertising, including a Super Bowl spot; it raised $82.5 million in its IPO in February 2000 and imploded nine months later.

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On the web, accommodating this growth was fairly easy: increasing one’s hosting capacity was a simpler and cheaper proposition than the brick-and-mortar equivalent. And doing so was well worth it because, at a certain size, network effects locked in advantages that were hard for a competitor to overcome. A second, related strength was the site’s role as a middleman. In an era when many dot-coms were selling goods directly—Pets.com paid a fortune on postage to ship pet food to people’s door—Omidyar’s company connected buyers and sellers instead. This enabled it to profit from their transactions while remaining extremely lean. It had no inventory, no warehouses—just a website. But both the benefits of being a middleman and those associated with network effects required a third factor as their enabling condition: a certain kind of sovereignty.

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
by Paul Jarvis
Published 1 Jan 2019

Krispy Kreme’s newly massive size also created some accounting and reporting nightmares that forced it into a $75 million settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Finally, Pets.com is, by most measures, the epitome of the dot-com boom-and-bust cycle—an example of prioritizing uncontrolled and overfunded growth while doing things like selling products far below cost (which obviously isn’t sustainable). Pets.com spent more than $17 million on advertising involving sock puppets in the second quarter of 2000 alone; meanwhile, their revenue (not profit) at that time was only $8.8 million. Pets.com was spending based on growth it hoped to see, not on where the company was currently at, and it ended up losing an estimated $300 million in investment capital along the way.

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There is never enough for the hungry ghost, so it’s always looking for more. In business, the hungry ghost is the quest for more growth, more profit, more followers, more likes. Even large and established companies aren’t immune to the perils of chasing the Beast of high and infinite growth. Starbucks, Krispy Kreme, and Pets.com all pursued aggressive scaling and have paid a steep price in various ways. Starbucks was opening hundreds of stores around the world but decided that it could scale faster by adding sandwiches, CDs, and fancier drinks to its offerings. This rapid expansion ended up diluting the Starbucks brand, and in an equally rapid contraction, the company was forced to close 900 stores.

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What’s interesting is that Southwest turned down over 95 percent of those offers and began serving only four new locations. It turned down exponential growth because company leadership had set an upper limit for growth. Sure, Southwest’s executives wanted to grow each year, but they didn’t want to grow too much. Unlike Starbucks, Krispy Kreme, and Pets.com, they wanted to set their own pace, one that could be sustained in the long term. By doing this, they established a safety margin for growth that helped them continue to thrive at a time when the other airlines were flailing. Southwest is interesting because its leaders did what they could to sustain their business, and not more.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

A lot of that money went into ads featuring the puppet, which people found about as goofy as the idea of shipping 30-pound bags of dog food in the mail. For Pets.com, and other start-ups like it, the only way forward in the medium term was by the grace of the capital markets. If investors supported their plan, they could keep buying customers, but a waver in confidence was a gust of wind through a house of cards. The $50 million that Pets.com raised from Jeff Bezos and friends in 1999 wasn’t enough to finance a build-out of the physical shipping infrastructure, nor was it enough to cover the transactional losses, the advertising, and buyouts of competitors at the same time.

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But despite spending $10 million a month on marketing—far more than the site’s revenue—and despite getting help from Amazon and institutional investors such as Disney, Pets.com wasn’t establishing a big enough lead over its competitors, including Petopia.com, Petsmart.com, and Petplanet.com.56 Each of them had a napkin like Jim Clark’s, but the “one asshole in the middle” strategy didn’t work with four assholes. (Clark ran into the same problem with Healtheon; he made the best of it by selling out to WebMD in 1999, soon after he found out the site had an investment from the only asshole bigger than he was: Bill Gates.) To kill a site like Pets.com, investors didn’t have to lose faith entirely; a mere pause in the momentum was enough.

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A robust business can handle a negative readjustment in expectations, but these were not robust businesses—they were gambles. And gambles pay off or they don’t, one or zero. By the end of 2000, Pets.com was the latter, and a whole cohort of start-ups followed it off a cliff. The Y2K bubble was overdetermined; it had more causes than it needed. One was that technology hedge funds bid up stock prices with a plan to jump out at the high and leave less sophisticated capital holding the heavy bag. That strategy worked well enough, and the funds mostly came out of the experience surprisingly whole.57 But if Pets.com brought global investors to their senses and tanked the NASDAQ as capital shifted out of technology stocks, then perhaps the coked-up sock puppy did some good, stopping people before they threw more money down the dog-food-delivery garbage chute and wising everyone up for the next time.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Published 15 Sep 2014

The crazy ’90s version of this was the fierce battle for the online pet store market. It was Pets.com vs. PetStore.com vs. Petopia.com vs. what seemed like dozens of others. Each company was obsessed with defeating its rivals, precisely because there were no substantive differences to focus on. Amid all the tactical questions—Who could price chewy dog toys most aggressively? Who could create the best Super Bowl ads?—these companies totally lost sight of the wider question of whether the online pet supply market was the right space to be in. Winning is better than losing, but everybody loses when the war isn’t one worth fighting. When Pets.com folded after the dot-com crash, $300 million of investment capital disappeared with it.

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Kaczynski, Ted Karim, Jawed Karp, Alex, 11.1, 12.1 Kasparov, Garry Katrina, Hurricane Kennedy, Anthony Kesey, Ken Kessler, Andy Kurzweil, Ray last mover, 11.1, 13.1 last mover advantage lean startup, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2 Levchin, Max, 4.1, 10.1, 12.1, 14.1 Levie, Aaron lifespan life tables LinkedIn, 5.1, 10.1, 12.1 Loiseau, Bernard Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) luck, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 Lucretius Lyft MacBook machine learning Madison, James Madrigal, Alexis Manhattan Project Manson, Charles manufacturing marginal cost marketing Marx, Karl, 4.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Masters, Blake, prf.1, 11.1 Mayer, Marissa Medicare Mercedes-Benz MiaSolé, 13.1, 13.2 Michelin Microsoft, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 5.1, 14.1 mobile computing mobile credit card readers Mogadishu monopoly, monopolies, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 5.1, 7.1, 8.1 building of characteristics of in cleantech creative dynamism of new lies of profits of progress and sales and of Tesla Morrison, Jim Mosaic browser music recording industry Musk, Elon, 4.1, 6.1, 11.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 Napster, 5.1, 14.1 NASA, 6.1, 11.1 NASDAQ, 2.1, 13.1 National Security Agency (NSA) natural gas natural secrets Navigator browser Netflix Netscape NetSecure network effects, 5.1, 5.2 New Economy, 2.1, 2.2 New York Times, 13.1, 14.1 New York Times Nietzsche, Friedrich Nokia nonprofits, 13.1, 13.2 Nosek, Luke, 9.1, 14.1 Nozick, Robert nutrition Oedipus, 14.1, 14.2 OfficeJet OmniBook online pet store market Oracle Outliers (Gladwell) ownership Packard, Dave Page, Larry Palantir, prf.1, 7.1, 10.1, 11.1, 12.1 PalmPilots, 2.1, 5.1, 11.1 Pan, Yu Panama Canal Pareto, Vilfredo Pareto principle Parker, Sean, 5.1, 14.1 Part-time employees patents path dependence PayPal, prf.1, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, 14.1 founders of, 14.1 future cash flows of investors in “PayPal Mafia” PCs Pearce, Dave penicillin perfect competition, 3.1, 3.2 equilibrium of Perkins, Tom perk war Perot, Ross, 2.1, 12.1, 12.2 pessimism Petopia.com Pets.com, 4.1, 4.2 PetStore.com pharmaceutical companies philanthropy philosophy, indefinite physics planning, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2 progress without Plato politics, 6.1, 11.1 indefinite polling pollsters pollution portfolio, diversified possession power law, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 of distribution of venture capital Power Sellers (eBay) Presley, Elvis Priceline.com Prince Procter & Gamble profits, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 progress, 6.1, 6.2 future of without planning proprietary technology, 5.1, 5.2, 13.1 public opinion public relations Pythagoras Q-Cells Rand, Ayn Rawls, John, 6.1, 6.2 Reber, John recession, of mid-1990 recruiting, 10.1, 12.1 recurrent collapse, bm1.1, bm1.2 renewable energy industrial index research and development resources, 12.1, bm1.1 restaurants, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1 risk risk aversion Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) Romulus and Remus Roosevelt, Theodore Royal Society Russia Sacks, David sales, 2.1, 11.1, 13.1 complex as hidden to non-customers personal Sandberg, Sheryl San Francisco Bay Area savings scale, economies of Scalia, Antonin scaling up scapegoats Schmidt, Eric search engines, prf.1, 3.1, 5.1 secrets, 8.1, 13.1 about people case for finding of looking for using self-driving cars service businesses service economy Shakespeare, William, 4.1, 7.1 Shark Tank Sharma, Suvi Shatner, William Siebel, Tom Siebel Systems Silicon Valley, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 7.1, 10.1, 11.1 Silver, Nate Simmons, Russel, 10.1, 14.1 singularity smartphones, 1.1, 12.1 social entrepreneurship Social Network, The social networks, prf.1, 5.1 Social Security software engineers software startups, 5.1, 6.1 solar energy, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4 Solaria Solyndra, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 13.5 South Korea space shuttle SpaceX, prf.1, 10.1, 11.1 Spears, Britney SpectraWatt, 13.1, 13.2 Spencer, Herbert, 6.1, 6.2 Square, 4.1, 6.1 Stanford Sleep Clinic startups, prf.1, 1.1, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1 assigning responsibilities in cash flow at as cults disruption by during dot-com mania economies of scale and foundations of founder’s paradox in lessons of dot-com mania for power law in public relations in sales and staff of target market for uniform of venture capital and steam engine Stoppelman, Jeremy string theory strong AI substitution, complementarity vs.

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising
by Ryan Holiday
Published 2 Sep 2013

And most crucially, all this could be tracked and tweaked and improved to drive as many users as possible into the service. You have to understand how revolutionary this was at the time. Consider that just a few years later, Pets.com would try to launch with a multicity television and outdoor advertising campaign that culminated in a $1.2 million Super Bowl commercial and an appearance at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Or that Kozmo.com would blow through literally hundreds of millions with advertising campaigns featuring the Six Million Dollar Man before collapsing like Pets.com in the burst dot-com bubble. But after adopting Draper’s suggestion—which the founders resisted for the first few months because it seemed so simple—growth was exponential: 1 million members within six months.

Wall Street Meat
by Andy Kessler
Published 17 Mar 2003

Even more annoying was that despite running a technologyonly fund, we didn’t get very many IPO shares allocated to us. Sometimes we got a meager 100 shares. Someone else was clearly getting shares in these deals. It pissed me off enough that we soon stopped going to CSFB’s road shows altogether. Many of these new companies going public were selling stuff on the Internet and worse than turkeys. Pets.com, Drugstore.com, Priceline.com, and Buy.com were all lowmargin companies, but their stocks were valued at many times their revenues. As the ducks quacked, these stocks went up anyway. 180 C H A P T E R 1 2 Price Targets as a Marketing Tool W orking on Wall Street from the West Coast is an ordeal, especially for those people like me, who like to sleep.

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Remembering the 214 The Ax Syndrome summer of 1986, when semiconductor stocks had no bottom, I said that bottoms usually occur when the very last investor pukes his shares out, at any price. This got a good chuckle. Henry had a problem in that he was still recommending a huge basket of stocks, like Yahoo and AOL but also Infospace, Pets.com and other Merrill Lynch banking clients. He said the downturn was almost over. He had to follow his recommendations or risk being called a liar. So Metcalfe took a different tack. “Henry, how can you still recommend shares of these companies that have no prospects of ever making any money?” The ax syndrome whacked Henry as well.

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The long “right” streak made them superstars and the long “wrong” streak destroyed them. 218 C H A P T E R 1 5 Spitzer Fixer D otcoms were like anchors with a six-month-long rope attached to them. At the other end of the rope about to be yanked into the abyss was telecom. By October 2000, telecom started giving up the ghost as well. The stocks of Pets.com and Drugstore.com and other milk, er, Internet companies were going down as the ducks quacked in reverse and momos were selling. But telecom was a different story. They talked down their exposure to dotcom companies, and talked up their blue chip corporate customers. Worldcom, Global Crossing, and Qwest kept reporting decent revenues, and met analyst expectations.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

We assumed we could raise more later in the year, and then as that money started running out and it got to be the end of the year, we realized, Oh, there’s no more money! Brad Handler: Then in March of 2001, everything just started to implode, companies were failing. Brad Handler: Webvan came and went. Pets.com—whoever thought that was a good idea?—went. The Globe had the highest run-up and then a year later was bankrupt. John Markoff: Pets.com and Webvan—nobody believed in those. They had the air of excess right from the start. Andy Grignon: We were doing stupid stuff: Pets.com and Webvan and Excite@Home. It was the early development of the service economy. Jack Boulware: It was crazy. All this money that was pouring into the Bay Area—ridiculous schemes like Beenz.com, WebVan, Kozmo—and everybody would profit from it.

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Jamis MacNiven: Nan Omo was looking at pictures of venture capitalists, spying the room, seeing someone, going up and slapping down something the size of an old Manhattan phone book, saying, “This is the new Amazon, you’ve got to look at this!” Chris Caen: At the time everyone wanted to be the Amazon of fill-in-the-blank. “We want to be the Amazon of pets!” Pets.com! Jamis MacNiven: He chased Steve Jurvetson out across the parking lot. So I had to grab him and threaten to drop him in the creek if he didn’t stop. He goes, “Oh, but it’s my dream!” People came here with this big dream, and it was just off the hook. Chris Caen: So imagine there is more money than God, and it has no place to go, but there are a lot of cocktail napkins with things scribbled on them, and those are what are called start-ups.

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Yves Béhar: Then during the dot-com boom it went from being known as Heroin Park to having Japanese tour buses driving around the loop and taking pictures. Steve Perlman: You couldn’t find a square foot of grass to sit on and cross your legs and eat your lunch—it was that packed. Yves Béhar: It was the epicenter of the dot-com boom: We had eGroups, 21st Century Internet, which was a VC firm, BigWords. We had Pets.com a block away. Scott Hassan: I was mostly doing eGroups at the time, and Yahoo purchased the company for $450 million, which is not bad for two or three years of work. Yves Béhar: All these companies were right there. People have always been looking for where the internet is—and for a little while the internet was “at” South Park.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

The great dot.com land grab, in which anyone with sense could buy a domain name, crank out a bare-bones business model, take the company public and retire a millionaire (an impressive thing to be in those days), commenced. This was the era of high hopes for companies such as pets.com, the aforementioned online pet-supply retailer, which spent lavishly on advertising before collapsing, and boo.com, an online fashion retailer, which also flopped. But while the hype raged, a more important project was under way: the construction of the hardware and software infrastructure of America’s information technology networks, which would persist long after pets.com and its peers had gone belly up. It was firms such as Cisco and Oracle that truly represented the heart of the technology boom.

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Studies of information-technology adaptation reckon there is generally a gap of between five and fifteen years between investments in new technology and the appearance of measurable gains in productivity associated with that investment.10 When people survey the technology all around them, at work and in their homes, they are seeing the world of technology in a rear-view mirror. America’s productivity boom of the 1990s is associated in popular memory with the crowds of consumer-facing dotcom businesses, such as Pets.com, which spent lavishly on Super Bowl advertising and existed mostly to give their founders a million-dollar payday when the firm went public. But what actually drove the rapid productivity growth of the boom were older and more prosaic technologies, such as the ‘enterprise software’ products sold by Oracle and SAP.

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Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
by Julian Guthrie
Published 15 Nov 2019

Turf battles escalated between banks vying for hot initial stock offerings and merger deals. VCs chased after fresh-faced, wide-eyed dot-com entrepreneurs. Companies such as At Home and Real Networks had impressive IPOs, as did Verisign, Exodus, CyberCash, UUNet, and Inktomi. Companies like Priceline, eToys, Pets.com, GoTo.com, and Webvan experienced dazzling growth—as measured by eyeballs, page use, and unique customers. Sonja was at work when she got a call from her friend Kim Davis, a venture capitalist at IDG Ventures in San Francisco. Kim had earned her bachelor’s degree at Stanford and had been a year behind Sonja at Harvard Business School.

…

SONJA By early 2000, Eve, the online cosmetics giant, had surpassed even Sonja’s expectations, becoming nearly twice the size of Sephora online. The Internet darling was beginning to attract some high-caliber suitors. One of Eve’s biggest fans was seed investor Bill Gross at Idealab. Idealab was comprised of more than forty dot-com companies, including eToys, GoTo.com, Pets.com, Friendster, NetZero, and CarsDirect. EToys was worth $7.8 billion when it went public, making Idealab’s original $200,000 stake worth $1.5 billion. GoTo.com was worth $5 billion when it went public, and Idealab owned 20 percent of it. But Bill Gross wasn’t the only one paying attention to Eve.

…

The call center was located in Westwood, Los Angeles, and most of their employees were UCLA students or graduates. Dot-com companies signed up in droves to outsource their customer support, sending their own employees to Westwood to train the PeopleSupport team. But suddenly PeopleSupport was losing clients in droves. The darlings of the dot-com boom were going under. Pets.com, begun in February 1999, closed after buying a $1.2 million Super Bowl ad and burning through $300 million in investment capital. Webvan, a grocery home-delivery service that attracted funding from Sequoia Capital, Goldman Sachs, Benchmark, and others, filed for bankruptcy after burning through hundreds of millions of dollars.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

But that risky approach also generated many big flops like the Fire Phone and Pets.com. He has survived this string of flops because while these failures were all big bets, none were “bet the company” bets. If a company is constantly innovating, a few of those winning bets are bound to more than make up for the losses. If a company doesn’t innovate, it might one day find itself in a position where it will have to make a Hail Mary bet to save the company. “I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally billions of dollars of failures,” Bezos told Business Insider’s Blodget. “You might remember Pets.com or Kosmo.com. It was like getting a root canal with no anesthesia.

…

In 2019, the company closed its Amazon Restaurants food delivery business, finding it difficult to compete in a highly crowded field that included players such as DoorDash and Uber Eats. That same year it discontinued its Dash buttons, which allowed consumers to reorder laundry detergent and other everyday items with a push of a button—customers didn’t find them very useful. During the dot-com bubble, Amazon invested in the delivery service Kosmo.com and Pets.com, two online businesses that flopped spectacularly. Perhaps the company’s most public failure was the Amazon Fire Phone. Apple’s iPhone, launched in 2007, had become a huge success, and Google had its fast-growing Android operating system. Why not, thought Bezos, develop a phone that would appeal to Amazon’s Prime members?

…

See also shopping addiction to, 18–19 Amazon Prime’s behavior change in, 98 Amazon’s investment in, 25 combining best of brick-and-mortar retail with, 165, 187, 270 difficulty knowing what is being ordered in, 190 integrating in-store experience with, 193, 194–95, 197–98, 205, 213, 270 search result clutter in, 21 shortcomings in, as opportunities for businesses, 208 smart algorithms needed in, 271 smart home devices for, 116 social isolation and, 105 tedious aspect of, 207 vision recognition for, 116–17 Walmart stores and, 186, 187 Ooton, Carletta, 133–34 Open Markets Institute, 258 operating system, Amazon as, 14–15 Optum, 227–28 Ostendorf, Mari, 113 Otellini, Paul, 51 Otto, 9 Outnet website, 201 Overstock, 203 Oxfam, 241 Page, Larry, 57, 58 Paltac, 139 Pandora, 26 Parker, Sean, 17 Parviz, Babak, 224–25 patents, 175, 230, 232, 240 payment systems Amazon Pay for, 234 China and, 234–35 facial recognition for, 198–99 PayPal, 234, 235 Peripheral, The (TV series), 102 Pets.com, 64, 65 pharmacy industry Amazon Care app and, 230–31 Amazon’s entry into, 225–26 Drugstore.com acquisition and, 223–24 PillPack online pharmacy and, 27, 216, 223, 226, 229 philanthropy Bezos family history of, 251–52 Bezos’s donations in, 30, 251, 252 Pickens, T. Boone, 242 picking process, with robots, 129–30, 135–36, 137–39 PillPack online pharmacy, 27, 216, 223, 226, 229 Pinterest, 210 Porter, Brad, 135–36, 138 Posner, Richard, 260 Posner, Victor, 242 Prasad, Rohit, 109, 110, 115–16 prefab housing manufacturers, 216–27, 238 Prime.

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
by Jeff Sutherland and Jj Sutherland
Published 29 Sep 2014

But despite megadoses of imagination, inspiration, and hard work, the people making the product can never figure out how to actually make money with it. What’s the difference between a Pets.com and a Zappos? They both saw a market segment that people spend billions of dollars a year on. They both saw a way to deliver products more easily and cheaply online. One became emblematic of dot-com excess and the squandering of millions and millions of dollars; the other company is worth more than a billion dollars. They both had vision—what Pets.com didn’t have was a sense of priorities. They didn’t know what to do when. I like to show people this Venn diagram. Every company needs to think about this diagram.

…

., 7.1 Omaha Beach OODA loop, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 8.1, 185, 8.2, 8.3 OpenView Venture Partners, 1.1, 3.1, 5.1, 8.1 Org Chart Orient, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 8.1, 185 output, as measurable standard Overburden Palm paper airplanes, PDCA cycle in making Pashler, Harold passivity, elimination of PatientKeeper, 7.1, 7.2 patterns: negative in Scrum PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act), 2.1, 2.2, 5.1, 7.1 peer review “Perils of Obedience, The” (Milgram) Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) personal growth Petraeus, David Pets.com, 8.1 planning, 1.1, 6.1 Waterfall, see Waterfall method weddings, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Planning Poker, 6.1, 6.2, 9.1 Porath, Christine Portal poverty, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 prioritization, 1.1, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1 process, happiness in product attributes, 172 Product Backlog, see Backlog product development: incremental value in productivity happiness and hours worked and, 5.1, 103, 8.1 Scrum and Product Marketing Product Owner, 2.1, 8.1, 8.2, app.1, app.2 essential characteristics of feedback and, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 incremental value and as internal customer product vision, 8.1, 172, 8.2 Backlog and profit margins Progress Out of Poverty Index projects, prioritizing between, 93 ProPublica, purpose, 2.1, 7.1 Putnam, Lawrence Quattro Pro for Windows Rand Corporation, 6.1, 6.2 rat race Reasonableness, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 relative size, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 releases, incremental, see incremental development and delivery renovations, time frame for Rethink Robotics retrospective revenue, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 in venture capital review rituals re-work RF-4C Phantom reconnaisance jet rhythm, 5.1, 5.2 risk robots, 2.1, 4.1, 9.1 rockets Rodner, Don Rogers Commission Roomba Roosevelt, Theodore rugby as analogy New Zealand All Blacks team in Rustenburg, Eelco Said, Khaled Salesforce.com, 1.1, 3.1 Agile practices at sales teams Sanbonmatsu, David Schwaber, Ken Scrum Backlog as power of freedom and rules in and Heathcare.gov, 1.1 implementing in Japan, 2.1 managers’ difficulty with and Medco, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 at NPR at OpenView origins at Easel, 2.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 origins in software development of positive behavior rewarded in productivity increases with reaching greatness with at Salesforce.com, 3.1 system examined and fixed in team size in time conceptualized in transparency in at Valve workweek and, 103 Scrum board, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 9.1, app.1 in education “SCRUM Development Process” (Sutherland and Schwaber) Scrum Master, 3.1, 4.1, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2, app.1, app.2, app.3 “Secret Weapon: High-value Target Teams as Organizational Innovation” (Lamb and Munsing) self-control, decision making and Senate Judiciary Committee set-based concurrent engineering Shook, John short cycles short term memory, retention in Shu Ha Ri, 2.1, 9.1 single-tasking sizing, relative, 6.1, 6.2 skills small teams, superiority of, 3.1, 3.2 SMART government Smithsonian Institution soccer social motivation software, fixing bugs in software development, 2.1, 3.1 Sony Soviet Union space travel, private specialization, communication damaged by, 4.1, 4.2 Special Operations Forces (SOF), U.S.

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy
by Christopher Leonard
Published 11 Jan 2022

One such asset was shares of stock in a San Francisco–based company called Pets.com, which went public in February 2000. These shares were like those Florida land deeds Galbraith had written about. Quite suddenly, the traders started to reexamine the value of the real-world asset that underpinned the paper asset. They saw that Pets.com had failed to think about the high cost of shipping dog food. The company’s stock had debuted at $11 a share, but began to fall steadily. This was the signal that the self-reinforcing logic of ever-rising asset values was over, and it was over because the Fed was raising rates. Pets.com declared bankruptcy in November.

…

., 218 JPMorgan Chase, 66, 115, 191, 210, 244, 269, 271 junk bonds, 72, 143, 146, 156, 164, 176–78, 259, 271, 272, 281, 286, 299 defined, 347 Kansas, 55, 206 Kansas City Fed, see Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Kavanaugh, Brett, 151 Kelley, Kathleen, 35, 38 Keynes, John Maynard, 81, 347 Keynesian economics, 81, 100–101, 347 KFC, 193 KKR, 180 Kocherlakota, Narayana, 130 labor unions, 14, 61, 79, 110, 166, 194, 196–98, 344, 348 Rexnord and, 190, 194–96 Lacker, Jeffrey, 27, 30, 31, 128, 141 Lehman Brothers, 5, 6, 8, 23 Lemann, Nicholas, 81 leverage, 193n, 257, 262–63 deleveraging events, 247 leveraging up, 252, 253 leveraged loans, 142, 149, 155, 156, 162, 168, 170, 172–75, 178–80, 182, 199, 270–72, 277, 279, 281, 298, 305 collateralized loan obligation, see CLO coronavirus relief and, 288 defined, 347 downgrading of, 271 with covenants stripped out (Cov-lite), 179–81 variable rates in, 177 Liang, Nellie, 148 liberals, 16, 109–11, 257, 346 see also Democratic Party libertarians, 225 Liesman, Steve, 145 liquidity mismatch, 224–25 living wills, bank, 208–9, 269 LMR Partners, 254 loans, 27, 43, 53, 55, 88, 133 assets and, 49–51, 57–60 business development corporations and, 181 collateralized loan obligation, see CLO consumer, 43, 56 defaults on, 271, 279 demand for, 57, 61–62, 212 home (mortgages), 23, 56, 96, 97, 99–100, 102–3, 137–38, 147, 149 interest rates on, see interest rates leveraged, see leveraged loans loan-shark rates in, 251 overnight, 114, 238, 242, 243, 247–52, 254–57 by Penn Square, 63–65 repo, 243–58, 264, 265 risky, 14, 19–20, 27, 33, 49–51, 63, 91, 97, 105, 146–47 securitization and, 63 short-term corporate, 266 to small businesses, 279 zero bound and, 19–20 lobbyists, 206–7 Lockhart, Dennis, 130, 140 Logan, Lorie, 241–43, 245–47, 249, 250, 255, 263 Long-Term Capital Management, 111 LSAP (large-scale asset purchase), 132 Macy’s, 298 Maffei, Greg, 86 Main Street Lending Program, 279, 286–87, 297 Mallaby, Sebastian, 83, 87 Man Who Knew, The (Mallaby), 83, 87 McConnell, Mitch, 201–2, 276–77, 283 McDonald’s, 193 McKeon, Jon, 38, 39, 41, 206 McKinney, Stewart, 66–67 McKinsey Global Institute, 211, 216 McWilliams, Jelena, 230 media, 108–12, 144–45 Mellon, Andrew, 17–18 Meltzer, Allan, 60, 62 Mercatus Center, 257, 301 Mercury Asset Management Group, 157 Messonnier, Nancy, 262, 263 Mester, Loretta, 267–68 Mexico jobs moved to, 196–99 and search for yield, 216, 217 middle class, 295–96 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 191 Minerd, Scott, 262–63, 268, 269, 282 Mnuchin, Steven, 229, 282 career of, 275–76 coronavirus relief programs and, 273, 276–77, 283, 285–86, 299 Powell and, 275, 277–78, 299 Trump and, 275, 276 monetary base, 6, 102, 120 monetary policy, 9, 46, 56, 60, 88, 148 defined, 347 fiscal policy and, 78–79, 346, 347 Hoenig’s views on, 62–63, 68, 82, 94–96 inflation and, 61–62 quantitative easing’s role in, 127 short-term and long-term problems and, 62–63 Trump and, 233–34 money currencies, 45, 112, 217, 225, 350 Fed’s control of, 47 politics of, see politics of money value and quantity of, 4, 6, 46, 347 see also dollar money creation, 4, 6, 17, 19, 26, 27, 45, 46, 47, 50, 58, 60–63, 79–81, 84, 101–2, 113–16, 120–21, 170, 211, 223, 297, 305, 343, 348, 349 asset prices and, 224 deflation and, 223 quantitative easing and, 113, 115–16, 120–21, 177, 211 money markets, 242 monopolies, 348 Moody’s, 198, 271, 347 mortgage-backed securities, 214–16, 247, 254, 266, 268, 304, 349 mortgages, 23, 56, 96, 97, 99–100, 102–3, 137–38, 147, 149 Mozer, Paul, 158, 161 MSNBC, 109 mutual funds, 177 Nasdaq, 84, 86 National Bureau of Economic Research, 140 natural gas, 55 Navistar, 189, 295 Nebraska, 55 negative-interest-rate debt, 217–18, 347–48, 351 Nelson, Edward, 61 New Deal, 79–80, 204 defined, 348 New York Federal Reserve Bank, see Federal Reserve Bank of New York New York Times, 13, 14, 41, 86, 109, 218 Nixon, Richard, 41, 67 Nomura Securities International, 115 NPR (National Public Radio), 109, 120 Obama, Barack, 13–14, 100–101, 103, 108, 122, 126, 135, 159, 203, 204, 207, 229 Occupy Wall Street, 286 oil, 49–51, 55, 57, 61, 63, 64, 97, 117, 118, 235, 263, 345 embargo on, 344 fracking and, 213–14, 216 and search for yield, 213–14 Oklahoma, 55 OneWest, 276 Only Game in Town, The (El-Erian), 231–32 OPEC, 344 open market operations, 247–48, 349 defined, 348 Operation Twist, 127 defined, 348–49 Paul, Ron, 225 Paulson, Hank, 23 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), 284, 285 Pelley, Scott, 112 Pelosi, Nancy, 276, 283 Pence, Mike, 197 Penn Square Bank, 63–65, 67–69, 97, 98 pension funds, 119, 143, 173, 175, 177, 211, 271 Pentagon Papers, 41 Pets.com, 86–87 Pianalto, Sandra, 130, 140 Plosser, Charles, 12, 27, 30, 31, 112 Poland, 216, 217 politics, 16, 80, 202 see also Democratic Party; Republican Party politics of money, 9, 11, 46, 78 see also doves; hawks Poole, William, 85, 86 Popp, John, 174–76 populists, 46, 47 Portnoy, David, 288–90 Potter, Simon, 249–50 Powell, Jerome “Jay,” 121–22, 125–29, 132, 151–63, 199–200, 221–22, 224–29, 231–34, 236–38, 244, 246, 247, 250, 255, 256, 258, 275, 300, 305 career of, 125–26, 152–53, 163, 169, 272, 290 at Carlyle Group, 126, 161–63, 165–69, 185, 186, 229, 290 Catholic University speech of, 225–26 coronavirus crisis response and, 265, 267, 268, 272–73, 277–78, 280, 280n, 283, 290, 291, 296–97 at Dillon, Read & Co., 153–56, 161, 270 Duke and, 125, 127–28, 142–43 early life of, 126, 151–52 economics conference speech of, 256 Fed’s image and, 286 golfing of, 167 growth of influence of, 222 Hoenig compared with, 222 Hoenig’s meeting of, 200 listening tours of, 286, 290 Mnuchin and, 275, 277–78, 299 news conference of, 236–37 normalization process and, 221, 224–25, 233, 234, 236–37, 243, 245, 256 physical appearance of, 156 political alliances of, 233 political standing of, 298 as pragmatist, 153 quantitative easing and, 121–22, 127–29, 132, 141–44, 148–49, 221–22, 236 reversal of opinion on quantitative easing and ZIRP (Powell Pivot), 225–27, 236–37 Rexnord and, 163–70, 185, 186, 199 Salomon Brothers and, 159–61 speeches of, 225–26, 256, 290 at Treasury Department, 126, 156–61, 290 Trump and, 229, 233–34 warning of, 272 wealth of, 169 Williams and, 246 Powell, Patricia, 151 Power and the Independence of the Federal Reserve, The (Conti-Brown), 132 prices of assets, see asset prices and value controls on, 62 deflation of, 96n, 223–24, 237 of gasoline, 17, 50, 54, 72, 73, 83, 84 of gold, 235 of housing, 92, 93, 100 inflation of, see inflation spread in, 268–69 of stocks, 84, 119, 131, 212, 235 primary dealer(s), 26, 101, 115–16, 285, 350 defined, 349 Salomon Brothers as, 159, 160 private equity firms, 97, 116, 122, 149, 156, 161–64, 166, 168–70, 174, 178–82, 187, 202, 221, 291 Apollo Management, 168–70, 173–74, 180, 186, 191 Carlyle Group, 126, 161–63, 165–69, 174, 178–80, 182, 185, 186 put contracts, 345–46 Fed Put, 237, 257, 272, 279, 345–46 Qualcomm, 86 quantitative easing (QE), 8–11, 114–15, 126–49, 154, 170, 173, 182, 225, 247, 249, 251, 252, 262, 292, 295, 302, 304n, 305, 344, 350–52 allocative effect of, 27, 28 asset price inflation and, 119, 132, 148, 182, 300 basic mechanics and goals of, 26 Beck on, 110 Bernanke and, 10, 25–34, 105, 112–13, 118n, 121, 126–30, 132–34, 136, 140–46, 148, 182, 247 bonds in, 101, 110, 139, 227, 231–34, 236, 267, 280 coronavirus pandemic and, 267, 279–80, 297 defined, 349 developing nations and, 216–17 difficulty of undoing, 32–33, 128, 130, 140, 143, 258 Duke and, 127–28, 141–44 end of, 147–48, 227 European Central Bank’s version of, 235 excess bank reserves and, 248 Fed’s research on, 30 Feldstein on, 133 in financial crisis of 2008, 25, 101 FOMC debates on, 9, 10, 16, 27–34, 112, 121, 126–30, 132, 134, 137, 140, 142, 143 FOMC presentation on, 136–39 FOMC voting on, 3, 8–11, 18, 21, 29, 32–34, 105, 107–9, 112, 113, 134, 136–37, 141, 148 forecasting errors and, 138–40 growth-boosting channels of, 148 Hoenig’s critiques of, 27–28, 31–33, 62, 112, 120 Hoenig’s predictions about, 34, 200 Hoenig’s public condemnation of, 29, 34 Hoenig’s vote on, 3, 8–11, 18, 21, 32, 34, 105, 107–9, 112, 258, 280 inflation and, 33, 112–13, 119–20 interest rates and, 116–19, 133, 137–39 job creation and, 119, 139, 182 media and, 108–12, 144–45 money supply and, 113, 115–16, 120–21, 177, 211 negative-interest-rate bonds and, 218 normalization (reversal) of, 221, 223–25, 227–29, 231, 233–37, 243, 245, 249, 256 as normal tool of monetary policy, 127 NQE (non-QE) program, 256–57 open-ended program of, 136, 141 open market operations and, 247–48 Operation Twist, 127, 348–49 policy options in, 128–29, 132, 136, 141 political backlash against, 144 Powell and, 121–22, 127–29, 132, 141–44, 148–49, 221–22, 236 Powell’s reversal of opinion on (Powell Pivot), 225–27, 236–37 public perceptions of, 119–20, 136 risk seesaw and, 145–46 risks of, 32–33, 130, 132, 143, 226 risky loans and, 27, 33 second round of, 32, 114–15, 118n, 144, 173, 349 stock prices and, 119, 212 Taper Tantrum and, 145–47, 217 unemployment and, 121 Yellen and, 130 quantitative tightening, 233, 237 defined, 349–50 Quarles, Randal, 229, 230, 280n Reagan, Ronald, 80, 156, 158–59 real estate, 50, 51, 55, 91, 92, 262 in Florida, 54–55, 86 quantitative easing and, 117–19 and search for yield, 214–16 see also housing real estate investment trusts (REITs), 147 recessions, 8, 22, 24, 50, 56, 60, 72, 73, 75, 80, 81, 136, 186, 225, 236, 302, 347 reconciliation, 158–59 Reddy, Sudeep, 34 Reifschneider, David, 148 relative-value funds, 253–54 repo market, 243–58, 264, 265 Republican Party, 21, 80, 101, 103, 135, 197, 201, 203, 233, 276, 304 Tea Party movement in, 14, 103, 109, 135, 206, 286 see also conservatives reserve accounts, 26 defined, 350 reserve currency, 350 revolving credit facility, 170 Rexnord, 163–70, 171–73, 176–79, 183, 185–99, 281 Adams at, 186–88, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198 Apollo Management and, 168–70, 172, 173, 186, 191 Carlyle Group and, 163, 165–69, 185, 186 closure of factory and move of production to Mexico, 196–99 Feltner at, 188–91, 196–99, 293, 295 labor unions and, 190, 194–96 Powell and, 163–70, 185, 186, 199 Rexnord Business System (RBS), 186–87 SCOFR plan of, 195–96, 198, 199 stock buyback of, 193–94 ZIRP and, 187–88 Rickards, James, 111 Riksbank, 218 risk parity funds, 265 risk seesaw, 145–46, 304, 305 Robinhood, 289, 290, 300 Roblox, 297–98 Romney, Mitt, 133 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 79–80, 100, 204 Rubenstein, David, 161 Russia, 85, 111, 238 Sahm, Claudia, 267, 286 Salomon Brothers, 157–61 SARS epidemic, 261, 263 Saudi Arabia, 263 Saxton, Jim, 76, 78 Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF), 281 Secrets of the Temple (Greider), 47 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 155, 159, 160, 162, 175, 215, 348 securitization, 63 September 11 attacks, 88, 91 S.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni
Published 22 Feb 2022

Even high-profile support didn’t count for much once the correction began. Sequoia’s Mike Moritz had invested in one of the dot-com boom’s highest flyers: the pet supply site Pets.com. In January 2000, Pets.com purchased a pricey thirty-second Super Bowl advertising spot titled “If you leave me now.” On November 7, 2000, just 282 darkly ironic days after the ad’s debut, Pets.com shut down and its assets were liquidated—turning “Pets.com” into a synonym for the dangers of dot-com speculation. During the bust, fuckedcompany.com—a snarky twist on the technology magazine Fast Company—became popular with the tech crowd.

…

Mimicry earned Alando fifty thousand registered users in just weeks—and a $42 million acquisition offer from eBay months after launch. 20 BLINDSIDED “We will have a thermonuclear IPO,” declared Musk in the summer of 2000. Employees ranked it among his more memorable Musk-isms. But a year past PayPal’s founding, the markets had just survived a major blast of their own—and gone sour on technology IPOs. The Amazon-backed Pets.com was exhibit A. The much-hyped online pet food company IPO-ed in February 2000, opening at $11 per share and later reaching a peak of $14 per share. By November, the stock had cratered to 19 cents a share. Only months after its IPO, the company was forced into liquidation. It wasn’t alone: in 2000, internet stocks collectively lost three-quarters of their value, wiping out a staggering $2 trillion in market capitalization.

Running Money
by Andy Kessler
Published 4 Jun 2007

And everybody celebrates. Maybe this whole redemption thing wasn’t so smart.” “People who celebrate Dow 10,000 and NASDAQ 5,000 are the same ones who obsess over stock splits,” Fred noted. “Good point. Still . . .” “Still what? Yahoo is $200. Amazon is $70 after splitting. AOL is buying TimeWarner. Pets.com actually has a bid,” Fred said with his best dripping sarcastic tone. “It’s crazy.” “Twilight Zone,” I said. We’d just seen the list from the folks that track hedge funds— our 377% gain in 1999 made us the fourth best hedge fund for the year. We are on our way to being up 40% for the first quarter of 2000, our sixth quarter of big gains in a row.

…

But those trades don’t clear for a few days. This may be something else,” Fred said coldly. “Buyer exhaustion?” “I wish. That’s how all these bubbles end. We’re getting beat up, but it looks like they’re taking the Internet names out first.” “Out back to the woodshed, like Old Yeller.” “And that silly Pets.com sock puppet. Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of names,” Fred said, almost a little too gleefully. “Maybe this is real. I haven’t seen that bag lady return to the bench outside.” “She was the ghost of bear markets past.” “Here’s another one for you, Fred. Your friends at Internet Capital Group?” “Yeah?”

…

See Xerox PARC Panasonic, 253, 254, 255, 257 PARC. See Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Parliament, 55, 56, 92, 272 Parsons, Charles, 94–95 patents, 55, 56, 57, 64, 65 pricing and, 58, 59, 137 PCs. See computers PDP-8, 103 Pearse, Edward, 92 peer-to-peer file sharing, 190 people costs and demands, 246–48 personal computers. See computers Pets.com, 223, 224 phone network, 61, 183–84, 185–86, 290, 291 Pinnacle Systems, 96–97, 98 piracy, 46, 206–7, 263 Pittman, Bob, 69–73 planar process, 101–2 Porat, Marc, 97 power, cost of, 64, 65, 77–79 computer and, 121 steam engine and, 58–59, 66 power looms, 66 pricing. See competitive pricing productivity, 64, 123 profitability, 256, 258, 275 gross margin, 130, 132, 135 Progressive Networks.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

It took a leap of faith. Even twenty years later, Pets.com was still the poster child for e-commerce excess in Silicon Valley. Taking advantage of a hot market for anything dot-com, it went public with hardly any revenue in 1999, but it spent heavily on advertising, including a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and an infamous sock puppet ad in the 2000 Super Bowl. Star analyst Henry Blodget, who would be permanently banned from the securities industry for making stock recommendations that he disavowed in private, had a “buy” rating on Pets.com for much of its time as a public company.[2] That wasn’t very long—the e-tailer ran out of cash and declared bankruptcy in 2000, just nine months after its initial public offering.

…

., 179 Klarman, Seth, 184 Koss, 132, 169, 188, 224 Kruger, Justin, 28 Kynikos Associates, 77 L Ladies’ Home Journal, 150 Lamberton, Cait, 54, 62 Lamont, Owen, 80 Langer, Ellen, 27 Langlois, Shawn, 45 Laufer, Henry, 237 Lay, Kenneth, 85 Lebed, Jonathan, 163 Leder, Michelle, 239 Ledger, Heath, 138 Left, Andrew, 39, 116–26, 148, 191, 214, 217 GameStop and, 120–24, 129, 130, 133, 146 harassment of, 122 WallStreetBets and, 121–23, 126, 129, 130, 133, 136, 238 Lehman Brothers, 80, 117 Lending Tree, 162 Levie, Aaron, 26 Lewis, Michael, 16, 88 Lindzon, Howard, 24, 49, 176 LinkedIn, 239 Livermore, Jesse, 78–79 locating a borrow, 72–73, 80 Loeb, Dan, 111 Lombardi, Vince, 8 Long-Term Capital Management, 260 Loop Capital, 128 Los Angeles Times, 215 loss aversion, myopic, 236 lotteries, 62, 239, 241, 242 Lowenstein, Roger, 260 Lucid Motors, 164 M Mad Money, 254 Madoff, Bernie, 117, 206 MagnifyMoney, 162 Mahoney, Seth, 19, 31, 176–77 Malaysia, 75 Malkiel, Burton, 253 Manias, Panics, and Crashes (Kindleberger), 179 Manning, Peyton, 64 Man Who Solved the Market, The (Zuckerman), 237 Maplelane Capital, 217 March Madness, 57 Marcus, 257 margin calls, 203–5 margin debt, 58–59, 62, 67, 138, 188 Markets Insider, 103 MarketWatch, 45, 180 MassMutual, 87, 131, 171 Mavrck, 142 Mayday, 48–50, 66 McCabe, Caitlin, 128–29 McCormick, Packy, 23, 35, 104, 202 McDonald, Larry, 99 McDonald’s, 154 McHenry, Patrick, 239 McLean, Bethany, 85 Medallion Fund, 237 MedBox, 117 Melvin Capital Management, 6–8, 56, 72, 94–96, 110–12, 114, 119, 121, 123, 128–30, 132, 135, 136, 146, 189, 190, 202, 205, 217, 218, 222, 227 meme stocks, xii–xiv, 5, 7–9, 11, 12, 14, 22, 30, 32–34, 36, 39, 40, 47, 54, 63, 67, 72, 73, 76, 100, 108, 123, 125, 127, 129, 132–33, 135, 137–40, 146, 147, 153–55, 157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 169, 170, 178, 179, 181, 183, 185, 191, 193, 194, 198–99, 204–5, 208, 219, 220, 222, 227, 229, 230, 237, 238, 240, 246 AMC, 39, 93, 125, 127, 132, 169, 188, 220–21, 224–26 Bed Bath & Beyond, 115, 133, 188 BlackBerry, 93, 115, 133, 169, 178, 188, 224 bot activity and, 165, 166 GameStop, see GameStop, GameStop short squeeze insiders of, 224 Koss, 132, 169, 188, 224 margin debt and, 58 Naked, 132, 188 Nokia, 169, 178, 188 payment for order flow and, 207 Robinhood’s trading restrictions on, 187–89, 194, 195–200, 203, 206 Merton, Robert, 101, 102, 108 Microsoft, 46, 93 Mihm, Stephen, 48 millennials, 21, 26, 27, 56, 71, 88, 142, 143, 148, 162, 242, 246, 255 Minnis, Chad, 126, 157, 242 MoneyWatch, 59 monthly subscription services, 32 Morgan Stanley, 28, 55, 178, 219 Morningstar, 216, 244, 245, 254, 255 Motherboard, 131–32 Motter, John, 215–17, 226 Mudrick, Jason, 220–21 Mudrick Capital Management, 220 Mulligan, Finley, 230 Mulligan, Quinn, 142, 214 Munger, Charlie, 183–84, 241 Murphy, Paul, 78 Musk, Elon, 19, 75, 82–83, 92, 124, 143, 149, 152–53, 155–57, 160, 161, 167, 212, 216 tweets of, x, 60, 82, 83, 124, 144, 152–54, 161, 170 Must Asset Management, 221 mutual funds, 139, 151, 221, 234, 244, 245, 254–56 myopic loss aversion, 236 N Naked Brand, 132, 188 Nasdaq, 60, 92, 98, 104 Nasdaq Whale, 98, 104–6, 108, 109, 227 Nathan, Dan, 192 National Council on Problem Gambling, 31, 57 National Futures Association, 118 Nations, Scott, 99 Nations Indexes, 99 NCAA Basketball, 57 Netflix, x–xi, 15, 50, 98, 133, 208 Netscape, 24 Neumann, Adam, 105 New Yorker, 143 New York Mets, 8, 161 New York Post, 124, 172 New York Stock Exchange, 49 New York University, 20, 82, 177 Nikola, 64 NIO, 120 Nobel Prize, 101, 260 Nokia, 169, 178, 188 nudges, 31–32, 235–36 Nvidia, 98 O Obama, Barack, 13, 38 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 160, 197 Occupy Wall Street movement, 12, 125 Odean, Terrance, 235, 238, 243 Odey, Crispin, 126 Ohanian, Alexis, 12, 37–38, 125 O’Mara, Margaret, 38, 156, 157 Omega Family Office, 191 O’Neal, Shaquille, 64 Oppenheimer, Robert, 83 options, 34–35, 99–107, 217 call, see call options delta and, 107, 108 losses and quick approval processes for, 103 put, 46, 99, 106, 111–12, 148 Robinhood and, 34–35, 102–4, 106, 108–9 Options Clearing Corporation, 102 P Pagel, Michaela, 235 Palantir Technologies, 120 Palihapitiya, Chamath, 143, 144, 152–53, 155, 157–58, 160, 164, 212, 234, 246, 253 Palm, 84 PalmPilot, 84 Pao, Ellen, 38 Paperwork Crisis, 49 Parker, Sean, 38 payment for order flow, 10, 33, 153, 196, 206–9 Penn National, 57 penny stocks, 60, 120, 133, 166, 167 Permit Capital, 223 Pershing Square Holdings, 56 Pets.com, 90 PetSmart, 89 Pew Research, 71 Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, The (Hirst), 7 Piggly Wiggly, 78–79 PiiQ Media, 166 PIMCO, 216 Plotkin, Gabriel, 41, 56, 67, 73, 80, 85, 86, 95–96, 110–12, 114–15, 116, 122, 123, 129, 130, 133, 140, 146, 148, 157, 158, 161, 191, 197, 213–14, 217, 218, 227, 240, 246, 250, 253 at congressional hearing, 6–11 Porsche, 77 Portnoy, Dave, 57, 152–55, 158–59, 161, 181, 188–89, 212 Povilanskas, Kaspar, 195 Pruzan, Jonathan, 219 Psaki, Jen, 192 Public.com, 196, 207, 209 pump and dump, 163 put options, 46, 99, 106, 111–12, 148 Q Qualcomm, 46 R RagingBull, 163 Random Walk Down Wall Street, A (Malkiel), 253 Raskob, John J., 150–52, 154, 156 Raytheon, 153–54 RC Ventures LLC, 114 Reagan, Ronald, 156, 234 Reddit, xi, xii, 11–12, 19, 22, 23, 25, 36–39, 41, 42, 107, 122, 125, 162, 164, 199 founding of, 37–38 Gill’s influence on, 141–42; see also Gill, Keith; WallStreetBets karma on, 47, 141–42 mechanics and demographics of, and GameStop, 37 offensive subreddits on, 38 r/ClassActionRobinHood, 196 r/GMEbagholders, 140 r/investing, ix, 46 r/wallstreetbets, see WallStreetBets Super Bowl ad of, 12 Volkswagen squeeze and, 78 Reddit Revolution, xv, 41, 42, 75, 99, 152, 170, 192, 206, 211, 219, 220, 230, 246, 261 see also GameStop, GameStop short squeeze; WallStreetBets rehypothecation, 80, 92 reinforcement learning, 35 Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Lefèvre), 78 Renaissance Technologies, 237 retail trading, xiii, xiv, xvi, 4, 7, 9–14, 49, 56–59, 63–64, 66, 67, 81, 98, 140–41, 143, 169–70, 178, 181, 183, 186, 194, 218, 237, 238, 244, 247 retirement accounts and pension funds, 5, 13, 27, 31–32, 41, 69, 76, 77, 81, 171, 182, 234, 235, 245, 252, 255, 256 Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 135–36 RiskReversal Advisors, 192 Ritter, Jay, 63, 65 Roaring Kitty (Gill’s YouTube persona), 2, 18, 45, 48–49, 92, 130, 133, 144, 171, 174–75, 191, 211, 213 Roaring Kitty LLC, 171 Robinhood, xi, xiii, xv, 4–6, 13–14, 19, 22–35, 41–42, 50, 53, 55, 57, 61, 66, 70, 81, 98, 139, 141, 153, 154, 157, 158, 161, 176, 178, 183, 184, 187–90, 193, 194, 195–210, 212–13, 219, 237–38, 243, 245, 246, 259 account transfer fees of, 54 average revenue per user of, 66–67 Buffett on, 240–41 call options and, 97–98 Citadel and, 10, 11 clearinghouse of, 187 commissions and, 49, 50 customer loan write-offs of, 205 daily average revenue trades of, 59 daily deposit requirement of, 205 former regulators hired by, 239–40 founding of, 3, 23–25, 90 funding crisis of, 187–88, 193, 198, 203, 205–6 gamification and, 29–31 Gold accounts, 32, 58, 97, 202 growth of, 25–26, 50 herding events and, 238 Hertz and, 61 hyperactive traders and, 193, 202, 207, 236 initial public offering of, 200–201, 219 Instant accounts, 32 Kearns and, 103–4 lawsuits against, 196 margin loans of, 58–59, 205 median account balances with, 50, 54 options and, 34–35, 102–4, 106, 108–9 payment for order flow and, 10, 33, 196, 206–9 revenue from securities lending, 73 risky behavior encouraged by, 202–3 Robintrack and, 53, 61 SPACs and, 64 stimulus checks and, 56 Super Bowl ad of, 28, 30, 200 technical snafus by, 53–54 Top 100 Fund and, 61 trading restricted by, 187–89, 194, 195–200, 203, 206, 209 valuation of, 49 WallStreetBets and, 22–23 wholesalers and, 33–35, 49, 104, 106 Robin Hood (charitable foundation), 196–97 robo-advisers, xv, 27, 257–58 Betterment, 27, 54, 183, 193, 242, 257, 258, 261 SoFi, 27, 56, 57, 158 Rockefeller, John D., 9 Rodriguez, Alex, 64 Rogers, Will, 163 Rogozinski, Jaime, 23, 39, 46, 50, 53, 55, 70–71, 97, 122, 138, 144, 190, 231 Roper, Barbara, 29–30, 35, 54, 185, 241 Rozanski, Jeffrey, 46 Rukeyser, Louis, 156 Russell 2000 Value Index, 125, 191 S S3 Partners, 76, 81, 130, 133, 170, 217 SAC Capital Advisors, 7, 110 Sanders, Bernie, 65–66, 198 S&P (Standard & Poor’s), 83 S&P Dow Jones Indices, 70, 254 S&P 500, 76 Sanford C.

How Money Became Dangerous
by Christopher Varelas
Published 15 Oct 2019

The problem was that the structures, timing, and valuations of these startups were all dependent upon assumed growth and the execution of ambitious business plans, and those assumptions and executions often weren’t reasonable or achievable. One example of many was the perfect catastrophe of pets.com, which sold retail pet supplies. The company launched in early 1999 and found quick success, mainly through ultra-aggressive advertising campaigns and by offering its products for a third of the price at which it had purchased them, with free shipping. The management team running pets.com gambled that if they could convince enough people to begin buying pet goods online, then they could capture adequate market share—even while losing money on every sale—to establish themselves as a viable company.

…

Yet they pressed on, spending lavishly to erect a “falloon” of their sock-puppet mascot (a thirty-six-foot-high balloon attached to a float) and entering it in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, then purchasing a Super Bowl ad for $1.2 million, even as the company hemorrhaged money. Seventeen days after the Super Bowl, they had a successful IPO on the Nasdaq at $11 per share. Less than nine months later, the stock bottomed out at nineteen cents, and they liquidated all assets and went out of business. The entire meteoric run of pets.com—from launch to falloon to Super Bowl to IPO to handing in its keys—spanned barely more than two years. There was a gold rush atmosphere in the fledgling days of the internet boom, and indeed it evoked memories of the first California gold rush, which was its own sort of bubble. Exactly a century and a half earlier, gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada by a former carpenter from New Jersey.

…

., 4, 312–19, 323–28, 330–36, 342–45, 351–52, 365 Citron in, 315–20, 324, 326, 343–45, 352, 367 pension system in, 345 Project Robin Hood in, 331–33 Orange County Register, 315 Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA), 334–35 Orwell, George, 210 Osnos, Evan, 306, 307 other line, see privilege ownership, asset division and, 246 Oyster Bay golf outings, 134–36 PAIX (Palo Alto Internet Exchange), 223, 228 Partinoli, Dave, 185–86 Patriot Bank, 372–73 Paul, Jake, 282–83, 295, 299, 301–2, 305 Paul, Logan, 282–84, 293–96, 299–303 PayPal, 233, 307 Pendergrass, Kristina, 336 pension systems, 335–39, 353–54, 359 accountability and, 369 in Orange County, 345 oversight or review board for, 366–67 in Stockton, 335–36 Penthouse, 244 PeopleSoft, 261 Perez, Monalisa, 303–4 pets.com, 229–30 PewDiePie, 304–5 Pfefferman scandal, 31 phone minutes: as currency, 245 see also prepaid calling cards Podesto, Gary, 320, 321 pooling, 170–72, 176 pornography, 218, 219, 233, 244 Danni’s Hard Drive site, 226, 227, 231–33 portfolio insurance, 37 poverty, 349 Predators’ Ball, 93–94 Predators Ball, The (Bruck), 93, 94 prepaid calling cards, 220–21, 223, 245, 246 SmarTalk, 218, 221–23, 244 preppers (survivalists), 305–8 Pretty Woman, 98–103, 106 Prince, Chuck, 208–10, 211 private companies, 177 Private Jet Studio, 303 privilege, 280–310, 362 air travel and, 299–300 Disneyland and, 289–90 education and, 291–92 extended across generations, 291 healthcare and, 291 social media influencers and, 283–84, 291–99, 301–3, 305 Project Passion culture committee, 204–6, 211, 264–65, 365–66 Project Robin Hood, 331–33 Purcell, Tom, 133, 325 Purpdrank, Jerry, 295 quarterly earnings expectations, 177–78 of Lucent, 194 of U.S.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

The splashier the brand, the greater the public relish in its fall. Exhibit A in this regard was Pets.com, online purveyor of cat food and doggie toys, which had gone public at the tail end of the boom with a valuation of close to $300 million. It threw most of its money into marketing, saturating television airwaves with ads featuring a canine sock-puppet mascot who bantered with pets and crooned Blood, Sweat & Tears to a mailman (“What goes up, must come down . . .”). And come down it did—less than a year after the Pets.com puppet appeared as a float in the 1999 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and 268 days after its IPO, the dot-com retailer shuttered for good.

…

The commander-in-geek was out of a job, and the Valley’s brief love affair with Washington sometimes seemed like it never happened. * * * — For entrepreneurs and investors who had ridden tech’s boom-and-bust cycle for decades, however, times were bleak, but endurable. The boom this go-round had been so long-lived, and so enormous, that the Valley remained larger and richer even after the market crashed and burned. Pets.com and its peers might have bitten the dust, but Internet retail sales continued their steady upward climb. People had gotten comfortable with buying things online, and they weren’t turning back. Four years of fevered deal-making had made rich investors even richer, even if billions of dollars in paper wealth had evaporated overnight.

…

Zach Schiller, “Morgenthaler Scores in IPO,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 4, 2000, C3; Alex Berenson, “Stocks End Gloomy First Quarter,” The New York Times, March 31, 2001, C1; Burt McMurtry, interview with the author, October 2, 2017; Ann Hardy, interview with the author, September 19, 2017. 4. Mike Tarsala, “Pets.com Killed by Sock Puppet,” MarketWatch, November 8, 2000, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sock-puppet-kills-petscom, archived at https://perma.cc/T6WU-HKW5 [inactive]. Also see Jennifer Thornton and Sunny Marche, “Sorting through the dot bomb rubble: how did high-profile e-tailers fail?” International Journal of Information Management 23, no. 2 (April 2003): 121–38. 5.

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms
by Jeffrey Bussgang
Published 31 Mar 2010

The Internet revolution resulted in an explosion in entrepreneurship, and the amount of venture capital investment in start-ups climbed from $10 billion in 1996 to nearly $100 billion in 2000. Average fund returns exploded to 30-50 percent per year during the first half of the 1990s and climbed even from there as the IPO market seemed to accept companies on concepts alone. For example, Pets.com, an online community for pet lovers, went public in February 2000. The IPO resulted in a $300 million valuation. The only problem was that the company had negligible revenue and no sustainable business model. It went out of business in November 2000, less than a year later. Since the Internet bubble burst, the VC industry has rationalized.

…

See Global venture capital Overture Page, Larry Paley, Eric background information Brontes 3D, development of pitch to VC selling Brontes 3D 3M, role at Parker, Randy Participation feature capped participation full participation, example of nonparticipation option waterfall calculations PayPal Pelz, Bryan Perkins, Kleiner, fund size Pets.com Pincus, Mark blog of on control elements on making mistakes on VC/entrepreneur match Pitch assessing VC for and deal flow and eccentric entrepreneurs entrepreneurial team evaluation of entrepreneurs, assessing from experiment to company example importance of networking toward VC overselling, avoiding rejection by VCs risk, presenting to VC rushed decision making, avoiding time allowed Upromise, example Polaris Venture Partners.

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs
by Andy Kessler
Published 1 Feb 2011

My host paused and smiled and continued, “And then, with magic, companies start to make money, profits. They cut—how you say—fat?” as he grabbed his belly, “and stocks go up and they get more money to grow.” MARKETS GET A bad name—stock markets any way. Mostly because they are so volatile and do unexplained things—like going up when bad news comes out, putting a huge value on Pets.com, and crashing precipitously every once in a while. No doubt, the stock market trades to inflict the maximum amount of pain. If everyone thinks it’s going to go up, it’s sure to drop. Why is that? Well, the market measures sentiment every day, and figures out what everyone thinks, a consensus if you will, and for the most part prices that into the market.

…

Then the credit crisis and a Lehman Brothers bankruptcy sent the market into a free fall, bottoming out at 6,547 only seventeen months later. Contrast this with a decade earlier, when the dot-com-laden NASDAQ peaked at 5,048, only to bottom coincidentally on October 9, 2002, at 1,114. Back then, companies like Pets.com were going to fundamentally reshape the economy in the new millennium into a Kool-Aid-induced nirvana of spectacular growth and well-being. Or something like that. No one would blame you for thinking the market is a textbook delusional paranoid schizophrenic, not knowing the difference between the real and the unreal.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

In August 2000, The Guardian wrote that Flooz had a chance of realizing “Hayek’s dream of companies challenging governments for the right to issue money,” referring to Friedrich Hayek, the great libertarian economist. Those two companies wouldn’t run into serious trouble until the end of the year. Few noticed the crash, in fact, until the fall, when the first dot-coms started running out of money. Pets.com announced, suddenly, that it was insolvent, the launch parties grew scarcer, and tech workers began nervously checking a new parody news site, FuckedCompany.com. But Thiel had noticed. In fact, almost as soon as he’d raised the $100 million and just before the bubble began to burst, he disappeared.

…

“The PayPal Mafia philosophy became the founding principle for an entire generation of tech companies,” said McNamee. * * * — even so, in late 2000, Thiel wasn’t thinking about moving fast and breaking things. The tech crash was well underway, and he was thinking about surviving. If Thiel wanted to avoid the fate of companies like Pets.com, he desperately needed to reduce PayPal’s losses, which meant dealing with fraud. Criminals had begun to notice that the company’s growth hacks—one of which was its decision not to verify users’ identities when they opened an account—had made it an ideal place to launder money stolen from victims of identity theft.

…

Army and, 234–35, 258–59, 284 Wolfe Schiff appointed to board of, 312 Palin, Sarah, 184 Palm, 51 PalmPilot, 50–52, 58 Pan, Yu, 53 parabiosis, 325–27, 329, 330, 335 Paris Climate Agreement, 261, 264 Parker, Sean, 106–9, 112, 119–20, 126, 134, 150, 159, 160 Parscale, Brad, 246 Path, 164 Patriot Act, 112, 116 Patterson, Daniel, 97, 99 Paul, Rand, 183–86, 221 Paul, Ron, 82–83, 134, 177–86, 277 2008 campaign of, 134, 178 2012 campaign of, 177–86, 226 Paul, Terry, 149 Paulson, John, 132 PayPal, viii, xii–xiii, xvi, 51–54, 56–61, 63–65, 68–74, 75–92, 94–96, 100–102, 105, 109, 112, 114, 119–21, 126, 132, 135, 137, 146, 147, 175, 192, 208, 211, 213, 218, 224, 250, 271, 292, 298, 302 eBay and, 56, 59, 64–66, 70, 80–81, 84–85, 147, 274 eBay’s acquisition of, xii, 76, 88–91, 105, 108 fraud and, 64–65, 69–71, 73, 78–82, 112–14 gambling and, 81–83 IPO of, 86–88, 90, 95, 96, 109 political action committee of, 83–84 porn and, 81, 82, 86 World Domination Index of, 59–61, 76 X’s merger with, 65–67, 70–73 PayPal Mafia, xiii, xvi, 77, 121, 143, 161, 172, 211, 333, 335 PayPal Wars, The (Jackson), 96, 121 Pearson, Todd, 53, 60, 81, 83–84 Pell, Barney, 23, 120, 169 Pence, Mike, 242, 257, 310, 322 Perino, Dana, viii Pesca, Mike, 137 Pétain, Philippe, 328 Peterson, Jordan, 278 Petraeus, David, 215 Pets.com, 68, 78 Petty, Richard, 98–99 Pichai, Sundar, 263, 288 Pixar, 75 Places (Google), 274 Plaxo, 106, 119 Poindexter, John, 115–16, 152 political correctness, 35, 99, 142, 239–40, 270, 278, 282, 321 Politico, 177, 332 Poo-Pourri, 180 pornography, 81, 82, 86, 314 Portal, The, 278 Portman, Rob, 332 Postal Service, U.S., 265 Pound, Ezra, 335 Powerset, 120 Predator drone, 152 preppers, 208, 307 presidential election of 2008, 135 Paul in, 134, 178 presidential election of 2012, 182–83 Paul in, 177–86, 226 presidential election of 2016, xi–xii, xvi, 182, 183, 184, 186, 221, 223–26, 233 Cambridge Analytica and, 215, 220, 323 Facebook and, 299, 323 Russian collusion in, 301 Trump in, xi–xii, xvi, 41, 220, 221, 223, 226–27, 229, 230, 233–40, 241–49, 259, 299 presidential election of 2020, 265, 300, 319–22 Capitol attack and, 322–23 voter fraud allegations in, 319–20, 322 Priebus, Reince, 249, 257 privacy, 80, 113, 116 Palantir and, 116–17, 119 private equity, 212 Project Dragonfly, 288–89 Project Maven, 290 Project Veritas, 298 Pronomos Capital, 175 Property and Freedom Society, 231 Prospect, 31 Protect Ohio Values, 332 Proud, James, 167 Pushkin Industries, 160 Putin, Vladimir, 200, 266 QAnon, 265, 300, 322, 332 Quayle, Dan, 82 Quillette, 231 Rabois, Keith, 33–37, 40, 53, 82, 126, 203, 315–16, 330 racism, 14, 134, 186, 196, 197, 203, 246, 261 see also white supremacists, white nationalists RAICES, 287 Rand, Ayn, xiv, xvii, 19, 77, 129, 131, 137, 174 Atlas Shrugged, 53 The Fountainhead, 176 rape, 35–36, 41, 200 Rattner, Steve, 212 Ravikant, Naval, 246 Raytheon, 147, 259, 284 Reagan, Ronald, 4, 15, 17, 19, 30, 38, 60, 115, 250 Reaganomics, 15 Reagan Presidential Foundation, 24 Reason, 181 Recode, 230–31 Reddit, 202–3, 296, 330 Redford, Robert, 98 Red Pill, The, 277–78 red pilling, 176–77 Rees-Mogg, William, 175 The Sovereign Individual, 175, 208–9 Republican National Convention (2012), 182–83, 195–96 Republican National Convention (2016), 236–40 Thiel at, xi, 226, 237–40, 241, 243, 248, 258, 295 Republican Party, x, xi, 4, 184, 313, 314, 320, 328, 330 antitrust law and, 281 gay rights and, 177 Rand Paul and, 185 Ron Paul and, 83, 178, 181, 185 Reider, Jon, 31 Renaissance Technologies, 99 Revolution PAC, 179 Reynan, Jack, 40 Rice, Condoleezza, 42, 312 Robbins, Chuck, 260 Robert A.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 6 Mar 2012

This trend is especially odd when you consider that the economic expansion in question was substantially driven by housing investment. What’s strange here is that you normally expect an investment boom, even a bubbly one, to be driven by some genuinely new innovation. The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s led to some stupid ideas (Pets.com) and to the overbuilding of fiber-optic cables, but the Internet was a real advance over previous communication technology and one from which we continue to benefit. American housing, by contrast, is mostly characterized by technology retrogression. We know how to fit large numbers of people into comfortably sized homes on small plots of land.

How to Kick Ass on Wall Street
by Andy Kessler
Published 4 Jun 2012

So in effect, banks operate under another societal bargain, we allow them to create money, under the supposed watchful eye and quasi control of the Federal Reserve, which creates money supply, which lets the rest of us to go about our business and grow the economy. Unfortunately, this shadow banking system was also creating money supply, but outside the reach of regulators to control it. Which ended up being a problem. Because it is so easy to misallocate capital. Investors are human and prone to spasms of momo-isms. Momentum investing. I’ll invest in Pets.com because dotcom stocks only go up (because there wasn’t much liquidity and every growth fund piled in). I’ll make take on another sub-prime loan derivative in my portfolio because home prices can’t go down, (because the Fed is so accommodative with low interest rates and this whole housing finance monstrosity is too big to fail, or so went the thinking.)

Heads I Win, Tails I Win
by Spencer Jakab
Published 21 Jun 2016

Stocks rose by nearly 10 percent, but investors lagged that by six percentage points, probably for two reasons. It was a very volatile month that saw technology stocks peak, but also an era during which many investors had abandoned so-called old-economy stocks that still made up a big chunk of the benchmark S&P 500 stock index. It was a bad time to own Cisco or Pets.com but a pretty decent one to own, say, Pfizer or Ford. There’s a reason that five of the seven worst months were bad ones for the market rather than good ones. Losing money hurts in two ways—financially and psychologically. The pain of a loss has been shown to be far worse than an equivalent monetary gain, a concept called prospect theory that won its cocreator, psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize in Economics.

…

In fact, they made a fool out of the smartest person almost anyone has known. No less a genius than Isaac Newton took a bath in a speculative mania. He even sold for a nice gain but jumped back in near the peak. It was called the South Sea Bubble, and at one point it was worth about five times all the money in Europe. And you thought Pets.com was loony! “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people,” said Newton at the time. One definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Burned by a previous round of poor timing, for example, we find it hard to let go and allow the ebb and flow of the market to take over.

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market
by Daniel Reingold and Jennifer Reingold
Published 1 Jan 2006

This was because Reg FD made it no longer acceptable to do a slow leak à la MCI in the old days. A Week from Hell By the Fall of 2000, it was obvious that what many people had believed was just another protracted episode of volatility was, in fact, a true market crash—at least on the NASDAQ, which had dropped 39 percent since its March 10 peak. Dot-coms such as Pets.com and Boo.com were in dire straits or had already gone under; layoffs had replaced luaus; and tech funding was rapidly drying up. But even though tech and telecom had in many ways become fully entwined, now the two paths seemed to be diverging, in my view. I had been cynical about many of these tech startups from the beginning, so I didn’t find the news of their demise particularly surprising.

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I’m sure he now wishes I’d been more negative on the stock at the time, not less. I certainly wish I had. There had been countless press stories romanticizing the stock market and the brilliant minds behind it, and now, as the indices began to sink into an unforgiving quicksand, the pendulum swung to the other extreme. First came the dot-com debacle. Pets.com was one of the first newly public American companies to go under, in November of 2000, with hundreds of others soon to follow. A bitterly funny Web site, Fuckedcompany.com, sprang up to spread the latest gossip about each failed dot-com and the number of layoffs associated with it. In a split second, the market psychology on these new companies switched from “anything is possible” to “nothing is real.”

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Orwell, George Outperform. See Accumulate rating over the Wall analysts’ improper use of Grubman’s use of proposed ending of Pacific Capital Group Pacific Telesis (PacTel) PaineWebber Palo Alto Research Center Pathnet Peek, Jeff pension funds Perella, Joe Peru Peter Kiewit & Sons Pets.com pheasant hunting philanthropy Pincus, Mark Portugal Telecom price-to-earnings ratio Prince, Charles (Chuck) private-to-public discount (private market value) privatization proprietary calls PT Indosat Puck, Wolfgang Purcell, Phil Putnam quarterly-earnings reports faking of at IDB stock prices and Quattrone, Frank earnings of federal investigation/indictment/conviction of Grubman’s negative press and influence of IPO share spinning and Reingold’s e-mail to Quinton, Adam Qwest Communications background of CEOs’ stock sales at congressional hearings on “culture of fear” at current CEO of Deutsche Telekom bid and as disastrous stock pick diversification of employee savings losses at finances of Internet and IPO and MCI vs.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
by Julian Guthrie
Published 19 Sep 2016

But at the end of the day, no one appeared to be building anything. In Peter’s mind, the competition would be real only when the hardware was real. In the same way Peter was jonesing for hardware, he was hustling for dollars. He was pitching his heart out, and here he was, in the middle of a dot-com bonanza, when wildly speculative companies including Pets.com and Webvan were taking in hundreds of millions of dollars in investment capital, and he was coming up empty handed, for something that could make history and launch an industry. To make matters worse, his keynote speaker for the XPRIZE gala had canceled at the last minute. Buzz Aldrin had phoned a few days before the event to say he couldn’t make it.

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Netscape had gone public five years earlier, Google had begun operating in a garage in Menlo Park two years earlier, and eToys had a value of $7.8 billion on its first day public in 1999. Idealab, founded by a small, wiry, constantly-in-motion engineer turned entrepreneur named Bill Gross, was worth $9 billion and comprised more than forty dot-com companies, including eToys, Pets.com, Friendster, NetZero, and CarsDirect. An inventor from an early age, Bill Gross had found inspiration for Blastoff from a new company called eBay. Bill had gone to the online auction site to try to buy a Moon rock, which he had dreamed about owning since he was eleven years old and transfixed by the Apollo 11 lunar landing.

…

Unwelcome surprises presented themselves at every corner. One engineer resigned, fed up with what he saw as unsubstantiated promises made to potential investors. Blastoff management was trying to hawk a product that engineers found illegitimate. Dot-com companies, meanwhile, were running out of cash or liquidating. Idealab’s Pets.com, with its popular sock puppet, had closed its doors and filed for bankruptcy. During a meeting in early November, Peter asked his team for support, as part of his feverish bid to save Blastoff from the same fate. But Peter got no sympathy. Blastoff’s avionics systems head, Doug Caldwell, told Peter in the meeting that he didn’t have the backing of engineers.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

(Nakamura 2001; Nakamura 2010). And in Paris, the OECD was actively thinking about frameworks to incorporate these wider immaterial assets (Young 1998). The excitement of the late 1990s dot-com bubble wasn’t to last. It turned out that making money from the new economy was harder than the investors in Pets.com and Enron had assumed. But the broader idea of investment in ideas, knowledge, and networks, whether enabled by new information technologies or not, endured. In the spring of 2002, with the high-tech NASDAQ index down 65 percent from its dot-com-bubble high, a group of economists began a project to think seriously and rigorously about measuring investment in the new economy.

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See MOOCs Matthews, Colin, 1–2 Maxjet, 162 Mazzucato, Mariana, 161, 168, 232 McAfee, Andrew, 30, 123 McDonald’s, 67 McKinsey & Company, 73, 135, 195 McKinsey Global Institute, 81 McLean, Andrew, 194 McNerney, James, 194 McNichols, Maureen, 204 measurement, of intangibles, 36–43, 46–49; and different types of investments, 43–46; future challenges in, 52–55 Mickey Mouse Curve, 78–79 Microsoft, 4–5, 7–8, 40, 175, 222–23; scalability of, 67, 102, 105 microwave ovens, 80, 81, 85, 239 Milanovic, Branko, 120, 124 Miles, David, 168 Milgrom, Paul, 194, 196 Mills, Les, 17–18, 21, 187, 239 Mills, Philip, 17 Mintzberg, Henry, 53 Miyagawa, Tsutomu, 42 mobile intangibles, 139–40, 248n4 Mokyr, Joel, 64 monitoring and management, 188–91 monopolies, 76, 78 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), 230 Moore, Lyndon, 132–33, 134 Moore’s Law, 30 Mowery, David, 226 Mukai, Kentaro, 42 mule-spinners, 126–27 multi-factor productivity, 98–101 Musk, Elon, 187, 198, 220 Myhrvold, Nathan, 152, 223 Mylan, 112, 113 Nakamura, Leonard, 41 Napster, 18 Nardelli, Robert, 194 national accounts, 20–21, 43, 51 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 38 National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, 154 Nature of Technology, The (Arthur), 80 neoliberalism, 119 network effects, 66 New Growth Theory, 66 Nightingale, Paul, 155 NIMBYs, 139, 150 Nohria, Nitian, 194 Nokia, 104 nonexcludable ideas, 72 non-rivalry, 66 obliquity, 161 Ocado, 23 Occupy Wall Street, 120 O’Connor, Sarah, 183 Office for National Statistics (ONS), 46 Oliner, Steve, 39 open innovation, 83–84, 103–4, 110 openness to experience, 141–42 option value, 72, 87, 175 oral rehydration therapy (ORT), 66, 67 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 5, 38, 41, 43, 52; on employment strictness, 32; on productivity gap, 96; on quality adjustment figures, 40 organizational development, 50–51 Other People’s Money (Kay), 205 Oulton, Nicholas, 41 ownership, of intangibles, 211–14 Parlophone records, 59, 61 Pasteur, Louis, 64 patents, 76, 153, 165, 213; blocking, 113–14 patent trolling, 78–79 Patientslikeme, 152 PayPal, 78, 184–85, 187 pensioners, 121–22 Pepsi Co., 49 Perez, Carlota, 146 Pets.com, 42 Pfizer, 31 Piketty, Thomas, 19, 118, 121; on capital accumulation, 124–25; on housing, 136–37, 139; on the income gap, 127–28 Pinch, The (Willetts),121 Pisano, Gary, 84–85 place, inequality of, 122, 128–29, 136–39, 249n3 populism, 122–23 Porter, Michael, 148 post-Fordist economy, 4 post-industrial future, 4 prescriptive knowledge, 64 Presley, Elvis, 61 Price, David, 129 producers, 20; and profitability explained, 97–101 production, 20–21 Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, The (Machlup), 38 productivity: of intangibles, 28–30, 95–96; labor, 96; profits and, 97–101, 103–7; and the ratchet effect, 195–96; total factor, 96, 98, 102, 107–9 profitability, 97–101, 103–7, 247n2 profits, and secular stagnation, 94–96 property rights, 153, 212 propositional knowledge, 64 public investment: challenges of, 231–34, 234–36; and public procurement, 226–28; in R&D, 33–34, 55, 77, 223–24; in training and education, 228–30 public policy, 208–9; challenges for, 209–11, 231–34; and cultivating synergies, 214–18; and financing for intangible investments, 218–21; and government-funded investment in intangibles, 223–30; and intangible inequality, 236–38; and ownership of intangibles, 211–14 public procurement, 226–28 Pumping Iron, 16, 17 purchases of investment assets, 47 Purposeful Company project, 220 Quarterly Acquisitions and Disposals of Capital Assets Survey, 46 Radio Taxis, 82 Rajgopal, Shiva, 168 R&D (research and development): accounting treatment of, 202–4; cost of, 28, 41, 71; definition of, 244n4; effect on GDP of, 38, 43; government spending on, 33–34, 55, 77, 223–24; in-house, 47; as intangible investment, 7, 22, 28, 43, 44, 49; investment in, 169–74; Microsoft’s investments in, 5; returns on, 29, 31; scalability and, 60; and spillovers, 72–73 ratchet effect, 195 Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity, The (conference), 38 Rauch, Ferdinand, 49 Raytheon, 80 Reich, Robert, 133, 134 rent-seeking, 113 Ridley, Matt, 81 Rise and Fall of American Growth, The (Gordon), 93–94 Roberts, John, 194, 196 Roberts, Richard, 126 Roberts, Russell, 188 Rognlie, Matthew, 128, 137 Rolls-Royce, 31 Romer, Paul, 41, 62, 63, 66, 147 Rosen, Sherwin, 130 Rowling, J.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

By Silicon Valley standards, it meant we had the first ICO “unicorn.” But unlike other highly profitable $1 billion–plus unicorns—like Uber and Airbnb—Gnosis hadn’t sold a thing. Meanwhile, the ICO ideas kept coming—some brilliant, some way outside the box, some highly dubious, many that just seemed born of sheer opportunism. Comparisons to Pets.com, that iconic IPO of the dot-com bubble, were increasingly heard as a wild array of ICO press releases flowed into Paul’s inbox at The Wall Street Journal. REAL was a cryptocurrency-based real estate investment firm. Prospectors was an online multiplayer game set in the gold rush days; the game’s token was called, predictably, gold.

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They will hopefully foster fiduciary standards that hold issuers to account for objective assessments and for making disclosures and putting trusteeship control over the money they receive. If all this happens, the industry should start to look less like the Wild West. It may have to take some painful losses first, but that, too, could be cathartic. It’s worth remembering that it took the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the disappearance of Pets.com and friends to bring focus onto the real innovative breakthroughs of the Internet. Those failures paved the way for Google, Facebook, and Amazon. The Golden Age of Open Protocols While the flood of money into ICOs gets the attention, it’s the potential for a new economic paradigm, for new ways to value the preservation of public goods, that’s most compelling about the emerging token economy.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking
by Mark Bauerlein
Published 7 Sep 2011

It’s the ultimate alternative newsweekly, available on the Web or by e-mail, using the Internet to collect and syndicate content from sources that just couldn’t get published any other way. And it’s free. It’s not that the original Internet community went into some sort of remission. No, not all. While e-commerce customers were waiting for return authorization numbers for misordered merchandise from Pets.com, the participants in AOL’s chat rooms were exchanging tips on caring for their Chihuahuas. While DoubleClick was reckoning with plummeting click-through rates on its banner ads, the personal ads in the Nerve singles classifieds were exploding. While the value of many E*Trade portfolios was falling into the red, people who’d never sold anything before were making money peddling items through the auctions on eBay.

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Search Marketing Ovid Oxford English Dictionary Page, Larry PageRank Palin, Sarah Paperbacks Paradise Lost (Milton) Participatory media Pashler, Harold Patterson, Thomas Paul, Ron PayPal Penchina, Gil Perceptual coherence field Pergams, Oliver Perl Perry, Bruce Personalization Peterson, Lloyd Peterson, Margaret Petrilli, Michael Pets.com Pew Charitable Trust Pew Internet and American Life Project Phaedrus (Plato) Photoshop PHP PickupPal PimpMySpace.org Pinkerton, Brian Plastic Plato PlayStation Podcasts Poe, Edgar Allan Poets and Writers (magazine) Pokémon Politics campaign websites Digital Natives and fund-raising in Internet and Internet media for Net Geners and participatory media and social networking sites and television and Wales, J., and Pong (video game) Portraits Post-Gutenberg economics Postman, Neil Post-traumatic dissociative disorders PowerPoint Prensky, Marc The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor) Printing press Privacy Procter & Gamble Producer public Progressive Group of Insurance Companies Project Muse Protean self The Protean Self (Lifton) Proust, Marcel Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Wolf) Psychoanalysis schools Ptolemy Publishing Purohit, Sanjay Python Quake (video game) Ranadive, Vivek Rather, Dan Raymond, Eric RAZR phone Reading brain and deep expert Internet use and teenagers’ skills at time spend in Web use skills and Real-time feedback loops Real-time search Real World (television series) Reason Foundation Reflection Reformation Reintermediation Religious fundamentalism Republic (Plato) Research skills, Internet use and Research strategies Results-only work environment (ROWE) Reynolds, Glenn Rheingold, Howard Robinson, Marilynne Rock, Jennifer Romanticism Romantic solitude Rosen, Jay ROWE.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
by Alan Cooper
Published 24 Feb 2004

Entering your name, address, and credit card information three or four times, only to find that the site can't sell you everything you need and a trip to the atom-based store is necessary anyway, has the unfortunate effect of making the entire online sale completely unnecessary and undesirable. Today, simply lowering costs for the vendor doesn't guarantee success. When Pets.com sold dog food over the Internet, it didn't offer better dog food, and it didn't offer a customer experience better than you could get at the local brick-and-mortar pet store; it didn't offer any better information, intelligence, or confidence. All it offered was cheaper shipping, stocking, and selling— variable costs all—for Pets.com. It was a classic industrial-age-economy tactic of cost reduction that ignored the fundamental principles of the new economy. Far from being the first breath of a new economy, it was the last gasp of the old.

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum
by Camila Russo
Published 13 Jul 2020

There was TrumpCoin, PutinCoin, Dentacoin (“the blockchain solution for the global dental industry”), and the scathingly honest “Useless Ethereum Token,” which promoted its ICO as “the world’s first 100% honest Ethereum ICO,” saying it “transparently offers investors no value.” Its logo was a hand raising its middle finger and the website said, “seriously, don’t buy these tokens.” Still, people handed over almost $75,000 in its ICO. At the height of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, Pets.com became the poster child of irrational hype. In the middle of the ICO mania, Pets.com would have been one of the most conservative, well-grounded business ideas. And it wasn’t just the niche crypto enthusiasts buying these coins. Celebrities started promoting them, usually in exchange for pay, encouraging their fans to buy obscure digital tokens.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

Companies were starting to issue reversals of revenue statements, and investors began to realize that many once-lauded start-ups were more style than substance. Once the Fed decided to raise interest rates, the die was cast. The “easy money” had officially run out. DotComDoom.Com Everyone remembers companies like Pets.com going under, but there were thousands more companies that either folded or got acquired in the months and years following the downturn—eToys.com, Excite, Global Crossing, and iVillage, to name a few.15 Marimba, the company founded by Kim Polese, the mistress of Java whom I’d interviewed years before during my first trip to Silicon Valley, flamed out just a couple of years after Polese was named one of Time magazine’s “most influential Americans” in 1997.16 And in London, the aforementioned Boo.com shuttered its offices after spending a good chunk of its $125 million in capital on advertisements in glossy magazines, in-office champagne, first-class airfare, and lavish parties—while apparently neglecting to invest in building a site that actually worked.

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What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, a book about the role of Silicon Valley in our bifurcated economy. “But in another way, it reflects the financialization of the tech sector. Jawbone rode a wave of enthusiasm that was ultimately speculative in nature and reflective of the ‘tulip’ quality of the tech market right now.”23 It seems not so much has changed since 2000, when start-ups like Pets.com were able to go public and jack up share prices even as they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Yes, the digital ecosystem has since grown, changed, and deepened. And yes, today it is harder for companies to receive funding just by sticking .com behind their names. But now, as then, you do not necessarily need profits—or even paying customers—to draw investor interest.

Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
by Steve Krug
Published 2 Jan 2000

And sadly, Apple couldn’t resist muddying the metaphorical waters by using the same drag-to-trash action to eject diskettes—ultimately resulting in millions of identical thought balloons saying, “But wait. Won’t that erase it?” Many sites have started using tabs for navigation. www.catalogcity.com www.drugstore.com mitsloan.mit.edu And… 800.com Amazon.com Beyond.com bn.com Borders.com Buy.com CDNOW eToys.com Fatbrain.com Fidelity.com LandsEnd.com Pets.com Quicken.com Schwab.com Snap.com ToysRUs.com I think they’re an excellent navigation choice for large sites. Here’s why: > They’re self-evident. I’ve never seen anyone—no matter how “computer illiterate”—look at a tabbed interface and say, “Hmmm. I wonder what those do?” > They’re hard to miss.

The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments
by Pat Dorsey
Published 1 Mar 2008

Great doughnuts, but no economic moat—it is very easy for consumers to switch to a different doughnut brand or to pare back their doughnut consumption. (This was a lesson I had to learn the hard way.) Or how about Tommy Hilfiger, whose brands were all the rage for many years? Overzealous distribution tarnished the brand, Tommy clothing wound up on the closeout racks, and the company fell off a financial cliff. And of course, who can forget Pets.com, e Toys, and all the other e-commerce web sites that are now just footnotes to the history of the Internet bubble? More recently, the ethanol craze is an instructive example. A confluence of events in 2006, including high crude oil prices, tight refining capacity, a change in gasoline standards, and a bumper crop of corn (the main input for ethanol), all combined to produce juicy 35 percent operating margins for the most profitable ethanol producers, and solid profitability for almost all producers.

The Firm
by Duff McDonald
Published 1 Jun 2014

The third: While the firm would never admit as much, under Gupta, McKinsey began working for just about anyone with a fat bank account and a checkbook. From the days of James O. McKinsey, the whole idea had been that McKinsey could secure its place at the top of the consulting pyramid by working only for companies at the top of the corporate pyramid. That policy went out the window when the likes of Pets.com and eB2B commerce—firms well below McKinsey’s long-held standard of quality—came calling. The firm had a thousand e-commerce assignments at the height of the madness. The fourth: The firm’s cherished culture of dissent was smothered under an “everything is good” attitude engendered by the sheer amounts of money being made.

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See also directors, McKinsey; specific person Pascale, Richard, 149 A Passion for Excellence (Peters), 152 Patsolos-Fox, Michael, 273, 274 Patton, Arch, 65–66, 120, 121, 128–29, 155–56 Peace Corps, 327 Pearl, David, 208 Pearson, Andrall, 121, 303 Pechiney, 79 Pemex, 103 Pendleton Dudley, 46 PepsiCo, 148, 182, 303 Perez, Javier, 238 Perkins, Tony, 228 personalizing of McKinsey, 275 personnel committees, McKinsey, 121 Perspective on McKinsey (Bower), 275 Perspectives (BCG), 111, 116 Pet Quarters, 265 Peters, Tom, 66, 136, 146–55, 164, 180, 239, 308 petroleum industry, 93 Pets.com, 266 Petters Group, 291 Philip Morris, 64, 92–93 Pichette, Patrick, 327 Pinault, Lewis, 190, 212, 251 Ping An Insurance, 229 Planning Research Corporation, 118 PlaNYC, 283 Polaroid, 233 political appointments, 67 Polli, Rolando, 162 Poor Charlie’s Almanack (Munger), 334 The Pope of Wall Street (Coleman), 62 Porter, Michael, 90, 164, 198 Porter, Suzanne, 207 The Power of Productivity (McKinsey & Co.), 156 practice bulletins, Gluck’s, 141, 278 practice information system/practice-development network, 142–43 The Practice of Management (Drucker), 55 Price Waterhouse/ PricewaterhouseCoopers, 199, 200, 322, 328 Principal Candidate Evaluation Committee (McKinsey), 105 principals, McKinsey: compensation for, 208, 233 promotions to, 208 Principles of Accounting (McKinsey and Hodges), 21 Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor), 26 private equity firms, 232 Proctor & Gamble, 53, 211, 224, 295, 311, 314, 315, 316 Professional Standards Committee, McKinsey, 317 professionalism: Bower’s views about, 51–52, 68, 105, 260 Project Alpha, 145 Project Destiny (AIG-McKinsey), 293–94 Prudential, 307 public/private partnerships, 176 publicity: and advertising by McKinsey, 45–46 and impact of Kumar and Gupta cases on McKinsey, 324 and Matassoni as communications chief, 155 about McKinsey accomplishments, 218–19 and McKinsey relationship with the press, 156–57 McKinsey reluctance about, 76 and McKinsey self-assurance, 206 and McKinsey’s Condé Nast consulting, 279–80 publishing industry: McKinsey clients in, 279–81.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition)
by Burton G. Malkiel
Published 5 Jan 2015

Flooz.com launched a special offer to American Express platinum card holders allowing them to buy $1,000 of Flooz currency for just $800. Shortly before declaring bankruptcy, Flooz itself was Floozed when Filipino and Russian gangs bought $300,000 of its currency using stolen credit card numbers. • Consider Pets.com, a real dog if there ever was one. The company had a sock-puppet mascot that starred in its TV commercials and even made an appearance at a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Unfortunately, the popularity of its mascot did not compensate for the fact that it’s hard to make a profit individually shipping low-margin 25-pound bags of kibble.

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Standard & Poor’s 500, 179, 181 see also specific funds Nagel, Stefan, 250 NASDAQ, 80–81, 82, 109, 128, 254 National Cash Register, 48, 53 national income changes, as element in systematic risk, 224 National Student Marketing (NSM), 67–68, 69 “naughties,” 344, 411 New Economy, 241, 249 accounting fraud in, 93–95 Internet-driven, 79–97, 104–5 New Economy stocks, 172, 177 New England Patriots, 148 new investment technology, 26, 31, 189–228 alpha in, 219 beta in, see beta CAPM in, see capital-asset pricing model MPT in, see modern portfolio theory risk in, 190 new issues, 257, 318 caution with, 75 of Internet stocks, 84–87 of 1959–62, 57–59 of 1980s, 70–75 Newsweek, 57 Newton, Isaac, 47 New Yorker, 88 New York Post, 89 New York State Teachers Association, 384 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 56, 109, 144, 151, 397 Babson Break in, 51–52 speculation in, 48–55 New York Times, 91, 393 Nifty Fifty, 36, 68–70 NINJA loans, 101 Nobel Prize, 35, 183, 197, 209 No-Brainer Step, 379, 380–82 NO-DOC loans, 101 no-equity loans, 100 Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street, A (Lo and MacKinlay), 139 Nortel Networks, 83, 90, 161, 166 NSM, see National Student Marketing NTT Corporation, 76 nucleus theory of growth, 64 NYSE, see New York Stock Exchange odd-lot theory, 149 Odean, Terrance, 93, 234, 246, 256 O’Higgins, Michael, 150 Once in Golconda (Brooks), 49 “one-decision” stocks, 69 online brokers, Internet bubble aided by, 91–92 online investment advisers, 408 OPEC, 337 open-end funds, 402 operating expenses, 402 option premiums, 39 O’Shaughnessy, James, 150 Outlook (S&P), 393 overconfidence, 231, 232–35 overtrading, 234, 255–56 PalmPilot, 83 Paternot, Stephen, 86 P/BV ratios, see price-to-book value ratios P/E effect, 263 P/E multiples, see price-earnings multiples pension funds, 167, 182, 184, 303–4 P/E ratios, see price-earnings multiples performance, 65–68 of buy-and-hold strategy, 158 of common stocks (1970s), 340 of concept stocks, 65–68 of mutual funds, 66, 174–82, 398–400 vs. future results in mutual funds, 399, 401 Performance Systems, 68, 69 Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), 83 Peters, Thomas J., 233 Pets.com, 84 Philadelphia 76ers, 145 Phillips, Don, 400 Phoenix, University of, 169 Pittsburgh Steelers, 148 Polaroid, 68, 69, 161 Ponzi schemes: Internet investment as, 80, 242 of Madoff, 258–59 ZZZZ Best as, 74 portfolio management, 66, 160–61, 164, 170, 174–84, 261, 349–50, 351, 361–62, 366–67, 389, 398 see also “smart beta” Portfolio Selection (Markowitz), 197 portfolio theory, see modern portfolio theory positive feedback loops, 80 Pound, John, 253 PowerShares, 270, 281 Prechter, Robert, 151–52 present value, 32, 125n price-dividend multiples, 330, 340, 341, 343 price-earnings (P/E) multiples, 57, 64, 65, 126, 264, 274, 336, 344, 346–47, 394–95 of blue-chip stocks, 68 crash in (1970s), 340 cyclically adjusted (CAPE), 347, 387 of growth stocks, 121–23, 130–33, 406 of high-tech stocks, 81 inflation of, 64 performance and, 263, 396 see also performance, of common stocks (1970s); performance, of concept stocks Priceline.com, 83 price stability, 54 price-to-book value (P/BV) ratios, of stocks, 264, 270, 274 price-volume systems, 143–44 Price Waterhouse, 153 Princeton University, 161 probability judgments, 233–34, 238 Producers, The, 166 product asset valuation, 72 professional investors: limitations of, 162–63 profit-maximizing behavior, as argument against technical analysis, 116–17 profits, 339 in inflation, 339 measurement of, 339 profit-sharing plans, 304 Prohibition, 52 property taxes, 314 prospect theory, 243–45 prospectuses, warnings on, 59 PSI Net, 90 psychological factors in stock valuation, see castle-in-the-air theory; technical analysis Puckle Machine Company, 45 Puerto Rico, 404 purchasing power, effects of inflation on, 28–29, 125n, 307, 315 Purdue University, 82 Quandt, Richard, 140 quant, defined, 221n Quinn, Jane Bryant, 91 Qwest, 166 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 48, 53 railroad industry, 91, 96 RAND Corporation, 197 Randell, Cortes W., 66–68 random events, forecasting influenced by, 164–65, 176 random walk: defined, 26–28, 139, 140 difficult acceptance of, 145–46 fundamental conclusion of, 154 summarized, 35–36 random-walk theory, 105–6, 266–67 assumptions of, 190, 229, 230 fundamental analysis and, 182–84 guide for, 291 and housing bubble, 105–6 index funds and, 379–80 role of arbitrage in, 248–49 semi-strong form of EMH, 26, 182–84 strong (broad) form of EMH, 26, 182–84 technical analysis and, 137–41, 154–57 weak (narrow) form of EMH, 26, 140, 183 Raptor, 94 rate of return: after inflation, 338 for bonds, 194–96, 307, 315–21, 342–43, 344, 345 in CAPM, 213–19 for common stocks, 194–96, 307 compounded, 351 diversification and, 198–200 expected, see expected rate of return future events and, 30, 343–48 high, for bearing greater risk, 194–96, 212–13, 350, 408 investment objectives and, 306–13 negative, 196 for real estate, 313 rebalancing to, 360 risk-free, 215–18 “small caps” vs.

Hollow City
by Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg
Published 1 Jan 2001

The eviction of Edith Love fi-om the modest Ingleside house Brown owned allegedly took place so that he could run for election in that district rather than against erful Supervisor Mabel Teng, who lives in the (wealthier) district pow- where Brown currently resides. With help fi-om a homeless organization she contacted, Love found new a place to her deposit and other acts that She sary. later went public to say she job at to, in to her son, the eviction far crueler than neces- was not happy with the poorer part because the Pets.com — new neighbors made and that the reverend had pressured her had moved voluntarily rather than was Supervisor Leslie Katz tive made despite Brown's refusal to return to say that she neighborhood she had moved homophobic remarks live, evicted.^ — another Brown appointee who had got a lucra- is proposing an end run around Proposition M, the 1986 slow-growth initiative that limits new office space to a hardly sparse 950,000 square feet a year.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, in which the exuberance behind higher stock prices reflected an abiding belief that the first Web site retailers in every sector would win just by carving out a niche and marketing to it, makes the case. Neighborhood pet stores weren’t killed by Pets.com, no more than wedding planners were made redundant by OurBeginning.com, whose representatives joined Pets.com’s talking sock puppet among a host of overhyped Super Bowl XXXIV ads in 2000, but whose domain name has since passed to a Seattle day-care center. Remember also the Y2K threat, which reached its anticlimax weeks before that Super Bowl. We’ll never know whether it amounted to nothing because computer consulting firms successfully convinced everyone to upgrade their mainframes or whether they just brilliantly hyped a nonevent.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac
Published 2 Sep 2019

Private estimations of company values soared. Businesses with no revenues and enormous losses were valued at tens of millions of dollars. More than 4,700 companies went public from 1990 to the mid-2000s, many of which had no business doing so. After they hit the public markets, shares in the companies—from Pets.com (dog food delivery) to Webvan (grocery service)—initially skyrocketed. Investors trolled the markets for speculative new internet stocks while bankers cold-called fledgling internet companies to pitch them on going public, since bankers made fees on every IPO. Some companies were indeed good bets.

…

Uber and, 233–36, 255–56, 338–39 Palms Hotel, 7, 93 Palo Alto, California, 35, 36, 38, 40, 72, 105 Pape’ete, French Polynesia, 307–8 Paris, France, 84 Parker, Sean, 21, 121 Partovi, Ali, 92n Partovi, Hadi, 92n Paul, Sunil, 85–86 Paul, Weiss, 289, 294 Paulson, Henry, 33 PayPal, 170–71 Pennsylvania, 113 Perazzo, Steve, 338 Pets.com, 26 Pham, Thuan, 142–47, 153, 165, 201, 309 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 83, 114, 244, 245–46, 247 Philadelphia Parking Authority, 244, 245–46 Pishevar, Shervin, 179, 192–93, 315–16, 337 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 151, 184 Pixar, 35 Planet Hollywood, 10 Plouffe, David, xii–xiii, xvi, 115, 225 Poetzscher, Cam, 301 Politico, 128 Portland, Oregon, xi–xvii, xviii, 115, 243–44, 247 Portland Bureau of Transportation, xi Posados, Miguel, 338 “Preacher,” 336 Priceline, 27 Prodigy, 67 “Project Chauffeur,” 180–81 Pronto.ai, 333 Puff Daddy, 89 Pulp Fiction, 45 Qualcomm, 317 Quattrone, Frank, 67, 69–70 Quentin, 153–54, 155, 156, 157, 161, 245, 246 Quill, Mike, 204 Quince, 328 Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart & Sullivan, 234 Rancho Palos Verdes, California, 176 Rand, Ayn, 84, 120 Recode, 248–49, 262 Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 24, 26, 28, 29 Reddit, 42, 200 Red Swoosh, 28–30, 31, 33, 47, 74, 81, 106, 192n Richter, David, 301 The Rideshare Guy, 248 Rigetti, Chad, 215 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 134, 174 Ritz-Carlton Hotel, 292, 295, 296–300, 302, 304 Robb, Walter, 292 Romania, 170, 172 Ron, Lior, 181–82, 234 Rubenstein, Steven, 239n, 289, 289n, 295 Rumayyan, Yasir al-, 270–71, 272 Sacca, Chris, 57, 74, 78, 288, 293 Sacks, David, 300 Safe Rides Fee, 135–36 Salesforce, 201 San Bernardino, California, 162, 206 Sandberg, Sheryl, 201, 239n Sanders, Jeff, 324 San Francisco, California, xiii–xiv, 5–6, 27–28, 31–32, 40–41, 67, 85, 100, 107, 130, 160, 183.

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice
by Julian Guthrie
Published 31 Mar 2014

“We got rid of the cancer,” he said, “and now we can be a team.” 13 Redwood Shores, California Spring 2002 SITTING IN HIS eleventh-floor office in the bayside tidelands of Redwood Shores, south of San Francisco, Larry said to Safra Catz at Oracle, “I was beginning to think I should retire. Everyone has been telling me how great these companies like Pets.com and Webvan are. ‘Larry, don’t you know?’ they said. ‘All that matters is eyeball traffic and clicks.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but what about actually making money? What about that old-school idea of revenue?’” It was March and Oracle’s stock had plummeted to $7.70 a share from $45 a share, wiping out 80 percent of Larry’s net worth.

…

Oracle’s underlying business was strong—the company made over $800 million in operating profit and had a 35 percent operating margin in its second fiscal quarter—but the markets were crashing and Oracle’s stock price was crashing along with them. Nearly half of the Internet companies created since 1995 were gone, casualties of the dot-com bust, which wiped out an estimated $5 trillion in market capitalization. Pets.com began in February 1999 and closed in November 2000, after buying a $1.2 million Super Bowl ad and burning through $300 million in investment capital. Webvan, the Foster City–based grocery home-delivery service created by executives who had no experience in supermarkets—yet attracted funding from companies including Goldman Sachs, Benchmark Capital, Sequioa Capital, and Yahoo—filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after burning through hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a fleet of trucks, build automated warehouses, and expand aggressively nationwide.

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts
by David Gerard
Published 23 Jul 2017

“A Tour of the Ethereum Token Bubble”. 18 June 2017. (archive) [313] e.g., Emin Gün Sirer, Phil Daian. “Bancor Is Flawed”. Hacking, Distributed (blog), 19 June 2017. [314] “SNT Creation and Status Project Creation Conditions: Explanatory Note & Governance Terms”. status.im. (archive) [315] Edan Yago. “Ads on Taxis – Is EOS.io the PETS.com of ICO?” Twitter, 11 July 2017. [316] “EOS.IO Technical White Paper”. EOS.IO. (archive) [317] Red Li. “EOS Triples in 2 Days, Making Yunbi Top Tier Exchange With Over 230k BTC Volume”. 8BTC, 3 July 2017. [318] “Frequently Asked Questions”. EOS.IO. (archive) [319] “EOS Token Purchase Agreement”.

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive
by Dean Baker
Published 1 Jan 2011

Measured as a share of private-sector GDP, the financial sector more than quadrupled between 1975 and 2009.[84] The enormous expansion would be justifiable if it resulted in a better allocation of capital, so that promising start-ups, say, could more easily raise funds than they could in the 1960s. A better allocation of capital would also mean that hare-brained schemes like Pets.com or Webvan would be less likely to receive funding today than in prior decades. But neither seems to be the case, or at least not obviously enough to justify the quadrupling of the sector as a share of GDP. Moreover, productivity growth, the most direct measure of the rate of innovation, was more rapid in the 1950s and 1960s than in the last two decades.

Firefighting
by Ben S. Bernanke , Timothy F. Geithner and Henry M. Paulson, Jr.
Published 16 Apr 2019

Some executives worried about the breakdown of risk management, but those qualms could be expensive during the boom. As Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince observed in 2007: “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” Not all bubbles threaten the stability of the broader financial system. When the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s burst, investors in busted internet stocks like Pets.com lost their money, but there wasn’t much of a ripple effect, just a mild recession. The real problems emerge when bubbles are financed with borrowed money, especially when that money can run. And leverage can be alluring, because it’s the ultimate profit multiplier. If you spend $100 to buy an asset without leverage, then sell it for $120, your profit is 20 percent.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

In 2001 the conventional wisdom was that tech investment bubbles fuel mainly junk companies, so no one was surprised that year when the collapse of the dot-com bubble led to multiple spectacular flameouts, like Pets.com. Subsequently, the Harvard Business School professors Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf found that, compared to stock bubbles in other kinds of companies, tech bubbles are likely to fund more start-ups that fail but also more that go on to become extremely successful (judged by how much money they attract when they go public) and innovative (judged by how many patents they win).5 For every few dozen companies like Pets.com that went under in 2001, there was a pioneering survivor like Google or Amazon that would help make the United States much more productive.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

But if you’re a fan of those companies, I predict that pretty soon, you will. CHAPTER 11 MARKETING: RETHINKING THE FOUR P’S Quick—when I say marketing, what do you think of? I bet you visualize Super Bowl ads, or Don Draper from Mad Men. Maybe it’s the Apple 1984 commercial, or the Geico gecko. Or all those crazy dot-com commercials from 2000: the Pets.com sock puppet, the Webvan fleet. Loaded with VC cash, the marketing departments of all those companies decided to take all that money and do what they do best: advertise. Because that’s what you did if you were in marketing. You advertised. Back in the old days of doing business, there was a very good reason marketing departments thought this way.

Bulletproof Problem Solving
by Charles Conn and Robert McLean
Published 6 Mar 2019

The shape of the S will vary a lot depending on the reference class you select and particular reasons for faster or slower take up in your case. Charles led a successful start‐up in the early days of Internet adoption. At that time, many forecasters overestimated the impact of Internet penetration in the short term (think of Webvan or Pets.com), but underestimated adoption in the longer term of 10 to 15 years. It looks in hindsight very clearly to be a classic S‐curve. In 1995 fewer than 10% of Americans had access to the Internet. By 2014 it reached 87%. The S‐curve can take many specific profiles as Exhibit 5.2 shows. Like any heuristic, you don't want to apply this rigidly or blindly, but rather use it as a frame for scoping a problem.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
by Tim Sullivan
Published 6 Jun 2016

Competitive signaling can lead to perverse, even destructive outcomes for the companies involved. It might help explain why, in the year 2000, nineteen internet start-ups spent millions buying advertising time during the Super Bowl. It’s also telling that eight of the nineteen—including, famously, Pets.com, with its sock puppet mascot—no longer exist. Ironically, their efforts to signal they had the deep pockets and quality offerings that would allow them to be one of the survivors in the internet’s winner-take-all economy may have helped to drive these big spenders into bankruptcy.10 You might think that such a failure rate would discourage a repeat, but the trend is back: during the 2015 Super Bowl, start-ups, including Wix.com (a company that helps users build websites), and Loctite (a glue maker) spent $4.5 million for each thirty-second spot.11 Whether this all has the desired effect on someone in the market for a new truck or soft drink is another matter.

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation
by Chris Nodder
Published 4 Jun 2013

Spore top-10 game: NPD Group/Retail Tracking Service. 38% efficiency: Will Wright made this quote at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in July 2008. Create status differences to drive behavior Bruce Schneier: “E-Mail After the Rapture.” (schneier.com/blog). June 2, 2008. Retrieved February 2013. Eternal Earth-bound Pets: eternal-earthbound-pets.com. Bart Centre quote: Mike Di Paola. “Caring for Pets Left Behind by the Rapture.” Bloomberg Businessweek (businessweek.com). February 11, 2010. Retrieved February 2013. Emphasize achievement as a form of status Two clipped: Joseph C Nunes and Xavier Dreze. “The endowed progress effect: How artificial advancement increases effort.”

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

, 36-38,227 ideological fiinction, 38 Internet and, 24—26 lack of diversity and, 233 as neoUberahsm's you«55ance, 228 Utopian aspects, 37-38, 229-230 New Eras, history of, 6—8 new social movements, 179 New York City, 172 fiscal crisis, 228 income distribution, 103-104 Nike, 19,159,165 Norberg-Hodge, Helena, 171-173 North American Free Trade Agreement, 175 nostalgia nationalist, 169-174,182-183 for nonexistent Golden Age, 164 O'Neill, Paul, 233 occupational crowding, 94-96 occupations female-dominated, 95-96 future growth in, 71-74 Oliner, Stephen, 57 Orshansky, MoUie, 108-109 output, measuring, 58—59 outsourcing, 215 Pacioh, Luca, 17 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 115-116 Parenti, Christian, 77—78 paternahsm, 35 patriarchy, 165 pay. See income pensions, Enron-style, 35 Petras, James, 150,178 Pets.com, 196 phlogiston, 51 place, meaning of, 147-148 Plender, John, 35 Polanyi, Karl, 167 polarization, 29, 225; see also income distribution; wealth distribution pohtics of finance, 202-207 267 and income distribution, 79—81 market democracy, 22 polls New Economy, 31—32,231 poverty and, 110 Pope, Carl, 162 pop culture, stock market and, 187 portfolio investment, 176 Porto Alegre, 185 potential GDP, 47 poverty, 105-114 absolute vs. relative, 109—111 composition of the poor, 111-114 defining, over time, 106-109 global perspective, 129-130,133-141 historical perspective, 106,111—114 popular perceptions, 110 see also income distribution "poverty line," coinage of phrase, 237 Prins, Nomi, 196 privatization, 221,231 productivity 1960s enthusiasm, 8 acceleration in, accounting for, 56-62 and the business cycle, 47 competing estimates, 60-61 definitions, 41—42 and deflation, 228 and earnings, 45, 56 high-tech vs. rest, 52—54 historical perspective, 48 by industry, 49, 64—67 international comparisons, 41—42 labor, 41 measurement problems, 42—45, 58—60 multifactor (total factor), 41,45 historical perspective, 49 outsourcing and, 51-52 where it went, 56 and workload, 39—41 work hours, measuring, 67 profitability historical view, 203—204 MNCs and, 157 prosocial behavior, 76 protectionism, 220 public subsidy to private sector, 6 purchasing power parity, 131, 238 quabty changes, measuring, 43—45 declines in, 55-56 inputs, adjusting for, 58 Quattrone, Frank, 199 Qwest, 197 race educational attainment, 98—99 Gilder on, 12-13 wealth distribution and, 125—126 race to the bottom, 155 racism and nationahsm, 239 neo- or diflferentiahst, 172—173 Ramone, Joey, 190 Rand, Ayn, 15 Rapaille, G.

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis
by Kevin Mellyn
Published 30 Sep 2009

The business of funding new companies in their early days, or rather the business of turning ideas into businesses, is called venture capital. Its spiritual homes are Silicon Valley in California and Greater Boston in Massachusetts. It has given us EBay, Google, Amazon.com, and a host of biotechnology companies. It has also given us a host of financial dogs, including pets.com. At its best, venture capital fuels the creativity and A Tour of the Financial World and Its Inhabitants dynamism of the U.S. economy. Its only contact with the capital markets is when the venture capitalist, a private investor risking his or her own money, want to ‘‘cash out’’ one of their companies by having the broker dealers ‘‘bring it to market.’’

Dead Companies Walking
by Scott Fearon
Published 10 Nov 2014

But, as with Chemtrak’s management team, they hadn’t analyzed the thing that would make them money: the way people in the real world actually behave. This failure to account for real-life human behavior also brought down the most overhyped company of the dotcom bubble (besides perhaps the still unbelievable Pets.com), Webvan. If you aren’t familiar with the story, Webvan delivered groceries. Despite that modest premise, it managed to raise and then blow hundreds of millions of dollars in a few short years. I was not dumb enough to invest in Webvan. I was even dumber. I invested $50,000 of my own money in a copycat business, a small start-up in Texas called Groceryworks.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader
by Colin Lancaster
Published 3 May 2021

It ended with massive bailouts and something called quantitative easing (QE). We will get to QE. That’s the biggest thing going. The bubble all started in the late 1980s but really ramped in the 2000s, when the world moved away from rational thinking, away from Markowitz and modern portfolio theory to Pets.com. Alan Greenspan, the top guy at the Fed in those days, was there to drive the bubble even bigger. That’s when the central banks changed. At the time, it looked innocent enough. Greenspan gave us low interest rates. They dubbed it “lower for longer.” But this was really just lighter fluid on a fire.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

The internet search company instituted a twoclass share structure so investors could profit from but not determine its long-term strategic plans. This alternative view took a hit in 2000, when the tech bubble burst and trillions of dollars in valuations were lost in the span of a few months. Observers wondered how anyone could ever have believed that Pets.com’s electronic shop window was a viable business model and worried that the promise of the internet was mostly hype. Maybe the economist Paul Krugman’s prediction that the internet’s impact on the economy would be no greater than the fax machine was right.9 The massive infrastructure buildout of cell phone towers and fiber-optic cable crisscrossing the country certainly seemed like overkill, a waste of excitement and resources.

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover
by Katrina Vanden Heuvel and William Greider
Published 9 Jan 2009

Sales volumes are slowing, prices are flattening or even declining, mortgage demand is easing and the inventory of unsold houses is rising. So what’s next? Deflating the housing bubble is likely to take some time. The housing market isn’t like the stock market; it’s a lot slower, and its harder to dump one’s house in a panic than 1,000 shares of Pets.com. But removing the stimulus responsible for about half the economy’s recent growth has to have an effect. That effect could be anything from a mild drag on an already limp economy to a real financial crisis. What it is depends on whether other sectors pick up some of the slack—say, if businesses were to start hiring and investing rather than hoarding their plentiful cash or distributing it to their stockholders.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
by Eric Ries
Published 13 Sep 2011

He envisioned a new and superior retail experience. Swinmurn could have waited a long time, insisting on testing his complete vision complete with warehouses, distribution partners, and the promise of significant sales. Many early e-commerce pioneers did just that, including infamous dot-com failures such as Webvan and Pets.com. Instead, he started by running an experiment. His hypothesis was that customers were ready and willing to buy shoes online. To test it, he began by asking local shoe stores if he could take pictures of their inventory. In exchange for permission to take the pictures, he would post the pictures online and come back to buy the shoes at full price if a customer bought them online.

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff
by Clara Shih
Published 30 Apr 2009

It wasn’t until nearly a decade later that we began to realize and then slowly tap into the unique attributes of the Internet to do things that simply were not possible prior to the Internet: search engine marketing, user-generated content, automating manual business processes in Web applications, and allowing people to interact with those applications. It took a generation of visionaries, early adopters, and believers to make Web 2.0 a reality. In the process, companies came and went—Netscape, CompuServe, Webvan, Napster, Pets.com, to name a few. Nor should you expect that the kings of today’s era will reign in tomorrow’s era. More likely, the kings don’t see it coming, don’t want to see it coming, or see it coming but can’t get organizationally aligned around doing anything about it. This is a classic example of the innovator’s dilemma, a concept introduced by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen to describe the inability of most large companies to embrace radically new technologies because they are disruptive to the existing business.

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World
by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt
Published 30 Sep 2017

In the early days of the automobile, many car manufacturers failed, including ABC, Acme, Adams-Farwell, Aerocar, Albany, ALCO, American Napier, American Underslung, Anderson, Anhut, Ardsley, Argonne, and Atlas – and that’s just the As.3 In the realm of video games, Sears Tele-Games systems, Tandyvision, Vectrex, and Baily Astrocade all fell by the wayside when the industry contracted in 1983. When the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, companies like Boo.com, Freeinternet.com, Garden.com, Open.com, Flooz.com, and Pets.com went under, costing investors hundreds of millions of dollars. Biotech companies have a 90 percent failure rate: in recent years, Satori, Dendreon, KaloBios, and NuOrtho are among the large companies that have gone belly up. Most of those names are forgotten, so we don’t fully appreciate how many corpses litter the plains of innovation.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
by Claire L. Evans
Published 6 Mar 2018

Once Web enterprises figured out their business models and how to securely process credit cards, clicks turned to dollars, forging some of the most powerful companies in the world, companies that have since become titans in distribution, media, and even space travel. Commercialization changed the Web for everyone. It had an indelible effect on the kinds of sites being built, and on the nature of the content being distributed there: less “my name is Lisa and here’s my dog” and more Pets.com. Where Echo managed to remain community focused by charging for its service, one of the few ways that social platforms and content sites make money on the Web—and today, in social apps—is by turning their users into the product, selling demographic information and targeted ad space to advertisers.

Hatching Twitter
by Nick Bilton
Published 5 Nov 2013

Other times he hung out in the 550-foot-long park, an ovate patch of grass that looked like it belonged in front of the royal palace in London, not in San Francisco’s warehouse district. In the center of the park was a rickety old brown swing set. South Park had played a crucial role in the late nineties as home to many of the now-defunct start-ups that quickly wilted away after the technology bubble burst. Pets.com and other start-ups that had collectively squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on ridiculous parties, asinine salaries, and expensive TV ads met their timely demise overlooking South Park. It hadn’t always been the epicenter of tech. Before the start-ups had moved in, the park had been home to brothels, drug dealers, dive bars, and sordid hotels.

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe
by Greg Ip
Published 12 Oct 2015

The Fed, these critics said, should prick the bubbles to prevent a bigger disaster later on. Both times, the Fed refused. In the case of the Nasdaq bubble, that turned out to be a good thing. In those years, more than five hundred companies listed shares on the stock market including such memorable stinkers as pets.com (known for its sock puppet) and webvan, an online grocer that went bust less than two years after going public. Then there was Amazon.com, which went public in 1997. Amazon fascinated investors, but it bled money. Much of its strategy was based on selling books at knockdown prices and zero profits.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
by Michael Lewis
Published 1 Nov 2009

By this time the craze for Internet stocks was completely out of control and had infected the Stanford University medical community. "The residents in particular, and some of the faculty, were captivated by the dot-com bubble," said Burry. "A decent minority of them were buying and discussing everything--Polycom, Corel, Razorfish, Pets.com, TIBCO, Microsoft, Dell, Intel are the ones I specifically remember, but areyoukiddingme-dot-com was how my brain filtered a lot of it.... I would just keep my mouth shut, because I didn't want anybody there knowing what I was doing on the side. I felt I could get in big trouble if the doctors there saw I wasn't one hundred and ten percent committed to medicine."

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

Spice was a craving, not a necessity. “To limit their function to food preservation and explain their use solely in those terms,” the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes, “would be like calling champagne a good thirst quencher.” Were spices just a financial bubble, like Dutch tulips and Pets.com stock? Almost certainly not. To begin with, if spices were merely a bubble, it was the longest in the history of markets; it took almost two thousand years to burst. More importantly, the market price of spices like pepper and cinnamon was rarely influenced by second-order speculation: people driving up the price by betting that the price will go up.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 26 Mar 2013

Most ER docs and nurses get good short-term feedback (I either help the patient stop bleeding or I don’t) but bad long-term feedback, since they don’t see what happens to a patient once he or she leaves the emergency room (e.g., did something we did to stop the bleeding cause greater complications down the road?). The learning environment for new-product launches is wicked on all three dimensions. Feedback is unclear (perhaps Pets.com was a bad idea or perhaps it was just ahead of its time), it is delayed (often for months or years), and it is biased by the very act of prediction (classifying a launch as high priority or low has self-fulfilling ramifications for, say, its ad budget or the quality of the personnel on the launch team).

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
by Michael Lewis
Published 2 Oct 2023

The closer you got to Alameda Research, the less it seemed like a hedge fund and the more it resembled a dragon’s lair, stuffed with random treasures. The Forbes wealth analysts had always tried to keep things simple: your assets were worth only what other people were willing to pay for them. That approach had worked during the dot-­com bubble, when everyone could agree that even though Pets.com was ridiculous it was still worth $400 million, because investors were willing to buy it at that valuation. But with these new crypto fortunes, the Forbes approach to wealth only got you so far. What to do, for instance, with the Solana tokens Sam owned inside of Alameda Research? Hardly anyone knew what Solana was—­a new crypto­currency minted to rival Bitcoin—­much less how to value it.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 11 Apr 2005

The price of cocaine had been falling for years, and it got only cheaper as crack grew more popular. Dealers began to underprice one another; profits vanished. The crack bubble burst as dramatically as the Nasdaq bubble would eventually burst. (Think of the first generation of crack dealers as the Microsoft millionaires; think of the second generation as Pets.com.) As veteran crack dealers were killed or sent to prison, younger dealers decided that the smaller profits didn’t justify the risk. The tournament had lost its allure. It was no longer worth killing someone to steal their crack turf, and certainly not worth being killed. So the violence abated.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race
by Tim Fernholz
Published 20 Mar 2018

A lot of folks are interested in doing space now, either because they already owned a sports team or they weren’t into sports,” Garvey says. “We can argue whether it made sense or not. It was like, ‘Okay, if they want to spend their money, that’s why America is great.’” Bill Gross was a Caltech grad who had made billions off an incubator that invested in internet stock darlings like eToys, Pets.com, and Webvan. The latter, a grocery delivery concern, would come to epitomize the unrealistic business plans of the era, at least until a wave of start-ups—notably Amazon—embraced aspects of its model a decade later. Wealthy, and apparently moonstruck by the heady fumes of their digital riches, Bill and his brother Larry were disappointed by their inability to purchase moon rocks or lunar dust on eBay, or anywhere else, for that matter.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

Through the ages, virtually every potentially profitable new frontier opened up to investment has led to a speculative bubble, as investors have scrambled to tap into its promise only to stampede in retreat a few years later. A decade before the housing crisis we experienced the dot-com bubble. The NASDAQ index, heavy with technology stocks, quadrupled between 1996 and March of 2000. Drunk on information technology’s promise, people poured retirement savings into companies like Pets.com, which achieved fame, though never profit, on the strength of a cute ad with a sock puppet. In 2000, AOL could use its pricey stock to take over media goliath Time Warner, which had more than five times its revenue. By October of 2002 the NASDAQ was back where it had been in 1996. In 2010, Time Warner quietly spun off AOL for a tiny fraction of its price a decade before.

My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture
by Guy Branum
Published 29 Jul 2018

The summer before I went to law school, I was living at my parents’ house and had finally worked up the nerve to use the Internet to get naked photos of men. Some will rail against this broad presence of the salacious online, but I must respect it. The desire of people with dicks to look at the stuff that turns us on is a potent fuel that powered the Internet bubble that became Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune and the precipitous rise and fall of Pets.com. Yeah, stealing music is cool, but online porn is the stack of cinder blocks that built our current culture. And the thing is, in the long run, online porn is why I can get married in this country. It’s why we have an openly gay U.S. senator and a whole slate of Ryan Murphy productions on FX. In a history department, they teach you that the printing press changed Europe for centuries afterward.

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It
by Scott Kupor
Published 3 Jun 2019

CHAPTER 11 The Deal Dilemma: Which Deal Is Better? Now that we have a basic understanding of the major terms of a VC financing, let’s put it to use in a hypothetical fund-raising. Let’s evaluate a trade-off between two different financing options for our make-believe startup, HappyPets (yes, this is an homage to the famous bubble-era company Pets.com). In this scenario, we have set out to raise VC money and have had very successful meetings. We are lucky enough to get two term sheets. One term sheet is from Haiku Capital and the other is from Indigo Capital (all names have been changed). As we talked about in chapters 9 and 10, let’s evaluate both the economic and the governance terms, starting with the economic terms.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

Yet again, monetary easing, intended as a solution, fueled a bubble. The Nasdaq shot higher to the applause of investors posting huge gains. It was beyond time to remove the punchbowl by tightening access to credit, yet the Fed resisted doing so. By now, any stock in a company with any claim to a digital future was red-hot. Do you remember Pets.com and Webvan, or Worldcom and Global Crossing? With so many companies skyrocketing in paper value, the phrase “irrational exuberance” was coined by economist Robert Shiller. The dot-com craze popped in 2000, erasing three-fourths of the market value of technology stocks listed on the Nasdaq. By 2002, a time frame that included the deadly attack on the World Trade Center, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled by 43 percent.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond
by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar
Published 19 Oct 2017

Investors who early on saw potential in Internet stocks encountered the devastating dot-com bubble. Stock in Books-A-Million saw its price soar by over 1,000 percent in one week simply by announcing it had an updated website. Subsequently, the price crashed and the company has since delisted and gone private. Other Internet-based high flyers that ended up crashing include Pets.com, Worldcom, and WebVan.11 Today, none of those stocks exist. Whether specific cryptoassets will survive or go the way of Books-A-Million remains to be seen. What’s clear, however, is that some will be big winners. Altogether, between the assets native to blockchains and the companies that stand to capitalize on this creative destruction, there needs to be a game plan that investors use to analyze and ultimately profit from this new investment theme of cryptoassets.

Free Ride
by Robert Levine
Published 25 Oct 2011

As an old-media Internet venture, Hulu aroused the ire of technology business blogs like TechCrunch and GigaOM, which predict the decline of television networks with the shoe-banging subtlety of Nikita Khrushchev. The former gleefully reported that Google staffers had nicknamed the new venture “Clown Co.” The latter ran a gag interview on the topic with the Pets.com sock puppet (which would seem to symbolize the hubris of technology start-ups rather than that of television networks). When bloggers finally tried Hulu a year later, however, they liked what they saw. An intuitive interface lets users stream shows from NBC, Fox, and some of their related cable channels, and ABC joined in 2009.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

The internet would democratize access to information, with benefits to all. Idealism ruled. In 1997, Martha Stewart came in with her home-decorating business, which, thanks to an investment by Kleiner Perkins, soon went public as an internet stock, which seemed insane to me. I was convinced that a mania had begun for dot-coms, embodied in the Pets.com sock puppet and the slapping of a little “e” on the front of a company’s name or a “.com” at the end. I knew that when the bubble burst, there would be a crash that would kill Integral if we did not do something radical. I took my concerns to our other partner, Morgan Stanley, and they gave me some money to figure out the Next Big Thing in tech investing, a fund that could survive a bear market.

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market
by Scott Patterson
Published 11 Jun 2012

The Nasdaq’s market makers and the NYSE’s specialists are critical components to maintaining a liquid market.” Island also had several close calls with its computer system. In early 2000, the stock market started to buckle as the dot-com mania collapsed. Trading volumes surged to record levels, especially on Nasdaq, full of massively inflated tech outfits from America Online to Pets.com to eBay. By then, nearly 15 percent of all Nasdaq stocks were flowing through Island’s pipes. The Nasdaq index peaked at 5049 on March 10, a Friday. The following Monday, before trading started, a wave of sell orders for bellwether tech stocks such as Cisco and Dell swept into the market. Many flowed through Island, a haven of before-hours trading.

That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea
by Marc Randolph
Published 16 Sep 2019

It had been an age of decadence, in other words. And like all decadent eras, it hadn’t lasted. By the time we were headed to Alisal Ranch, there wasn’t much decadence left. Boo.com, the online clothing e-tailer, had filed for bankruptcy after spending more than $175 million in only six months. The rumor mill had Pets.com on the verge of collapse after the company spent more than $150 million in the first half of the year. Webvan’s stock would fall from $30 per share to 6 cents per share after the online grocer spent nearly a billion dollars on expansion. Drkoop.com, the online portal founded by 82-year-old retired surgeon general C.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business
by Ken Auletta
Published 4 Jun 2018

Aware of her large ambitions, her Disney boss, Charles Adams, stepped in as a mentor. “If you want to be a CEO or a general manager, the Harvard Business School is where you want to go.” As an alumnus, he put in a good word for her. After graduating with honors, she held a number of executive jobs over the next several years, including the ill-fated Pets.com, followed by two years at Zagat and three years at PriMedia, Inc., before joining Viacom. Then, in 2010, with a nudge from Kassan, one of his consulting clients, Microsoft, offered Everson a position as vice president of global advertising sales and trade marketing teams in Seattle. After Everson received the offer, she turned to Kassan for advice.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by Guy Raz
Published 14 Sep 2020

[back] * * * † Adam had quit his job at the Carnegie Institution several months earlier in an attempt to qualify for the 2000 Olympics with the US sailing team. [back] * * * * Between the time Adam and Eric reconnected on their flight home in 1998 and they got their first product on store shelves in 2001, Pets.com would be born, raise eight figures in venture capital, be acquired by Amazon, IPO, crater, and then be shuttered. [back] * * * * A surprising number of founders I interviewed used their own mobile phone numbers as the customer service line and printed them on the packaging of their products.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It
by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
Published 10 Jul 2023

Pink Shirt for future stock picks, we have to look carefully at the rest of his grid. No professional investor or stock-picker can survive by recommending only one stock every fourteen years. He must have picked others, but we have no idea whether those did well or poorly. It’s quite possible that the list includes duds like Zynga, MySpace, and Pets.com (“Because pets can’t drive!”). Stocks like those would fall in the upper-right cell: stocks he picked that were bombs. We wouldn’t regret missing out on those picks! We also know he failed to pick some highly successful stocks, like Google, Facebook, and Mastercard, because if he had picked them, he would have bragged about them as much as he did about Amazon and Tesla.

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
by Sheelah Kolhatkar
Published 7 Feb 2017

Promising a positive report on a particular company was an effective way of paving the way for more advisory fees on deals. The classic case was Henry Blodget, the star Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch who said in 1998 that he believed shares of Amazon were worth $400. He publicly praised companies like Pets.com and eToys.com while his firm courted business from them. In private emails to colleagues, however, he said that he really thought the companies were overhyped, calling Excite@Home “a piece of crap” and other dotcom companies “dogs.” When the attorney general’s office exposed these conflicts of interest and settled with Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, J.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing
by Burton G. Malkiel
Published 10 Jan 2011

Flooz.com launched a special offer to American Express platinum card holders allowing them to buy $1,000 of Flooz currency for just $800. Shortly before declaring bankruptcy, Flooz itself was Floozed when Filipino and Russian gangs bought $300,000 of its currency using stolen credit card numbers. Consider Pets.com, a real dog if there ever was one. The company had a sock-puppet mascot that starred in its TV commercials and even made an appearance at a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Unfortunately, the popularity of its mascot did not compensate for the fact that it’s hard to make a profit individually shipping low-margin 25-pound bags of kibble.

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website
by Matt Blumberg
Published 13 Aug 2013

Pretty soon, you’re spending money as recklessly as they are and there isn’t any left in the bank. The second possibility is subtler but just as damaging: when investors see a certain kind of idea fail, spectacularly, they’re less likely to fund a good idea along the same lines. (Selling pet food online isn’t a bad idea but it took a long time for investors to take another shot after Pets.com failed to the tune of some $300 million.) The response? Have the stomach to wait them out. While some techniques for winning are specific to the type of competition you’re facing, most of them are universal. Concede that competitors will sometimes out-think you, so out-behave, out-prepare and out-execute them.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013

In 1998 Bezos and venture capitalist John Doerr saw an opportunity for an online pharmacy and founded Drugstore.com, recruiting longtime Microsoft executive Peter Neupert to run it. Amazon owned a third of the company. The venture got off to a promising start, so for the next two years, Tinsley and Bezos invested tens of millions of Amazon’s cash in a variety of dot-com hopefuls, including Pets.com, Gear.com, Wineshopper.com, Greenlight.com, Homegrocer.com, and the urban delivery service Kozmo.com. In exchange for its cash, Amazon took a minority ownership position and a seat on the board for each, and the company believed it was well positioned for the future if those product categories succeeded on the Internet.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You
by Sangeet Paul Choudary , Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker
Published 27 Mar 2016

Students and faculty alike were dropping out of school to launch fledgling technology businesses. Inevitably, the market came crashing down. Beginning in March 2000, trillions of dollars’ worth of paper valuations vanished in a matter of months. Yet amid the rubble, certain companies survived. While Webvan and Pets.com disappeared, Amazon and eBay survived and thrived. Steve Jobs, who had lost Apple to mistakes he made earlier, recovered, returned to Apple, and built it into a juggernaut. Eventually, the online world emerged from the depths of the 2000 downturn to become stronger than ever. Why were some Internet-based businesses successful while others were not?

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age
by Robert Wachter
Published 7 Apr 2015

While today’s market may be, in another favorite Silicon Valley-ism, “a bit frothy,” Rock Health graduates are competing successfully for real dollars from mature, no-nonsense funders. And many of the start-ups appear to be building sustainable businesses. In mid-2014, Augmedix signed a deal with the Dignity Health system, which manages hospitals in 17 states, and Lift Labs was bought by Google. This is not Pets.com, or any of the other dot-com flameouts we’ve seen over the years. More important, these products are not indulgent and silly—they are solving real problems for clinicians and for patients. Augmedix, CellScope, and Lift Labs each have compelling human stories: helping a doctor who is struggling to satisfy both his patients and his EHR; a working mom who is confronting a wailing, febrile toddler; a proud elderly man who is too embarrassed to eat in his favorite restaurant.

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

In 1994, having tried going east, he now went west, moving to California just in time for the first dot-com bubble. He joined a start-up run by his little brother’s best friend from high school, and learned to build websites.2 He helped code the first CNET.com, and, in a sin that still haunts him, some of the first banner ads ever put on the internet. The dot-com bubble was still inflating – Pets.com, which would go on to be one of its most notable failures, had not even been founded – but Haig was put off by the rush to commercialisation and the ever increasing focus on money. He decided to return to his Tibetan studies, and signed up for a course in Tibetan medicine at a school in Dharamsala, in the Indian Himalayas, the de facto capital of the Tibetan government in exile, and where the Dalai Lama had fled in 1959.

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy
by Iain Martin
Published 11 Sep 2013

For a time it seemed that any young, chino-clad technology geek with half an idea could secure millions or tens of millions in funding from venture capitalists keen to surf the wave of the future. On 10 March 2000 the boom peaked when the NASDAQ, the technology index on Wall Street, burst through the 5000 mark. Shortly afterwards firms with names such as WorldCom and Pets.com, which had rocketed in value, came crashing down. At the height of the madness, Yahoo had thought it sensible to pay $5.7bn for Broadcast.com, a website that was soon defunct. There had even been a widely tipped business called Startups.com, dealing in Internet start-ups, which failed. But the US authorities dealt calmly with the after-effects.

Competition Demystified
by Bruce C. Greenwald
Published 31 Aug 2016

One of the articles of faith that drove the Internet mania during the last half of the 1990s was that this new medium would transform the way consumers bought books, computers, DVDs, groceries, pet supplies, drugs, banking services, fine art, and virtually everything else. Any traditional retailer that did not completely revise its business model was going to end up as roadkill on the information superhighway. The dominant merchants in this new economy would be dot-coms like Amazon, Webvan, Pets.com, Drugstore.com, and Wingspanbank.com, leaving Wal-Mart, Kroger, and Citibank in their wake. After the mania subsided, it became obvious how excessive those predictions were about the rate at which online commerce would supplant traditional shopping. The expectation that the newly hatched, Internet-only retailers would displace their brick-and-mortar competitors also proved mistaken.

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
by Tony Fadell
Published 2 May 2022

I got a little seed money and then I was in it. I had to build a company. And not a side-job, small-potatoes college startup. A real company. A serious business. Fig. 3.0.1 We used these drawings in the Fuse pitch deck to illustrate how the internet and music and TVs could come together. The MP3 player makes me chuckle. The ad for pets.com makes me laugh out loud. Tony Fadell I was going to get it right this time. We were going after the world’s biggest players. We were going to challenge Sony. But first I had to convince people to come work with me. I’d walked away from Philips’s enormous infrastructure, their mountains of process and cash, and walked right onto a blank slate.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis
by Anatole Kaletsky
Published 22 Jun 2010

The financial returns from trans-Atlantic trade and investment in the American economy—the “fantasies” on which the South Sea and Mississippi Companies were founded—far exceeded the deluded speculators’ wildest dreams. Such historical examples do not prove that the speculators in property and financial derivatives before the crash of 2007 will ultimately be proved right. On the contrary. The buyers of Squared-CDOs, who were as foolish as the late investors in Pets.Com and the leveraged buyers of South Sea promissory notes, will never recover a penny of their reckless speculations. But the idiocies of CDO-2 investors do not necessarily imply a structural decline in the United States and British economies, just as the idiocies of Dutch speculators in striped-black Semper Augustus bulbs did not reflect the imminent demise of the Dutch economy.

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
by John Kay
Published 24 May 2004

Webvan proclaimed itself the future of retailing, its enthusiasts predicting the demise of"bricks and mortars," and even attracted George Sheehan to relinquish charge of the Accenture consulting business for a seat at the driving wheel of this home delivery service, not long before closing in 2001. Pets.com and etoys will forever be symbols of the implausible expectations for online retailing. As these businesses failed, breathless predictions of the future were transferred from B2C (business to consumer) retailing to B2B (business to business). Eventually reality broke in here also. The ease with which money could be raised to fund businesses such as these was widely applauded as a demonstration of the vitality of financial markets. 13 In reality, it represented a collapse of market discipline.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Published 19 Jul 2021

Then the 254-page document used to sell the bonds spelling out all of WeWork’s financials got in the hands of the media, with The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and others alerting the world to WeWork’s unusually aggressive, and amusingly named, metric. “Community-adjusted EBITDA” was mocked relentlessly online. On Twitter, users questioned whether WeWork was the next Pets.com, a 1990s dot-com flameout. The blog Dealbreaker called the metric a “rage-inducing Silicon Alley pile of thought horseshit.” Neumann was caught flat-footed, unprepared for any public blowback—on WeWork’s finances or community-adjusted EBITDA. Until this point, he had enjoyed years of largely fawning press.

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59
by Douglas Edwards
Published 11 Jul 2011

Then Al Gore, giving an intense look of concern, asked with the emotional spark of soggy cardboard, "Are you searching for answers? Google.com can help you find them." A pause, and then Gore asked, "Was that too over the top?" Other Googlers appeared, including Chef Charlie and our sultry receptionist Megan, who leaned forward to whisper, "Looking for something? Need a good search?" as well as a guest appearance by the Pets.com sock puppet. When the video aired, the audience of Googlers went nuts. After it ended, Sergey announced that we had decided not to spend the money airing a spot after all, and instead would split the cash among the Google staff. That went over very well. By the end of the next year, the amount of cash needed for the bonuses became unwieldy.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

Americans Elect, enthused Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, can do to American politics “what Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies.” Friedman wrote this in July 2011. By May 2012, Americans Elect could not even be counted on to do for American politics “what pets.com did to pet stores”—which is to say, not much. Friedman, of course, was not alone; many other pundits, intoxicated by “the Internet,” thought that Americans Elect would change the country’s politics forever. Lawrence Lessig, never passing up an opportunity to remind us of just how revolutionary all this Internet stuff is, proclaimed that “10,000 clicks from 10 states could begin a candidate in the process towards winning the Americans Elect nomination.”

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else
by Jordan Ellenberg
Published 14 May 2021

Hassett’s biggest previous brush with fame was his coauthorship of the book Dow 36,000, published in October 1999, which argued that based on past trends the stock market was due for a tremendous near-term rise in prices. We know now what happened to the people who rushed to invest their life savings in Pets.com. The bull market stalled shortly after Hassett’s book came out, then started to drop; it would take the Dow five years just to return to its 1999 high point. The “cubic fit” curve was a similar overpromise. Deaths from COVID-19 in the United States decreased through May and June, but the disease was far from gone.

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time
by Sean M. Carroll
Published 15 Jan 2010

If you had a flashlight that emitted tachyons, you could (in principle) construct an elaborate series of mirrors by which you could send signals in Morse code to yourself in the past. You could warn your earlier self not to eat the shrimp in that restaurant that one time, or to go on that date with the weirdo from the office, or to sink your life savings into Pets.com stock. Figure 22: If tachyons could exist, they could be emitted by ordinary objects and zip around to be absorbed in the past. At every event along its trajectory, the tachyon moves outside the light cone. Clearly, the possibility of travel backward in time raises the possibility of paradoxes, which is unsettling.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

Transportation analyst Kenneth Button confirmed as much in another study published during the dot-com bubble. Analyzing the catalytic effects of European flights from forty-one American cities, he discovered that simply increasing the number of flights to the Continent from three to four daily would create almost three thousand “new economy” jobs. (Picture the khaki-clad visionaries behind Pets.com.) Overall, he calculated that every thousand passengers crossing the Atlantic created somewhere between forty-four and seventy-three new jobs around the hubs. A similar formula applies to all air traffic. When the economist Jan Brueckner ran the numbers for ninety-one airports from Albuquerque to Wichita, he found that a 10 percent increase in passengers led to a 1 percent bump in employment.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das
Published 14 Oct 2011

The growing interest in stocks and money matters culminated in the day trader phenomenon. Most day traders were small-time investors risking their own money—American Mrs. Watanabes trading part time. Between 1997 and 2000, during the euphoric dot.com bubble, day traders traded stocks like Intel or Microsoft as well as ephemeral companies like pets.com or boo.com. Day traders made large numbers of trades during a single day as they bought and sold online in a frenzy to take advantage of news and opportunities. Some day traders worked out of trading alleys housing stations (a desk and computer with high-speed connection to the electronic broker).

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises
by Timothy F. Geithner
Published 11 May 2014

As the American economist Hyman Minsky explained in work I would read a decade later, stability can produce excessive confidence, which produces the seeds of future instability. This penchant for self-delusion is inherently human, but it does not inevitably lead to financial and economic crises. At the time, a similar dynamic was fueling the U.S. dot-com bubble, as investors enthralled by winners like eBay threw cash at losers like Pets.com. But the bursting of that bubble didn’t cause a major crisis, because it was financed mostly with equity rather than bank debt. Investors lost their money when their Internet stocks tanked, but the broader economy suffered only a modest slowdown. To cause a severe crisis, a mania must be financed by concentrated leverage, by excessive debt.

Hedge Fund Market Wizards
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 24 Apr 2012

From September on, equities were up a lot, and commodities were up a lot. It was a massive opportunity that I should have been in, and I wasn’t. I missed the key point that no one else cared, and as long as no one cares, there is no crisis. It’s the same reason I didn’t make any money in the Nasdaq bubble. I thought, “I can’t buy Pets.com.” But actually you can’t make money in the Nasdaq bubble by definition. You can. How do you go long a bubble and protect yourself? When it starts to go down, you sell it. It turned out that the Nasdaq move up was relatively smooth, but a bubble could be very volatile. That’s when you don’t get involved.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

And told her that, within ten years, she could use it to browse the Internet on an airplane flying 35,000 feet over Missouri and make a Skype call* to her family in Hong Kong? She would have bid Apple stock up to infinity. Nevertheless, ten years later, in 2010, technology companies accounted for only about 7 percent of economic activity.42 For every Apple, there were dozens of companies like Pets.com that went broke. Investors were behaving as though every company would be a winner, that they wouldn’t have to outcompete each other, leading to an utterly unrealistic assumption about the potential profits available to the industry as a whole. Still, some proponents of efficient-market hypothesis continue to resist the notion of bubbles.

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

The ConnectU team had drawn its plans in the belief that success in the Internet world came from thinking up a good idea and moving it online, taking advantage of digital’s superpowers. That had been the theory in the first wave of Internet start-ups, a movement that had crashed ignominiously when the inflated values of companies like Pets.com exhaled like punctured balloons. But the next wave of successes were start-ups whose founders were technically minded. They often referred to themselves as hackers. Their ideas were only starting points for a product that they would rush to release and then iterate to excellence. By the mid-2000s, the way to glory did not involve hiring people like Mark Zuckerberg as cheap labor to code up the concept you brainstormed with pals at your finals club—it was driven by the Zuckerbergs themselves.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan
Published 25 Sep 2017

Benchmark Capital invested in eBay, the online auctioneer. eBay was notable in that there was no similar real-world corollary—a real-time nationwide auction for Aunt Mae’s dining chairs was not possible without the Internet. Hundreds of start-ups in e-commerce of every conceivable category were funded: Pets.com in pet goods, CDNow and Music Boulevard in music CDs, Buy.com in electronics, and so on. Hotmail, a free e-mail service, received venture funding and quickly grew to ten million users before being acquired by Microsoft for $350 million a little over one year after its founding. In many ways Microsoft was perhaps the most overlooked beneficiary of the Internet.

Americana
by Bhu Srinivasan

Benchmark Capital invested in eBay, the online auctioneer. eBay was notable in that there was no similar real-world corollary—a real-time nationwide auction for Aunt Mae’s dining chairs was not possible without the Internet. Hundreds of start-ups in e-commerce of every conceivable category were funded: Pets.com in pet goods, CDNow and Music Boulevard in music CDs, Buy.com in electronics, and so on. Hotmail, a free e-mail service, received venture funding and quickly grew to ten million users before being acquired by Microsoft for $350 million a little over one year after its founding. In many ways Microsoft was perhaps the most overlooked beneficiary of the Internet.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common
by Alan Greenspan
Published 14 Jun 2007

The Internet boom became part of TV news, not just on the networks (of which I am a faithful viewer, because of Andrea) but also on CNBC and other upstart cable channels that catered to businesspeople and investors. On Super Bowl Sunday of 2000, half the thirty-second ad slots were bought by seventeen Internet start-ups for $2.2 million each—the Pets.com sock puppet appeared alongside Budweiser's Clydesdales and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz (in a FedEx spot). In pop culture, I was right up there with the sock puppets. CNBC invented a gimmick called the "briefcase indicator" in which cameras would follow me on the mornings of FOMC meetings as I arrived at the Fed.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

He told people that she would take care of everything. 55 The Last Kay Party Omaha • September 2000–July 2001 By the time Buffett got his semicolon, the Internet boom had boomeranged. The dotcoms were dying at the pace of one a day: Arzoo.com, Boo.com, Dash.com, eToys.com, Flooz.com, FooDoo.com, Hookt.com, Lipstream.com, PaperFly.com, Pets.com, Wwwwrrrr.com, Xuma.com, Zing.com.1 The NASDAQ was trading at less than half the value of its peak; the old economy stocks were still swooning. The Federal Reserve had started to cut interest rates once again. Buffett’s reputation, however, began to revive. Berkshire dipped its soup ladle into a huge stockpot of capital for Buffett to buy private companies, bankrupt companies, under-the-radar companies as the window to invest began to open again.