"Today, we're coming to you from one crazy dog park.
Now that you can get whatever you want at pets.com, it's like Mardi Gras!"
If there's one voice you may recognize from the early days of the internet, it might be
this one.
For me, it's like the voice of a very beloved and distant relative calling from the past.
"Oh wow, he's got a stuffed thing, I love stuffed things!"
That is the pets.com sock puppet.
This homemade sock puppet with button eyes and a microphone became the voice of a company
that sold pet products online like way before that was a thing.
And like magic eye posters and beanie babies, the sock puppet was everywhere.
On magazine covers, parade floats, morning TV talk shows, you name it.
And then, almost as quickly as it appeared, pets.com went under, along with a whole lot
of other dot-com companies in the dot-com crash of 2000.
And the sock puppet wound up in the trash can of history, a punch line for everything
that was wrong about those early internet days.
But as you'll learn, there was a lot more going on with the pets.com sock puppet than
you would expect.
In a lot of ways, the puppet is an emblem of why we're here and an excellent place to start.
Hello and welcome to Go For Broke, I'm Julia Furlan.
Go For Broke is a series that examines historical moments when everybody went a little bit overboard
financially, culturally, whatever.
They bet real big and then it didn't go so well.
This season I invite you to lace up your Doc Martens and tell your mom to get off the
phone so you can log on because we're talking about the dot-com bubble of 2000, a time when
the promise and excitement of the internet led to some really wild investments that eventually
cost the stock market almost two trillion dollars.
It's a story about idealism and money that is also the foundation of the internet and
the tech industry we know today.
And we're starting the series with pets.com because if you're going to be a super fluff
like a total and complete failure, you got to get real big first.
And that is what pets.com did.
It's 1999 and the internet is poised to change how people shop, how they plan their travel,
how they socialize.
Everything feels like it's about to change.
And all of this means new jobs and a whole new economy.
Just to be, you either had a blue collar job or a white collar job, but nowadays some
of the highest paying jobs don't require a collar at all.
The IT revolution will create over one million new jobs the next year and tech skills can
help you get one.
Suddenly every single industry is like, oh shit, you mean instead of just selling stuff
to the people we've always been selling to, we can access anyone with an internet connection?
Booyah.
People note they may have in fact actually said Booyah, millions of dollars were pouring
into Silicon Valley companies that were trying to strike gold on the internet.
And that meant hundreds of thousands of people were moving west to work in tech, banking
on the promise of the dot-com boom.
People like Oscar Yuan, who was a couple of years out of Stanford and excited to work
at a fast-paced startup.
Back in 1999 and 2000, I was an assistant marketing manager at pets.com.
So I was in the first 20, 30 employees and we were there till the very, very end.
Oscar and the marketing team were at the beatingheartofpets.com because when you have a new
company and you only exist online, the first step is letting people know you actually exist.
So this was a time where the way that you built your business was by advertising and
by building brand awareness, by creating as much buzz and excitement about your business
as you could.
Deborah Ajo-Williamson was one of the founding editors of a magazine called The Industry Standard.
It was based in the Bay Area and it was designed to be the news magazine of what was being
called the internet economy.
The most important thing, again, for all of these dot-com businesses was to build their
brand name.
The belief back then was that if you had a strong brand name, strong brand recognition,
if people knew about your product or your service or your website, then eventually the
revenues would come.
But you had to build that brand awareness first and the more brand awareness you had,
the more investors were interested in possibly investing in your company, whether as venture
business or in the public markets.
And so the cycle began, but it all really started with the marketing and the public awareness
of the company.
Marketing marketing was one of the ways that these companies were going to beat out the
competition.
And we knew we were defining an industry as e-commerce became a thing.
None of us knew where exactly it was headed.
But there was this really powerful energy that kind of drew me to it.
But the energy that drew Oscar to pets.com was also drawing a lot of other people to
the online pet business.
By the time Oscar joined, there were already at least four other online pet stores trying
to be the main place where people bought their cat food and their dog sweaters.
Why were there so many companies trying to sell us pet food online?
If there's one thing that was true in 1999 and is still true today, people love their
pets.
We're talking iguana food and cat birthday cards and hamster obstacle courses and snake
furniture.
The U.S. market for the pet industry was $23 billion in 1999.
The pet market was bigger than books, bigger than toys.
And on top of all that, this was also the point when it started being more common for
people to have a computer at home.
In 1990, it was actually pretty rare, like 15% of households.
But by the end of the decade, there was a computer in more than a third of U.S. homes.
Given the massive pet market and the potential for people to change the way they shopped,
why wouldn't you get in on the ground floor?
So pets.com wasn't alone.
I think we all knew that the market couldn't support three pet websites.
What everyone understood at the pets.com office was that the company needed to be a category
killer, the one brand that dominates the market.
And that idea drove the company's strategy.
So the objective was to be the last man standing, right?
And so the last man standing is the one that has the most traffic, the most revenue, the
most unique visitors.
Like, that all of these metrics that you had to kind of push towards, I think, which is
what drove kind of all the ambition that we had.
Oscar was hired at pets at a key point in the company's history.
It had started as a sort of DIY endeavor by an early internet entrepreneur named Greg
Macklemore, who had the unusual foresight to buy the URL pets.com.
But in order to grow into a big time business, pets.com needed big time money.
Enter Julie Wainwright.
I was top of my class in high school.
I graduated high up at Purdue.
I got the job I wanted.
I did this.
I had, I mean, it was sort of one freaky success after another.
This is from a talk she gave in 2012 at the University of California at Merced.
And by the time I got to pets, I'd made millions.
Taking pets, I did, because I thought, OK, one more, this will be a blast.
Julie was kind of a celebrity CEO, and hiring her meant that investors would be interested
in taking pets from Greg's home in Pasadena into the big leagues.
So Greg stepped back from the day to day and focused on being a board member.
And Julie ran the show.
Within her first month as CEO, Julie secured a very important investment from a little
company you may know called Amazon and another from a venture capital firm to the tune of
$10 million.
Julie wanted pets to be the household name for pet supplies in the same way that Amazon
was the go-to for books at that time.
This is what she told Bloomberg News in 2011.
Honestly, if there wouldn't have been an Amazon, there wouldn't have been any e-commerce companies.
So we, to me, they were the proof point that, in fact, consumers would transact.
So really, they were the groundbreakers.
Julie knew that one of the best pets she could make to beat the competition was with
a marketing campaign that made sure people knew about pets.com.
So pets went for the big guns at a firm called TBWA, Shiet Day.
Shiet Day was a much-in-demand agency in the '80s and '90s and had done a lot of breakthrough
work from Apple to Taco Bell to a lot of different things.
Yep, they were responsible for the very famous Apple 1984 ad and the cute but pretty racist
Taco Bell Chihuahua.
In 1999, Rob Smiley was one of their creative directors.
And right away, Rob could tell that the pets.com folks were in a bit of a hurry.
What was unusual about pets.com is they immediately awarded us the business.
Normally, it might take a week and a company will review a bunch of different proposals.
We walked in, we made a presentation, they asked us to sit in the room for 15 minutes.
They went out and came back in and gave us our assignment instantly.
Pets needed to move really fast to compete in this environment, which is why they made
the sure bet and gave their money to Shiet Day so quickly.
Because pets wasn't the only company betting on marketing in 1999.
Rob said that lots of dot-coms were banging down Shiet Day's door with some pretty wild
ideas of how to make sure that they were visible.
In that rush to try to outpace other competitors, many companies wanted to be as outrageous
as they possibly could be to get the attention and the eyeballs of the consumers.
So that was a very, that was a big difference from previous generations who were more calculated,
more strategic, more measured in their approaches to advertising and marketing.
And this kids is how the sock puppet came to life.
Rob and his colleagues were banking on a simple, but revolutionary idea that went against
the instincts of basically all of pet advertising that came before it.
As we developed it, I think that we started to create a world where we showed that pets.com
understood that pets have lives, they have things they love, they have things that make
them sad.
The pets.com marketing campaign was going to tap into that part of pet ownership where
you break into a weird voice or you make up an elaborate fiction around your pet.
Like I for one, I'm pretty sure that one of my cats is running a radio station out of
our bathtub and that the other cat was her intern before she was cruelly fired.
I don't know, maybe it's just me.
Shyaday and pets weren't going to do a commercial with some prissy cat eating from a goblet or
some Westminster-esque looking dog running around.
Pets was going to let the sock puppet be this imperfect individual with wants and needs.
It became this very homemade puppet with homemade props with a wristwatch for a dog collar,
with a button for an eye, with a goofy microphone made out of cardboard, with a pets.com logo
stuck on the side, slap-dash, in a manner.
The agency also wanted to steer clear of the superscripted way that commercials usually
sounded.
So they hired Michael Ian Black, a member of the comedy troupe The State, to basically
do improv as the puppet.
Before we shot the first thing, the first commercial, I remember an executive saying
something along the lines of, this has to be a home run.
And then I also remember the ad guys, Scott and Rob, having a look of projecting confidence
and emoting terror.
I didn't know the whole thing was hanging in the balance about whether I could make
a good joke about a Frisbee.
Like I didn't know.
Thank God I didn't know.
I would have blown it.
So on the set of their first commercial, executives from pets.com and from shyaday actually stood
around to see what was going to happen.
They were taking a moonshot with a wildly different concept and they were paying a lot
of money for it.
Rob, the creative director, remembers that day really clearly.
So the first shot we did was the sock puppet with the delivery driver.
Today, I'm overseeing some deliveries for pets.com, purely in an advisory role.
Rob and the other execs were supposed to watch Michael and the delivery driver from
a video feed.
And unfortunately, the video tap broke.
So we couldn't watch what was happening in real time.
They just drove away and for 35 minutes we sat there, clients, creative director, waiting
for them to come back wondering what was happening.
What goes up must come down spinning wheel, round and round.
The pets.com execs were nervous because remember, remember, their whole plan for getting customers
to visit their website instead of petopia.com or the local supermarket was a comedian riding
around in a van doing loose improv with a sock puppet.
If this very first shoot was a bust and they didn't like what they saw, the suits were
ready to pull the plug on the whole thing.
They came back, laughing, got out of the van, said it's great, it's great.
They popped what was then a tape into a tape player for us to see the takes.
And we saw just the most hilarious improvisational takes between the driver and the sock puppet.
We knew at that moment this was absolutely going to be brilliant.
I like your shorts, you're good looking fella.
So they have their first commercial.
Oscar, who was on the marketing team, was thrilled.
Yeah.
So I mean, the first coolest thing is when you're just watching TV at home and then the
ad comes on, right?
And you're sitting there and you're like, wait a minute, that's the company I work
for.
And wait a minute, I've seen a preview of this ad and wait a minute, I know the people
who are doing that, right?
And I think it's not something that happens very often.
The first TV ads with the sock puppet hit the airwaves in September 1999 and they quickly
get some buzz.
The ads are funny and memorably weird, but there's a catch here.
The whole motivation behind this ad campaign was not simply to get people to log on and
buy their dog a new collar.
It was to demolish the competition.
And by the time the first ad aired, the field of competitors was getting bigger.
Petopia.com's website had just launched and they had the backing of the brick and mortar
company Petco.
But it seems like the Petso.com ad campaign, which would eventually cost $20 million, is
keeping them ahead of the competition.
In Julie Wainwright's autobiography, she writes about how valuable the sock puppet
was.
Could the other companies sell dog collars?
Yeah, sure.
But did they have the cutest little rascal in all of puppeteering sitting on the end
of Michael Ian Black's arm?
They did not.
Julie writes that she realized how much of an asset the sock puppet was when Macy's
asked the sock puppet to be in their annual Thanksgiving Day Parade free of charge.
And our man, Al Roker, wasn't the only fan of the sock puppet.
Deborah Ajo-Williamson, the marketing journalist who we heard from before, says that this kind
of stuff was helping Petso.com pull away from the pack of online pet retailers.
And let me just be real with you, because I spent a lot of time watching old commercials.
The competition wasn't doing anything riveting at this moment.
At best, the commercials for the competition look like stock footage.
The sock puppet was so engaging and so unique and the way that it was incorporated not only
into TV advertising, but into integrated marketing opportunities, such as being a balloon in
the Macy's Parade.
I mean, these were things that really made that brand stand out among all the other brands
that I can remember thinking about and writing about back in that day.
Pet CEO Julie Wainwright didn't speak to us for this episode, but like, let's just get
in her head for a moment, OK?
What is the number one place you go if you want to be flashy and cool and advertising?
Like, what is one of the few moments of every year where people actually talk about ads?
Where people actually look forward to the ads?
The Tennessee Titans square off with the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl 34.
Like what is the one thing we can do to one up hit them, right?
Just like, oh, Super Bowl ad, they wheeled in a TV on a cart with a VCR, right?
And then they played the first few cuts of the commercial and we all loved it.
And then the next thing you know is you see it on TV in the Super Bowl ad.
So on January 30th, 2000, the day of the game, 88.5 million people are glued to their TVs.
But in between watching Kurt Warner lead the Rams to victory, that massive audience sees
this.
The commercial opens with a dog looking really sad while its owner drives away.
OK, Dino, I gotta go to a lot of stores to get what you like.
So remember how the whole idea behind pets.com was that pets have lives and feelings and everything?
The Super Bowl ad was all about that.
A spotlight comes on and the pets.com stock puppet appears singing "If You Leave Me Now"
by the band Chicago.
One of the folks we spoke to from shyaday told us that the band had never given permission
for the song to be used in a commercial before.
But their lead singer, Peter Cetera, just loved that damn puppet.
There's a crying turtle, an angry looking cat, a parakeet, and a goldfish.
For Oscar and the employees of pets.com, the Super Bowl was a huge public sign that their
hard work was actually paying off.
I started in May, and it was just starting.
By November, we were in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
By January, we were in the Super Bowl.
So just to be clear, in under eight months, pets.com went from barely existing to one
of the biggest stages in the world.
And it just happened so quickly that it is a little bit of a blur.
For pets and many other.com companies, the Super Bowl was their big coronation, a sign
that they were ready to play in the big leagues.
17different.coms took out ads in the Super Bowl that year, and all that demand drove
up the price for a commercial slot by 31%.
Super Bowl 34 is known as the.com Super Bowl.
And for creative directors like Rob Smiley?
Well, it's everyone's dream to have an incredibly successful campaign in a Super Bowl ad and
float in the Macy's Day Parade.
You dream those things, but you don't know if they'll really happen.
For most people, it is a once-in-a-lifetime moment.
So this campaign is, by all markers, a huge success.
The pets.com website actually crashed because so many people went on it after the ad.
But the thing is, pets.com is far from dominating the market.
If what it wanted was to be a category killer, it's actually more like a category mosquito.
When we come back, as the sock puppet prophesied.
What goes up must come down.
Hi, I'm Julia Furlan, and this is Go For Broke.
In this episode, we're telling the story of Pets.com and its battle to establish a successful
e-commerce company at a time when buying things online still felt kind of like science fiction.
And the fate of Pets.com sat squarely on the small, stuffed shoulders of the sock puppet.
Two weeks after the Super Bowl, Pets.com is about to have its IPO, its initial public offering
on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.
It's a big moment for the Pets team.
Over the years, they've seen .com after .com go public with skyrocketing stock prices.
Today, Pets was up.
Oscar Yuan remembers that morning fondly.
It was early because, obviously, the market opens in New York when we were in San Francisco.
I remember it was a celebratory, it was a positive mood.
The top Pets executives have flown to New York to be there for the opening bell, but
Oscar and his coworkers are holding down the fort.
So it was almost a little bit like the parents away, the kids are going to play.
And it was celebratory, like I said, it was the first time I had tried Dom Perignon.
It was kind of exciting.
But as the trading day starts, the celebration doesn't last very long.
And then I remember kind of as the day wore on, our stock price stuck.
I remember the number very well, it stuck at $11.
And I had friends who were bankers, and I remember getting called, we didn't have text
messages at the time, right thing.
You guys are still 11.
You know what that means?
That means the bank is buying up all the shares to keep you guys at 11.
And I wasn't quite sure what that meant at the time.
But I remember thinking that they had a little bit of like a, it told you so tone in their
voice.
By the end of the day, Pets is exactly where it started at 11 bucks a share.
Oscar and his coworkers are happy that the company went public, but it's not the raging
success that they had been hoping for.
So it was kind of a, okay, well, this is, this is how, how it turned out.
You know, and the next day we went back to work and kind of things moved forward from
there.
This was the point in 2000 when the stock market starts to lose momentum.
But you know what was still going strong, the sock puppet, Pets.com knows that they
need him out there shilling for the company.
He's their best hope of making money.
He's the star.
And like any true celeb, he needs a publicist.
Hi, I'm Melissa.
I'm Melissa Menta.
I was
[email protected] and it was great.
Melissa's job was to help get press coverage for the puppet.
And Pets hired her because she was the perfect person for the job.
So I was in a job that I didn't really love.
Somebody told me about a headhunter and I sent my resume and the next day she called
and she said, "This pet food company wants to talk to you."
And I thought, "That makes absolutely no sense.
I have done publicity for the Muppets."
And she goes, "That's exactly what they want to talk to you about."
I mean, you might say Melissa Menta was born to be a puppet publicist.
In fact, she still reps a white and black dog today.
This time, it's Snoopy.
After the Super Bowl ad, Melissa Menta's phone was ringing off the hook.
I picked up the phone, it was like a week after the Super Bowl and it was a producer
from Good Morning America.
She was like, "We really want to have the puppet do an interview on Good Morning America."
It sounds absolutely bizarre in retrospect, but the Pets.com sock puppet was so popular
that in March of 2000, the puppet actually did Oscars coverage for Good Morning America.
Hey, how you doing?
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 going
to try to interview as many celebrities about their favorite movies and their favorite Pets.
And we were getting news coverage.
I mean, for a publicity person, getting news coverage is like a high.
So, you know, I would get these really great hits and I would just go home and feel excited
about that.
I was succeeding at my job.
The sock puppet is everywhere.
People love that little buddy so much that they're dying to get their hands on a sock
puppet of their own.
Oscar remembers this time as an absolute frenzy.
I remember the customer service was fielding inquiries all the time for people like, "Can
I get a puppet?
Can I get a puppet?
When is the puppet going on sale?"
So they did it.
They started churning out sock puppets and selling them for $20 a pop.
And honestly, they couldn't keep them in stock.
They were so popular.
Ten thousand puppets were sold in the first week that they were available.
It's great, right?
So something that we have built has become such a cultural touchstone in driving so much
interest that people are buying it, you know, so fast off the shelves we can't even keep
it stock.
But lots of people were just buying the puppet and nothing else.
So sales were up, but maybe not in exactly the way that the business plan meant them
to be.
And it's sort of like if people weren't really interested in Big Macs, but they were hyped
to buy a Ronald McDonald doll.
The question rose, like, are we moving stuff away from what our core business should be
with, you know, we want to be the best pet product company out there?
And so I think there was a tinge of that, but it was not a huge, at least from my perspective,
wasn't a huge thing.
It was kind of like, okay, well, let's, we just have to move more pet food.
So number check, pets.com at this point had spent $20 million on the marketing campaign
that created the sock puppet.
But the problem is they weren't making enough money.
You add that to their other operating expenses, and they were almost 62 million smackeroos
in the hole.
Omar Merlot is a professor of marketing at Imperial College London, and he did a case
study on the marketing strategy used by pets.com and other pet retail companies in 1999 and 2000.
You know, they spent millions on Super Bowl ads, TV, radio magazines, and, you know, it's
expensive to create something like the sock puppet and ingrain it in the head of every
single American.
That's cost a lot of money.
And you know, at one point, I think we were spending $4 on marketing expenses for every
dollar they made in sales.
So there's a massive investment, and eventually the customer acquisition cost was about $400
per customer.
So it takes you $400 to get your customer in.
Look, if you're selling helicopters or yachts or fancy shit, $400 to get your customer in
the door is worth it.
You'll make that back on your first sale.
But when we're talking about Christmas hats for your iguana, it means that the company
is spending a ton of money on you in the hopes that you'll spend even more over the
long haul.
I gotta say, those numbers don't really add up, especially because pets.com wasn't necessarily
connecting with customers.
So one thing is to be known, is to have customers that are aware of you, a brand that is familiar.
Another is actually to connect in a meaningful way.
And the way you do that is first by building a value proposition that is meaningful.
And then advertising kind of comes later to reinforce what you've done.
But I think in this case, there was really a rush to grow very quickly.
In this rush to grow very quickly, pets.com wasn't the only one spending millions on
marketing without building the business muscle to back it up before the business really took
off.
You had companies like HotJobs.com, Computer.com, LastMinuteTravel.com that all bought Superbowl
ads in 2000.
Everybody wanted to make a big splash.
I mean, we were told about this one company that had a big marketing idea to build a
smiley face emoji that you could see from space.
That's it.
That was their entire idea.
Omar remembers another dot-com company with a marketing campaign that went too far.
I think it was called Outpost.com and they had this terrible advertisement where they
had this guy shooting gerbils out of a cannon.
It was just the worst ad.
And you know, everyone knew them and it became very popular because of this ad.
But for all the wrong reasons, people remember the advertisement, remember the brand, possibly
in a negative way because the ad was so foul.
But nobody even knew what it is that they were selling, what it is that they stood for.
Omar says, "Pets spent so much money building up the puppet, but they weren't offering
customers anything different.
Even if you loved the sock puppet, it didn't mean that you were going to be a loyal customer."
We spoke to so many people who actually owned a sock puppet but never purchased anything
regularly from pets.com.
And what pets.com was offering wasn't that enticing.
Even to the sock puppet himself, Michael Ian Black.
I didn't use pets.com.
You didn't?
I had a dog.
I had a dog I adored.
Did I ever buy dog food from pets.com for that dog?
Nope.
Never even, never even like entered my consciousness that I would do such a thing.
Even though you were selling the puppet, even though you were the central figure of the
marketing campaign, I know it's stupid, right?
But I didn't know anybody who used the service.
That feeling where you're like, "Um..."
Yeah, like this could all come crashing down fairly quickly.
That was definitely the feeling that I was getting.
People had absolutely heard of pets.com and people were absolutely not using pets.com.
Turns out, pets was fighting to be the number one pet website, but people were still buying
pet supplies the same way that they always had at the store.
And this was one of the many big problems that pets could never solve.
They spent a lot of money making people aware of the company, but they couldn't convince
them to buy enough stuff to be profitable.
In 1999, there just weren't enough people buying things online.
And PS, shipping huge, heavy bags of dog food across the country, isn't exactly a high-margin
proposition.
To do it well, you need a whole supply chain of trucks and planes and warehouses and workers
that didn't really exist yet.
Maybe pets.com could have figured out their business model eventually, but they ran out
of money and they ran out of time.
In 1999, pets.com loses $62 million, and in the eight months after its Super Bowl ad,
it loses an additional $85 million.
For its investors, it wasn't clear that the company was ever going to be profitable, so
they start jumping ship.
In those eight months, the share price falls to under a dollar.
In November of 2000, pets.com CEO Julie Wainwright decides to pull the plug.
Here is NBC's Tom Brokaw with the bad news.
Other economic news tonight.
Here is a new victim of the falling fortunes of the new economy, pets.com, which made
its mark with a sock puppet is closing down.
On January 16, 2001, shareholders approve a plan to liquidate the company's assets.
After failing to find a buyer, pets.com will sell off the majority of its assets and lay
off 255 of its 320 employees.
Oscar and Melissa and the other pets.com employees walk in on their last day of work past a bunch
of news cameras.
A big group of them just go to a bar nearby to drink their sorrows.
Twelve days later, Super Bowl 35 rolls around.
It's the Baltimore Ravens against the New York Giants.
This time, only three dot-com companies from the previous year are running ads.
And one of them is for eTrade.
It features their signature chimpanzee, don't ask, just go with me here.
And the chimp is riding a horse through what looks like an abandoned town.
By this point, dot-coms had lost nearly $2 trillion in value.
Some people had their entire retirement savings wiped out.
Many people lost their jobs.
The chimp passes by an empty office building for a tie-clasp.com, pass the sports car with
the license plate, dot-comer.
And then something hits our little chimp friend in the foot.
It is, as you may have imagined, a tattered, dirty shell of the beloved sock puppet.
Tears run down little chimp's cheek as the commercial closes.
Oh, how the mighty little cutie, the sock puppet that represented so much promise and
momentum, it had fallen.
In just over a year, the company was being sold for parts.
Actually, the sock puppet did have another life.
"Take it car financing, then call 1-800-BAR-NONE!"
The puppet ended up shilling low-budget car insurance without Mike Lee and Black, though.
Melissa and Oscar, and actually a lot of the employees that we spoke to from pets.com,
were really bummed out by that.
"If you need car financing, even if you have bad credit, been divorced, and you look like
such a nice couple, or have no credit at all, you deserve a second chance, too!"
It was so depressing to see that ad.
I remember like, "That's the physical sock with the button eyes and the microphone, I
get it."
But it wasn't, it wasn't us.
And I think that's what was really sad, right?
I don't think there was the whole energy and the people behind it and committing to building
something.
They were just using it, you know, without any of the, any of the history behind it.
"Who says pets can't drive?"
Ugh, I know, it's bad.
To the extent that you can be heartbroken by a sock puppet, I kind of am.
This season on Go For Broke, we're going to bring you some heartbreaks and big wins.
We're going to make it so that the dot-com bubble isn't just this footnote in history.
We're going to examine the forces that created the bubble and what caused it to pop.
And we're going to figure out how the early internet changed the world that we live in
today, right now.
Next episode we're going back in time to 1995, the start of the dot-com bubble.
It's the moment when money transforms the nerdy, idealistic early internet.
It was wild.
We're running in and out of the fountain in front of the old Netscape on Middlefield
Road, you know, and drinking champagne out of bottles and there's balloons everywhere.
We're going to see what convinced so many people in the early 90s to chase their internet
dreams, only to lose it all.
Thanks to Michael Cattano, Hideo Higashibaba, John Ketchum, Sarah Saracen, and Todd Whitney
for their production support on this episode.
Special thanks to Epic's Malise Tusserey.
Archival clips are from ABC Sports, NBC Nightly News, and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Clip of Good Morning America courtesy ABC News.
This episode was researched and fact-checked by Charlotte Silver.
Go For Broke is produced by Bridget Armstrong, Megan Kanane, and Zack Mack.
Isaac Kestenbaum is our editor.
Anil Dash is our editorial consultant for the series.
Gautam Shrikishan engineered this episode and composed our wonderful theme song.
Art Chung is our showrunner.
Our executive producers are Nishat Kerwa and Joshua Bearman.
Go For Broke is a production of Epic and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
If you liked this episode, which I really hope you did, please leave us a rating and
review on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend it's a popularity contest and I would like
to win.
And subscribe for free to the series on your favorite podcast app.
I'm Julia Furlan, and I guess my tagline is "Boo-yah."
Boo-yah!
PodcastTranscript AI