-♪ Money ♪
-The '90s was a time to cash in.
Just ask E-Trade.
- What? What is it?
-He's got money
coming out the wazoo.
-A financial frenzy...
-It's a pretty addictive thing
when you see other people
making so much money.
- fueled by the magic
words "dot com."
[ Modem dialing, screeching ]
Just take your business online.
-Anybody can access
anything from anywhere.
-And watch your wealth
magically take off.
-I was surrounded
by Internet millionaires.
-What everyone called
this gold rush.
You didn't want to be left out.
-But what goes up...
-This was hubris...
Flying too close to the sun.
- must... you know the rest.
-People getting laid off
en masse, companies shuttering.
-People had to move back in
with their parents.
-I just remember
being devastated.
♪♪
[ Dial-up modems screeching ]
♪♪
-Today, I'm talking to some
city pets.
Ooh! Ooh, ooh, ooh!
Hey, poodles!
Did you know that Pets.com
delivers food, treats, and toys?
-By the late '90s, Pets.com
would be in a three-way battle
over where online customers
would buy their pet food
on the Internet.
-The online competition
for the pet space
was incredibly cutthroat.
-But just a few years earlier,
morning-news anchors struggled
to even understand
what the Internet was...
-Can you explain
what Internet is?
- or how it worked.
-That little mark with the "A"
and then the ring around it.
- "At."
- See, that's what I said.
-Mm-hmm.
-Um, Katie said she thought
it was "about."
- Yeah.
- Oh.
-The information super-highway
can be a confusing mix
of on-ramps and off-ramps.
-The Internet starts as a
military communication network
{\an1}in the '60s and spends the next
in university
computer-science labs.
But it was the creation
of the World Wide Web in 1990,
a series of Web pages
connected by hyperlinks,
that made the Internet
become something
that the average person can use.
-Your link to literature,
the arts,
the world at your fingertips.
-The free transfer
of information
in is accessible a way
as possible.
You know, we're going to make it
so that anybody
can access anything
from anywhere.
I was like, "Well,
that's kind of a cool idea."
-And who better to latch on
to a cool new idea
than baby boomers Bill Clinton
and Al Gore?
When they get elected in 1993,
the World Wide Web
is at the center of their
proposed tech-based economy.
-Eisenhower had built
the interstate highway system.
Well, Clinton and Gore
were going to bring in
the age of the
information superhighway.
-Clinton makes good on
his promise,
but he gets some much-needed
help from a company
that builds an on-ramp
to this new digital future.
I'm Rosanne Siino,
and I was Vice President
of Corporate Communications
at Netscape.
I was the 19th employee
and, I believe, the second
female to be hired.
There was me and a lot of very,
very young, smelly engineers.
-The company is founded in 1994
by Marc Andreessen,
a 23-year-old
computer-science grad
from the University of Illinois,
and Jim Clark, an established
Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
-Jim Clark became convinced,
in talking to Marc,
that the Internet space
was wide open for the taking.
Yeah, this thing that was
right now being used
for scientific purposes
could potentially be used
for commercial purposes.
He could envision that
we might want to sell things.
He could envision
that it could be used for,
you know,
widespread communication.
-In the early '90s, the Web is
slow and hard to navigate.
It's the domain of academics
and computer geeks.
But Clark and Andreessen
have a vision
to make the Web accessible
to everyone.
-We ended up sort of
in the middle of the night
starting this project.
What we were trying to do was
put sort of a human face
on the Internet.
-True to its namesake,
the browser
is a navigator to the Web,
making surfing as easy
as point and click.
-Netscape Navigator was the
first commercial version
of a Web browser
that spawned Apple Safari.
It spawned Google Chrome.
All of a sudden, the power of
the Internet that had been there
for years was available
to everybody in an easy way.
Point and click...
The universal language.
I'm Tara Hernandez,
and back in the '90s,
I helped launch
the World Wide Web.
That's a little much. Let me...
Let me... Let me do that again.
I was able to witness the birth
of the World Wide Web.
I like that better.
I don't want to take credit
for any of that. [ Chuckles ]
-Netscape was foundational.
This wasn't just a nice-to-have.
Having the browser
was absolutely essential
to Internet commerce,
for entertainment,
for communication,
all these things.
-I'm Margaret O'Mara.
I'm professor of history
at the University of Washington
in Seattle.
The very first e-mail
I sent outside of my building
was in late 1993.
I thought it was amazing.
-Is everybody listening?
To begin, let us introduce you
to our first college recruit.
-Wow!
-I am, in fact,
the first college recruit.
-With Netscape recruiting
employees fresh out of college,
traditional workplace culture
of tech giants like IBM
is getting replaced.
Geeks run this startup,
and they write
the rules as they go.
{\an1}-Imagine going into a frat house
that has an adult living there,
and that adult is Jim Clark.
And Jim Clark is trying to help
a bunch of young college boys
figure out that they're now
doing something
that has to be ready
for business.
-One of the engineers
I worked with
brought in a remote-control car
and attached a very early
remote camera on it.
Didn't work very well.
We had little traditions
like saving our cans
and building things out of them.
We had a massive
rubber-ball fight.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
We really kind of made it
a space that we enjoyed
being in.
-There was a lot of silliness
going on,
but also a lot of hard work.
-Netscape people got into work
and maybe didn't go home
that night,
maybe worked all the way
through the night.
-I have a nice couch.
Little mattress under there
I can sleep in.
-Work became the life.
And that was sort of
the only life you had.
That tied into that concept
of sort of manic innovation.
-Hey, what did your
doctor say, Tara?
-My doctor said,
interestingly enough,
that I work too much.
[ Laughter ]
-The Web's ruled by
the under-30 set.
In '94, 30-year-old Jeff Bezos
creates Amazon
out of his garage.
The same year, Yahoo!,
a searchable Web directory,
is launched by 20-somethings
Jerry Yang and David Filo.
-Yahoo! had an exclamation point
at the end of its name.
Like, it was
Yahoo-exclamation-point.
Like, that was the way you had
to print it in the newspaper.
So this playfulness
with the frontmen...
Kind of of these
young, geeky types
that clearly weren't the
popular jocks in high school.
-We are trying to get him
into long pants.
-[ Laughs ]
-And I have threatened
I don't know how many times...
-Marc represented sort of
the "this is what's coming."
You know, it's not this
polished, you know,
suit-and-tie kind of thing.
-Andreessen's rise from geeky
undergraduate to tech rock star
is whispered about
in Silicon Valley.
But his story goes mainstream
when he lands
the cover of "Time" magazine.
-A year into Netscape,
"Time" magazine saw
how exciting all of this was
and how perfect of a face
Marc Andreessen was.
Young and nerdy,
perfect for the moment.
So they came up with this idea
of putting him on a throne,
kind of looking like a guy
who just came out of college.
[ Camera shutter clicks ]
And he had no shoes on.
-And everybody gets focused
on his toenails.
"Why isn't this kid
clipping his toenails?"
And I'm like, "Why are people
looking at his feet?" [ Laughs ]
-He was evidently the first
person to appear on a cover
of "Time" magazine
with bare feet.
-Netscape and
its shoeless co-founder
helps to redefine the image
of an American success story.
Sales double every few months,
and Netscape grows to control
of the browser market.
But Jim Clark,
the adult in the room,
sees problems on the horizon.
-We were making money,
which was good,
but we weren't... certainly
not profitable.
So Jim was very concerned
about, "Let's grow fast."
We have... you know, speed was
what we had on our side.
Don't do things 100 percent.
Do them 80 percent.
Do them 80 percent.
Get them out there.
Get people onboard with us,
and try to outrun Microsoft.
Microsoft was a behemoth
at the time.
-20-year-old Microsoft rules
the personal-computer market.
But its founder, Bill Gates,
is slow to see
the potential of the Internet,
even dismissing it as a fad
to Tom Brokaw in 1994.
-A lot of people just getting
onto the Internet because they
feel that they have to get onto
the playing field, so to speak.
-Well, it's very hip to be
on the Internet right now.
-But just a year later, Gates
realizes the 'net is no fad.
Microsoft begins developing
Internet Explorer,
a browser to compete
with Navigator.
Netscape sees a w*r coming...
One that will require
more money to wage.
-We were a young company.
We needed the cash infusion.
So the conversation started
to turn to,
you know, "Should we go public?"
-Going public allows a company
to raise capital quickly.
And that's just what Netscape
needs to compete with Microsoft.
In the summer of 95, this young
company launches an IPO,
an initial public offering,
to sell shares to investors.
-We decided it really was
to the advantage of...
To seize the moment,
just seize the moment
and go public,
even though we'd only been
in business
not even a year and a half.
-At 11:00 a.m. this morning,
Netscape stock went public
and Wall Street went bonkers.
-Netscape went IPO
August 9, 1995.
Also known as
the day Jerry Garcia died.
Whether or not he died
undiscussed
is a discussion
for the philosophers.
-Initially offered at a price
of $28 a share,
Netscape shot up to $72
within minutes.
-Netscape stock price explodes.
Investors are anxious
to own a piece of the company
that is bringing the Internet
to the world.
And everyone with stock
in the company,
especially its founders
and employees,
is poised to get rich.
-In a room that was
full of people
that I considered my peers,
all of a sudden, you know,
the eyes started getting bigger
as the number of zeros
in those calculations
started happening.
And all of a sudden, on paper,
I was surrounded
by Internet millionaires.
Nobody was working.
We were running around
being crazy, drinking champagne.
-When trading closes
for the day,
Netscape is valued
at $2.2 billion.
It's the best opening day for
a stock in Wall Street history.
And Netscape's executives
are multi-multi-millionaires.
-No stock had ever behaved
the way our stock did.
We broke so many records
at the time,
for amount above asking price
that the shares opened at,
the growth in a day.
Nobody had ever seen
anything like it before.
-Early investors who invested
in these companies...
The IPO was all they needed
to get their payday.
-Netscape's success redefines
the letters IPO
into "Internet pays off."
For tech companies,
the road to riches now
runs straight down Wall Street
with an oversubscribed
public offering.
And for investors,
the key is to get in early
on an Internet company
and wait to collect
your jackpot.
-People started to say,
"How do I get
a piece of this
Internet business,
this World Wide Web thing
that's going on here?"
-And while some warned it felt
like a get-rich-quick scheme,
the new tech-savvy investors
countered by asking,
"Who wants to get rich slow?"
-People were buying boats
and cars, vacation homes.
-By mid-decade,
the U.S. stock market
is reaching historic highs,
but browser company Netscape's
hugely successful IPO in '95
shifts the attention
of America's best and brightest
away from careers in finance
and out west to Silicon Valley,
where almost daily,
an Internet company
is launched to capitalize
on the World Wide Web.
-People were graduating
from business school
and coming out to the Valley
to work in a startup
or start a startup of their own.
-There were 20,000 new
college graduates
that showed up every year
in the Bay Area.
And you would go to bars
and there were, you know,
tons of people...
Young people your age
who were all working
at Internet startups.
-If you went out into
Silicon Valley,
you saw venture capitalists
everywhere,
meeting with young guys...
mainly guys...
Pitching crazy ideas.
Sometimes pitching,
not-so-crazy ideas,
but many of them were
kind of outlandish ideas.
-But as long as the idea
ended in "dot com,"
it was likely to get funded.
-You have Kozmo.com
with bicycle couriers
who were delivering
a pint of Ben & Jerry's
and a Blockbuster video
to your door.
-I think I'll go get a video
and some chocolate ice cream.
-You're gonna go out for that?!
Kozmo.com has videos
and ice cream.
-And decades before Bitcoin,
flooz.com tries to create
an online digital currency...
One you can trust because, well,
Whoopi Goldberg tells you to.
-It's just like money.
You send it by e-mail.
They spend it at some
of the Web's coolest stores.
And you come out hip
[Snaps fingers] and smart.
-There was Webvan,
which did grocery delivery.
Hello, Instacart, you know?
Same thing 20 years earlier.
Maybe they were ahead
of their time,
but they were building
the airplane while in flight.
Everything was moving so fast.
-And if none of these new
wonders of the World Wide Web
has answers to life's mysteries,
Razorfish.com is there
with its promise
to find solutions
to hard problems.
-Maybe it's indiscreet of me
to ask how much you're worth,
but how much are you worth?
-I don't know. That may be
indiscreet of you to ask.
Um, somewhere around
$180 million.
-That was the kind of crazy
that fueled people to believe
that you could do anything
and get millions.
-This was hubris...
Flying too close to the sun.
It was just stupid money
chasing after stupid things.
-As stock prices
for dot-com companies rise,
so do the number
of extravagant dot-com parties.
-People were buying new cars.
People were buying boats,
vacation homes in Lake Tahoe.
But the parties... boy,
everybody wanted to get invites
to the best parties.
-The Razorfish guys
threw a legendary...
And not in a good way...
Belly-dancer party
where drag queens served
White Castle burgers
to 2,000 guests.
-I believe it became more of
a competition
to throw the best party
than it did
to create the best product.
-Rents and house prices rise,
and Silicon Valley parking lots
fill up with expensive
and flashy cars.
-All of a sudden, a lot of money
started showing up.
There was a Ferrari dealership
that was not too far away
from Netscape.
I don't know that
I personally knew anyone
who bought a Ferrari.
I probably would have
mocked them.
But it was there, and it was
there because they had buyers.
A lot of these companies are
traded on the Nasdaq exchange,
which just starts going
hockey stick.
Extraordinary numbers.
And getting reported
in the business press,
you know, story after story
after story,
the average reader is like,
"Oh, my gosh, what's going on,
and how do I get a piece of it?"
-Enter CNBC, who, early on,
becomes the go-to cable network
for Americans looking to get in
on the dot-com action.
Future Fox News mastermind
Roger Ailes
transforms the
almost-forgotten network...
-Biotech stocks, which looked
good yesterday, are down.
- into a channel
where financial news
is reported in the breathy,
action-packed style
previously reserved
for sports reporting.
-CNBC turns buying and selling
stocks, or profiling companies,
into something like watching
ESPN and seeing sports teams.
-The audience responds to
the insider style of reporting,
often live from the floor
of the New York Stock Exchange.
-It's a pretty addictive thing
when you see other people
making so much money.
-The constant stock ticker and
all of this information was...
Usually, only Wall Street
brokers had access to.
-In the past, trading stocks
was a relatively
expensive proposition
that required working through
old, established brokerage firms
who preferred
old, established money.
And well-known firms like
EF Hutton were happy to help.
-What is your broker saying?
-Well, my broker's EF Hutton,
and Hutton says...
-When EF Hutton talks,
people listen.
-But all that changes
in the '90s
with what's termed
"the digital disruption."
Discount brokerage services
like E-Trade and Ameritrade
start advertising
their services.
- Let's buy 100 shares.
- All right, click it in there.
- Okay.
- How about 500?
- 100, Stewart.
- [ Imitates chicken clucking ]
{\an1}-Now anyone with a little dough
can join the stock-buying craze.
And while investors no longer
need expensive brokers
to buy stocks,
they are drawn to free
professional advice.
-Analysts are brought
on to CNBC.
They are... you know,
suddenly become celebrities.
-CNBC regularly features
Internet stock analysts
like Henry Blodget
and Mary Meeker,
who push certain companies
and downplay others.
-What people didn't realize
is they're coming on and they're
pumping up stocks that their
companies have investments in.
They have a stake
in what they're selling.
When you have someone who's
a really telegenic young analyst
like Henry Blodget
on CNBC saying,
"Oh, yeah, this is this company,
this is why it's great,
this is why I rated a buy,"
you're like, "I'm gonna go
on my E-Trade account
and I'm gonna buy that.
That makes a lot of sense."
And, you know,
people made money that way.
-As newly formed
digital companies go public
and celebrate
as their stock prices soar,
Netscape... that company
that got the party started...
Finds itself being targeted
by the most powerful
corporation in tech...
Microsoft.
-Netscape was, of course,
one of Microsoft's
software developers,
and we were invited up
to their campus,
as all other
software companies were,
to show what we were
developing on Windows 95.
I remember one of my
employees called me.
She said, "Rosanne,
you're not gonna believe
who's hanging around
at our booth.
Bill Gates... he just is
staring at our browser.
He just won't leave."
He was tuning in.
They wanted to create
something just like this.
-And they did.
In 1995, Microsoft launches
the Internet Explorer browser
{\an1}and includes it with every copy
of its Windows operating system.
Netscape discovers few are
willing to buy their browser
when they get Microsoft's
for free.
-Once Internet Explorer started
to become the de facto
on every new computer
that was purchased
that had the Windows
operating system,
you know, the market share
just plummeted quickly.
-This was the way
Microsoft had learned
to k*ll software companies.
-Netscape sues, and Microsoft
will also face antitrust charges
for using the power of Windows
to slam shut
other software companies.
-That whole process did
end up eventually causing
a judgement against Microsoft,
but it really was
too little, too late
and certainly too late
for Netscape.
-As of 1:30 this morning...
-[ Woman sobs ]
- I concluded negotiations
and agreed
to sell our company to AOL.
-Congratulations, Skippy.
You've got mail.
-It was a very sad day
with my beloved colleagues
who had put their heart and soul
into this company
and really believed in it.
-The quote that came out
of this article was,
"Netscape lived fast,
died young,
and left a tired corpse."
-In four short years,
Netscape goes
from Internet trailblazer
to Microsoft roadkill.
It left behind an Internet
with seemingly unlimited
commercial potential,
until one company proves
there are boundaries.
Crossing those boundaries
can have
devastating financial
consequences.
-Part of the story
of the dot-com boom
is many people
lost their fortunes.
-In the late '90s,
a company will launch
whose name becomes
a shorthand for the excess
and greed that dooms
the decade of the dot-coms.
-It is not about the fame
or the success
or anything like that.
It's just about the animals,
you know,
and, uh, are you getting
the whole thing?
That company is Pets.com.
But in 1998, Pets.com is
simply one of the first
online retailers to sell
pet supplies to Americans.
Its CEO, Julie Wainwright,
prepares to face competition
from both
brick-and-mortar pet stores
and other Web entrepreneurs
hoping to cash in
on the online pet market.
Wainwright needs
to build out Pets.com
as fast as she can,
no matter the cost.
-You know, that's a rule
of Silicon Valley...
Elbow everyone out of the way
so you can be first to market
and you can dominate the market
and be the market.
-The office was in a garage
in the south of Market,
which is where all the
auto-repair shops were.
I'm Oscar Yuan.
I was employee number
Everyone brought their dogs
and their cats,
and so right there,
right from the beginning,
you knew it was different.
But what was really unique
was just the energy.
There was a buzz.
They were hiring me for an
assistant marketing manager.
The business itself
was secondary.
I was getting into what everyone
called this gold rush.
The Internet...
It was what was happening.
You didn't want to be left out.
-Early on,
Pets.com gets a boost
when one of the Web's
most successful pioneers
decides to put his own money
into the company.
-One of the major investors
was Jeff Bezos.
Even back then, Amazon, even
though they only sold books,
was kind of seen
as the forefront of e-commerce.
And so the investment
from Jeff was exciting.
He came to the office, and he
went around talking to everyone
and asking what we were doing.
And a lot of us joined
a little bit on... on faith,
so every little nugget
that you had
that gave you faith that
we were doing the right thing
was a huge confidence booster.
-In fact, Amazon is already
worth a staggering $30 billion.
Bezos, always looking to expand
his piece of online commerce,
buys a 50-percent stake
in Pets.com,
now locked in a three-way
competition to capture
the online piece of the
$23 billion pet-products market.
-Discover paradise
at Petopia.com.
[ Dog barks ]
The Internet Pet Paradise.
-There were three big players.
There was Petopia, Pets.com,
and then there was PetSmart.
-The online competition
for the pet space
was incredibly cutthroat.
My roommate from New York
also got a job,
and it was a competing
pet-food Web site.
She said, "But now,
if you work at Pets.com,
we can't be friends anymore."
She goes, "You have no idea
what it's like
in the dot-com world."
-We were determined to be
the number-one...
The winner in the pet category.
We felt like we were
transforming the economy, right?
We were giving people access
to a huge number of products
that they weren't able
to access before,
transforming how commerce works.
-But buying products online
is not something people
naturally think about doing.
-People needed time to really
get the idea that,
"Oh, I can buy anything
and have it delivered to me."
Like, that whole notion was
still a little bit like,
"Really? I'm gonna my
credit card on the Internet?"
-To help change that, Pets.com
hires ad agency Chiat/Day.
-Chiat/Day was
one of the hottest agencies
in the '80s and '90s,
and it began in the '80s,
certainly,
with the iconic 1984 Apple
Super Bowl spot...
The dystopian sort of future.
-Aah!
-We shall prevail.
-They also did the
"Think Different" campaign
for Apple in the mid-'90s.
And then there was Taco Bell
with the Chihuahua.
Chiat was known at the time
for taking brands
from being brands
to being a part of culture.
I'm Scott Duchon.
I was a copywriter
at Chiat/Day many moons ago,
and I am one of the creators
of the Pets.com sock puppet.
Sorry.
-I'm gonna free the socks.
- You're welcome.
- [ Whistling ]
-Sorry?
-Run! I got you!
Fly away from here! Go!
- "Why a sock puppet?"
is a question I've asked myself
for 20 years now.
No. [ Laughs ]
-Pets.com. executives
love the idea,
and a mascot is born.
-It's Pets.com Sock Puppet.
- [ Laughs ]
- Oh.
-But you can call me
Pets.com Sock Puppet.
-Michael Ian Black,
an improv artist
best known for his early '90s
sketch-comedy series
"The State" on MTV,
is hired as the voice and hand
of the Pets.com sock puppet.
-This is the happiest day
of my life!
-This improv approach
was really important to us
as far as the entire tonality
of the campaign,
because pets are not actors.
I don't know if you know this,
but they're not.
And so you need somebody
who could just go with the flow
of... of dogs
starting to do weird sh*t.
-Oh, yeah. Oh, this is
my kind of party.
-I'm a professional
happy puppet thing.
-It was like the puppet
was created for Michael.
He just knew what to do
with that weird sock.
-Puppets make good money, man!
-I'm Melissa Menta,
and I'm a puppet publicist.
The process of Pets.com
hiring me was very quick.
They saw on my resume that
I had the Jim Henson company.
They thought, "Oh, my God,
this is the perfect match."
And I had the job.
-Today, I'm overseeing
some deliveries for Pets.com,
purely in an advisory role.
-The first Pets.com
commercial is filmed
during the summer of 1999.
-And we were packed
really tightly in this van.
And Michael just started
throwing jabs at the driver.
-I like your shorts.
You're a good-looking fella.
-The driver's reactions
are perfectly dry.
And [Laughs]
Michael Ian Black is just
pretending like he knows pets
at different homes.
-I know the guy
who lives in that house.
He's got a snake,
and he's got an iguana.
He was thinking about getting
a c*ck for a while,
but I kind of
talked him out of it.
-We just rode around, like,
holding our laughter in
so that we didn't
ruin the takes.
-But he... he went ahead.
He got the c*ck.
And I was wrong, man,
'cause they get along great.
It's like the Brady Bunch with
snakes, iguanas, and c*ck.
-When we came back,
the van opens,
and we come off, we're like,
"We've got it. It's amazing."
-Did you get all these things
at Pets.com?
Oh, wow,
he's got a stuffed thing.
I love stuffed things.
Come on, I see the delivery
for the parakeet.
Let me go surprise him.
-Pets.com spends a
then-shocking $20 million
for a marketing campaign that
soon transforms the sock puppet
into a TV celebrity.
-Come on, jump! Jump!
Whoo-hoo!
Got it!
-We put out the ads,
and suddenly,
you start getting
people chatting about it.
In today's terms, it would
be called going viral.
-And now Al and Katie,
here's one pooch who is a VIP.
That's one very important pet.
Al, this is your favorite
television commercial.
-Macy's actually reached out
to Pets.com and said,
"We want you to be
in the parade," right?
Usually, it's a huge fight to
get into the Macy's Day Parade.
-Furnished by Pets.com.
You may have seen this
sock puppet on television.
-Look, he's got a stuffed thing!
"I love stuffed things."
-Everybody at Pets.com was glued
to their television.
And I can't help but think,
"I hope those people at Petopia
and PetSmart are jealous."
-Then we did a holiday campaign.
-What is it? I can't wait,
I can't wait, I can't wait.
What is it, iguana?
[ Dog growling ]
Hey, Max, you're gonna
give me a concussion.
Uh-oh, mistletoe!
Who wants to kiss a puppet?
-It was not just a fun,
you know, flash in the pan.
We were actually seeing
the results
of what was happening...
You're seeing site traffic,
which is the huge metrics
that we were looking at.
-Soon, the sock puppet
will deliver his message
about Pets.com in front of
television's biggest audience.
-If you're trying to win
in a competition,
the best way to do that is
to get in front of the millions
and millions of people who watch
the Super Bowl every year.
-There's no bigger stage in the
world of traditional marketing
than the Super Bowl.
-The NFL's Super Bowl
will also end up being
the big game for dot-coms...
A "push all your chips
into the pot" moment
to get noticed,
scare off competitors,
and lock in your
market dominance.
And like any high-stakes game,
there will be
winners and losers.
-For companies that can
afford it,
advertising during the
Super Bowl is an unrivaled
opportunity for your brand
to get noticed.
-Every dot-com was buying up
the media space
to be on the Super Bowl.
-And that reached its peak
in 2000,
along with the
greatest show on turf...
St. Louis Rams beating
the Tennessee Titans
and Christina Aguilera
and Enrique Iglesias
performing at
the half-time show.
The 88 million viewers
were bombarded
with an almost endless series
of dot-com advertising.
-I think there were 17 different
dot-com companies that bought
ads at, you know, millions
and millions of dollars apiece.
So it became known as the...
The dot-com Super Bowl.
-Internet companies like
HotJobs.com and E-Trade each
pony up two million dollars
for a 30-second spot.
E-Trade, with its chimp mascot,
even calls attention
to the outrageousness
of all this dot-com spending.
♪♪
-The 2000 Super Bowl was really
a classic example
of tech companies
with money run wild.
-This meeting is a real drag.
Y'all should be
meeting online with WebEx.
-Even RuPaul makes a commercial
appearance shilling for WebEx,
a pre-Zoom Web
video-conferencing service.
-The amount of money to do a
and was even then.
The idea of that being
your way of marketing,
your way into popular
imagination seems crazy.
-For Pets.com, there's more at
stake than selling pet supplies
to football fans.
About to go public, the company
needs to sell investors
that the future
of pet stores is online.
-For the Super Bowl spot,
we decided to just go back
to the simple premise.
You don't have to leave
to go to a pet store.
-♪ If you leave me now ♪
♪ You'll take away
the biggest part of me ♪
♪ Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, no, baby ♪
Please don't go.
-We had a Super Bowl party
watching the ads versus
watching the game.
I was working,
but I also knew I was winning
because we were getting
the most publicity.
-It was top five on
the "USA Today" ad meter
for the Super Bowl,
so it was a big success.
-The Super Bowl brings
an entirely new level
of fame to the Pets.com mascot.
-A couple days after the
Super Bowl,
I answered the phone, and it was
"Good Morning America."
They said, "We want
the Pets.com sock puppet
to come on and do an interview."
And literally, we finished
"Good Morning America,"
and my flip-top cellphone,
which I had at the time, rang,
and it was Regis and Kathie Lee.
And then it just started
snowballing.
-♪ I got you, babe ♪
♪ I got you, babe ♪
-It was just
one after the other.
"Nightline" and Charlie Gibson
and Diane Sawyer.
-Oh, hey, Charlie, Diane.
I'm here at a big Oscar party
in Hollywood, California.
Now, I wasn't exactly invited.
And technically,
I'm not supposed to be here,
but I'm gonna try to interview
as many celebrities
about their favorite movies...
-We did an Oscar party
at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
And we were just walking around
and talking to celebrities.
-Are you flirting with me,
Anna Nicole Smith?
-Yes, I am.
- How you doing?
- I'm doing good.
How you doing?
- I'm doing good. How you doing?
-Hi.
That was the weirdest moment
of my entire life.
-It was incredible.
-The sock puppet might be
hobnobbing with Hollywood,
but it's not translating
into profits.
Pets.com is spending
four times
as much as they earn
on marketing.
-We were spending a lot of money
on advertising on our team.
We moved to new offices.
Some of the traditional metrics
that we had always measured...
You know, revenue, sales, profit
were almost secondary
at the time,
which is a little bit
counterintuitive.
-Counterintuitive is '90s speak
for flawed business strategy.
Early 2000 visitors to the
Pets.com Web site are rising,
but revenues are falling.
So the company tries
another counterintuitive idea...
Free shipping.
-The free delivery started
to raise a little bit
more of a question
for... for some of us,
like, "How do you deliver
-Pets.com hadn't quite
figured out how to ship
the way that we
just take for granted today,
that you can order something
from Amazon this afternoon
and have it tomorrow morning.
-Profits are an afterthought
for 90s dot-coms.
The rules are grow fast,
sell products at a loss
to gain market share,
and spend whatever it takes
on advertising
and brand awareness
to crowd out competitors.
-That certainly was the rule
that Pets.com
was trying to follow...
Was following that playbook.
Look, it makes sense
if you're trying to convince
a big consumer market
of pet owners
to buy things on the Internet
that they used to buy in person,
if you're trying to get ahead
of your competition fast.
-Then Pets.com makes
a fatal miscalculation.
-The public was not as excited
about it as we were.
-The millennium had
come and gone,
and although things like
flannel shirts and Beanie Babies
didn't survive the '90s,
the Internet was here to stay.
For investors in Pets.com,
the aughts is their chance
to finally cash in on the
now well-known e-commerce site.
-As the market gets higher and
higher and higher and higher,
there was a lot of pressure
for investors to say,
"Oh, no, no, no,
I'm not gonna give you
another round of funding.
You should go public
'cause I want my payday,
'cause I'm gonna make
a lot of money on this."
-Investors may want a payday,
but for Pets.com,
its huge advertising expenses
and losses from free shipping
leaves it $62 million in debt.
So it needs to go public
in order to survive.
-Super Bowl's in end of January,
early February.
Pets.com goes public
only a few weeks later.
And everyone's like, "Okay,
this is gonna be
another rocket ship."
-Anyone with stocks
in Pets.com,
from the executives
to assistants,
prepare to become
overnight millionaires.
-It was exciting
to turn on the news
and actually hear analysts
talk about your company
and what you're doing.
And you get swept up
in the belief
that you're gonna transform
the economy.
-On February 11, 2000,
Pets.com debuts
on the stock exchange,
hoping to raise $100 million
in their initial stock sale.
-All the senior executives had
gone to New York for the IPO,
and the rest of us were...
Were in the office.
We were all checking
the stock price.
We see the stock price creep up,
and there's a good amount
of energy.
And then we see it
kind of creep down.
It settles at 11,
and it sticks at 11
for the rest of the day.
-It's a disappointing price,
but the IPO still raises
$82 million for the company.
CEO Julie Wainwright
tells her staff
it's back to business as usual.
-The day after the IPO,
we all went back to work again.
We continued as we were doing.
There was so much commitment
to what we were building
and had built
that we almost thought of it
as a small road bump
in the grand scheme of...
Of where we were headed.
-Just like every other
dot-com at the time,
it almost didn't matter
if it was gonna succeed.
It was still a future bet that
made it a successful opening.
And so you couldn't really
tell up from down, I think.
-But dot-com frenzy
is on the decline.
The stock market has woken up
to the reality
that many of these companies
are losing much more money
than they're making.
-The Internet may produce
something else...
The next
big wave of bankruptcies.
-The downslide has wiped
$16 billion.
-And a lot of
once-promising companies
are coming to
the end of the line.
-In March 2000, the Nasdaq
hits its high peak
and starts going down,
and investors
start getting cold feet.
And of course, people get
really excited as a group.
And then they're like,
"Wait a minute,
someone's starting
to sell Amazon.
Now I should sell it, too,"
and da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
For all of the growth
of the Internet,
the market itself
and the valuations
were outpacing where it was at.
-At least 135 dot-coms
went belly-up.
-They are roadkill on the
information superhighway,
and the carnage
is just beginning.
-CEO Julie Wainwright
needs a way to weather
the financial storm.
And the sock puppet
seems to be her best bet.
-We ventured into the world
of character licensing,
which can be very lucrative,
so we signed a toy licensee
who manufactured
a Pets.com sock puppet
that wasn't as cool
as the real ones,
but they were pretty cool.
-Then they started to get savvy
with the puppet... dog bowls
and lots of other things that
had the puppet's likeness on it,
and they owned that.
-So, when Wainwright learns
of another pooch
besmirching the sock puppet's
good name in the media,
she's quick to pick a dogfight.
-This is what I hear
of Pets.com.
I hear your stock's going down
faster than me on a Pekingese.
[ Laughter ]
-Triumph the Insult Comic Dog,
the creation of comedian
Robert Smigel,
is a staple on
"Late Night with Conan O'Brien."
His act includes
making fun of other dogs,
including Pets.com's
beloved mascot.
To stop the alleged damage,
Pets.com slaps Smigel
with a $20 million
defamation lawsuit,
and Conan responds on the air.
-It's literally a sock puppet
suing a sock puppet.
-Well...
-A sock puppet suing
a rubber puppet.
And why can't those two kinds
of puppets learn to get along?
-Take a look at this lawsuit!
Now I know why human beings
wipe their a*s!
[ Laughter and applause ]
I just threw away my arm, too.
-There was this fear that
Triumph was gonna ruin
the Pets.com brand
because of all of his insults
and really do some damage
to our, um, brand integrity.
-Well, listen, I like the press
to check it out.
-But the lawsuit backfires,
and Pets.com
ends up on the wrong end
of the publicity stick.
To avoid more bad press,
puppet publicist Melissa Menta
goes to work.
-I kept saying, "It's got to be
puppet versus puppet,
not puppet versus evil dot-com
that's trying
to take over the world."
The Pets.com sock puppet
should have a press conference
and discuss why he is not
a knock-off of Triumph.
We went to New York, and we
hosted a press conference.
The sock puppet said
he was innocent
because he was an ancestor
of Knickers from the Mayflower.
And the next day,
the cover of the...
I believe it was the
"New York Daily News"...
Had the puppet
on the front cover,
and the words were,
"I am innocent."
And suddenly,
the narrative changed,
and people weren't bashing
Pets.com as much
after that press conference.
-But will saving its
brand integrity be enough
to help the battered
dot-com survive?
-In late 2000,
Pets.com's total debt
is a staggering $147 million.
Even 50-percent shareholder
Jeff Bezos,
already worth $4.7 billion,
isn't willing to chase
good money after bad.
So Pets.com,
once the poster child
for a thriving dot-com,
announces they're shutting down.
-What I notice amongst the
failures is they think
if they just throw
the words dot-com at people,
they will come,
and they won't come.
-There's a cascading line of
companies waiting to go under,
unfortunately.
-I have no idea what
I'm gonna do.
-The message is clear.
In its two years of its
existence, Pets.com,
like many other dot-coms,
had spent their money
frivolously
on over-the-top advertising
and free shipping to customers.
But for Oscar and his coworkers,
their job was about
so much more.
-We believed we were
transforming commerce.
We loved our coworkers.
It was something that
we had dedicated so much time
and energy and commitment to,
and so much belief.
-But it wasn't enough to keep
Pets.com afloat.
-The last day was hard.
We... We showed up for work,
and there were news cameras
and the news teams in front,
and they wanted to talk
to all of us, but we...
We just wanted to get
into the office,
kind of wrap up our things,
say goodbye.
-I just remember
being devastated.
I just remember being
just so sad
and definitely crying a lot.
-We did go to someone's house
after that,
and we held a vigil
for the sock puppet.
This creature made of socks
and a button...
In the end, we almost felt
that he was human, he was real.
He is symbolic of the team
that put all the work into it
and, also, of course,
the era that we all
lived through together.
-It was like a death. It was.
It was like a death of a company
and a group of people
that I love so much.
And I just didn't
want it to end.
-The good times were followed,
short order, by dark times.
You suddenly had people getting,
you know, laid off en masse,
companies shuttering...
All these cool office spaces
in south of Market
in San Francisco
that were just empty.
-Pets.com was the canary
in the dot-com coal mine.
{\an1}By the start of the millennium,
across the country
had lost $5 trillion
in the stock market.
-The amount of money lost
was phenomenal.
The people who really got hurt
in the dot-com bust
were mom-and-pop investors...
People who had their money
in tech stocks
that they believed were gonna
be their retirement.
-People had to move back in
with their parents...
Just, you know, were so
devastated or frustrated,
they just got out
of the industry altogether.
-In 2003, CNBC media darling
analyst Henry Blodget
settles fraud charges
related to several companies
he analyzed during
the late '90s.
He's fined $4 million
and banned from the industry.
Julie Wainwright is the CEO
and founder
of the successful luxury
consignment site The RealReal.
And Pets.com's star investor,
Jeff Bezos,
can afford a vanity trip
to space.
But before the sock puppet
is put to bed,
one final insult would
strike deep when E-Trade,
one of the last dot-coms
standing,
takes aim at Pets.com's
spectacular rise and fall
in a 2001 Super Bowl ad.
-There was the E-Trade ad with
the... the chimp on the horse,
um, looking through this desert
of other failed
Internet companies,
and kind of the last one
that he comes upon is Pets.com.
[ Crashing ]
[ Horse neighs ]
There is a little bit
of indignance
that they would use you and
the work that you had done,
but at the same time,
there's a little bit of pride.
We're the finale of this ad,
right?
We're the one
that people remember.
-Hey, the sock puppet
was the best thing
that came out of the '90s,
let's just face it.
[ Laughs ]
-What sort of message
do you have for all of us?
-Don't invest in dot-coms.
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