Pets.com's most famous employee was a sock puppet. The dog with a microphone starred in a $1.2 million Super Bowl ad in January 2000, a few weeks before the company went public. Pets.com sold pet food and supplies online and delivered them to the door. The trouble was in the box: bags of kibble and litter are heavy and cheap, so shipping ate the profit. Investors still bought in, at the very top of the dot-com boom.

Amazon Bought Half

Greg McLemore started Pets.com, and the site launched in November 1998. Early in 1999 Julie Wainwright took over as chief executive. That March, in the first venture round, Amazon bought a 54 percent stake. The bet was that pet owners, who buy the same food every month, would happily let a website do the hauling. The company spent heavily on marketing to win them. The sock puppet, created by the agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, first appeared in August 1999.

Nine Months on Nasdaq

Pets.com sold 7.5 million shares at $11 in February 2000, raising $82.5 million, and listed on Nasdaq as IPET. A month later the dot-com crash began. The company kept losing money on most orders, and new funding dried up. On November 7, 2000, Pets.com announced it would shut down. Its stock closed that day at 19 cents. PetSmart bought the Pets.com name and web address that December, and the liquidation finished in January 2001.

Cover: Puppies in the Snow, Isoda Koryusai. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for puppies (the sock-puppet dog).