The Sock Puppet
Nine months from the Super Bowl to bankruptcy
August 1999. A startup called Pets.com launches with a simple pitch: people will buy dog food and cat litter on the internet. Within months it has a national TV campaign, a sock puppet mascot voiced by a deadpan comedian, and a slot in the Super Bowl XXXIV ads on January 30, 2000.
Eleven days later, on February 11, 2000, Pets.com goes public on the Nasdaq at 11 dollars per share. Investors fight to get in.
Nine months after that, on November 7, 2000, the company announces it's liquidating. The sock puppet is auctioned. The brand is sold for parts. Most investors lose almost everything.
Pets.com is the meme. It's not the whole story. The Nasdaq Composite, the index full of tech stocks, peaked at 5,048 on March 10, 2000. By October 9, 2002 it closed at 1,114. That's a roughly 78 percent decline over two and a half years.
This whole episode has a name. It's called the dot-com bubble.