Pets.com
company on 23 shows · 13 statements across 10 episodes · said 94 times in 57 episodes since 2015
Lenny's Podcast 19 
Capital Allocators 11 
TBPN 9 
20VC 9 
Acquired 8 
How I Built This 7 
Founder's Journal 4 
the a16z Podcast 4 
the Startup Ideas Podcast 3 
Big Technology 3 
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 2 
Founders 2 
Sourcery 2 
All-In 2 
Cheeky Pint 1 
We Live to Build 1 
American Optimist 1 
Latent Space 1 
the Neon Show 1 
No Priors 1 
the Official SaaStr Podcast 1 
Top Founders 1 
the MAD Podcast 1
Mentions by year, every show
tap a year for its mentions
Lenny's Podcast 19Capital Allocators 1120VC 9TBPN 9Acquired 8How I Built This 7the a16z Podcast 4Founder's Journal 415 more shows
2026 8 mentions in 6 episodes 1 per episode
- Mark Pincus: How to Spot a Fake CEO · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- Is AI Killing Software? — With Bret Taylor, OpenAI's board chair and CEO of Sierra
- GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen’s $56B Plan to Take Over eBay
- Ramp founder Eric Glyman on the many ways AI is changing corporate spending
- Anthropic's Super Bowl Ad: Who Won & Lost? | Sierra Hits $150M ARR: Is Customer Support Too Crowded? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 14 mentions in 12 episodes 1 per episode
- OpenAI Drops A Web Browser? Our Reactions | Diet TBPN
- Tucker Carlson: Rise of Nick Fuentes, Paramount vs Netflix, Anti-AI Sentiment, Hottest Takes
- What 20 Years of Investing taught Somesh Dash of IVP after backing Perplexity, Figma, Dropbox
- OpenAI Requesting Federal Backstop? | Diet TBPN
- GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen live on TBPN
- OpenAI’s & NVIDIA's $100 Billion Marriage, Meta’s Sloppy Vibes, TikTok Deal Arrives?
- Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- Ben Horowitz Shares the a16z Origin Story & Plans for the Future
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 14 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- Inside JD Vance's Portfolio (ep8)
- Why Software is Eating the World
- Superintelligence, Bubbles And Big Bets: AI Investing in 2024 | Matt Turck & Aman Kabeer, FirstMark
- Bret Taylor: Why Pre-Training is for Morons & Companies Will Build Their Own Software | E1209 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- No Priors Ep. 76 | With Ramp Co-Founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh
- Michael Eisenberg: How China Could Overtake the US in the AI Race | E1167 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The Future of AI in Sales with Gong’s CEO and Co-Founder Amit Bendov
- Jeff Bezos' Shareholder Letters
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 23 mentions in 5 episodes 5 per episode
- Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Zero)
- Failure
- Anthony Scaramucci – Another Winter and Another Rebirth (Capital Allocators, EP.292)
- Aaron Sack – Branded Middle Market Investing at Morgan Stanley (Capital Allocators, EP.311)
- Tomasz Tunguz: How I Raised $230M; ChatGPT vs. Google; How LLMs Work; Trump vs DeSantis | E1004 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 15 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- Amazon.com · Acquired
- David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert – Acquiring an Industry. Venture is Eating the Investment World 1 (Capital Allocators, EP.229)
- NFTs with Gary Vaynerchuk | Where It Happens
- Builders Are the Ticket Before Interoperability Ever Gets Solved
- Sonali De Rycker | How I Became a Partner at Accel; Type 1 vs. Type 2 Mistakes | 20VC #902 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Legendary iPod & iPhone Creator Tony Fadell Shares His Design Secrets · Joe Lonsdale
- How to Leverage Nostalgia and Win at Marketing with Danny Trinh
- Fabrice Grinda – Canvassing Seed Stage Marketplaces at FJ Labs, Venture is Eating the Investment World 4 (Capital Allocators, EP.232)
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Bill Gurley and Michael Eisenberg on The First Signs of an Impending Bust, What Happens with a Market Crash, How Do Public Markets Impact Private Valuations & The Biggest Lessons from 20 Years Investing in Venture
- Michael Mauboussin Master Class — Moats, Skill, Luck, Decision Making and a Whole Lot More · Acquired
- Crypto for Institutions 1: Eric Peters – The Macro Case for Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.180)
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2019 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2017 5 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Jim Dunn – Protect, Perform, Provide (Capital Allocators, EP.24)
- VMware Cofounder Diane Greene with Jessica Livingston at the Female Founders Conference · Y Combinator
- Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07)
- 643: Nimble Passes $1.5M In ARR Last Year, $200k MRR now as CRM space heats up with CEO Jon Ferrara
- Zappos: Tony Hsieh
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
13 statements about Pets.com, every show
Amazon lost significant money investing in Pets.com and Living.com
“Our decision to invest in smaller e-commerce companies like living.com and pets.com Both of which shut down operations in the year, 2000 lost a significant amount of money for us.”
Lieberman: Pets.com thesis was validated years later by Chewy
“What's interesting is clearly their thesis was right because Chewy, many years later, became a very successful online retailer for pet supplies.”
Conrad: Pets.com and rivals each raised over $50 million
“One of the things that happened was that there were three kind of overfunded pet e-commerce sites, and we all raised in excess of fifty million dollars”
Pets.com failed because 80% of users were on dial-up, says Tom Conrad
“The critique that is often leveled at Pets.com, or at least at the time was like, this is just a stupid business. They're shipping dog food around. You could never make that work. And like that that's just wrong. Like you absolutely can make it work. Probably …”
Pets.com didn't go bankrupt; it shut down and returned cash to investors
“We actually didn't go bankrupt. We shut the company down and returned the remaining balance to the investors, which no public company had ever done before.”
Conrad: Online pet supply delivery works, but dial-up timing doomed Pets.com
“The critique that is often leveled at Pets.com, or at least at the time was like, this is just a stupid business. They're shipping dog food around. You could never make that work. And like that that's just wrong. Like you absolutely can make it work. Probably …”
Conrad: Pets.com did not go bankrupt and returned cash to investors
“We actually didn't go bankrupt. We shut the company down and returned the remaining balance to the investors, which no public company had ever done before.”
Sack: Joining Goldman Sachs over dot-com startups was unpopular in early 2000
“Went back there after business school, which was very unpopular in March, February of 2000. You were really viewed quite negatively, and Unimaginatively, if you were going back into these, when you could be working at pets.com.”
Rosenthal: Bad timing, not bad models, killed dot-com startups
“And the reality was that was all wrong. It was just timing and exogenous factors that made that not work at the moment.”
Hsieh: Investors refused to fund online shoe companies after dot-com crash
“No, and also there were huge companies like pets.com that were e-commerce that were kind of imploding at the time, and so even if someone wanted to invest in an internet company, the last thing they wanted to do was invest in an online shoe company, because no…”
Following the dot-com crash, investors refused to fund online shoe startups
“No, and also there were huge companies like pets.com that were e-commerce that were kind of imploding at the time, and so even if someone wanted to invest in an internet company, the last thing they wanted to do was invest in an online shoe company, because no…”
Paul Krugman predicts most crypto projects will look like Pets.com by 2033
“My guess is, however, that I think I don't actually believe that we're at the dawn of a new age. I actually believe that we're at the that that most of this 10 years back, 15 years, 15 years from now, it will look a lot like Pets.com.”
Hsieh: Post-Crash Investors Believed No One Would Buy Shoes Online
“No, and also there were huge companies like pets.com that were e-commerce that were kind of imploding at the time, and so even if someone wanted to invest in an internet company, the last thing they wanted to do was invest in an online shoe company, because no…”