pets.com

87 results back to index

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

And just months earlier, it had appeared as a thirty-six-foot float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Founded in August 1998, Pets.com launched with an aggressive marketing plan and the goal of getting big fast. This was the M.O. of many Internet companies at the time, for which scale was the business model. Pets.com went public less than two years later on February 9, 2000, shortly after its Super Bowl commercial aired. Its public offering raised $82.5 million and the stock began trading on the NASDAQ at $11 a share under the symbol IPETs. Despite its mascot’s enormous popularity, Pets.com had a problem: Its business model was broken. Its assumption, one shared by many prominent venture capitalists who invested in Pets.com and similar companies, was that if the company got big enough fast enough, it would be able to turn a profit.

…

For one, at the time the market for people wanting to shop online only for pet food and related products was smaller than the company had estimated. Pets.com also invested in a large warehouse to store its products, meaning the company had high fixed costs. Even worse, Pets.com had to price low to compete with existing pet stores, even though many of these stores already had razor-thin margins on pet food. As a result, the company actually lost money on most of the sales it made. This combination of high costs and nonexistent margins was ultimately unsustainable. And it didn’t take long for the company and its investors to figure this out. On November 6, 2000, Pets.com declared bankruptcy—only nine months after its initial public offering.

…

It belted out an off-key version of Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” for some 30 seconds, imploring you to buy pet food online. Why? So that you wouldn’t have to leave your heartbroken pet at home when you go to the store. The company, of course, was Pets.com, then at the pinnacle of its reign atop the dot-com pyramid. Following the football game, the USA Today’s Ad Meter ranked the sock puppet’s Super Bowl commercial number 1 in its list of Super Bowl ads. Pets.com was the most memorable company from what would come to be known as the dot-com Super Bowl. The commercial, which cost $1.2 million, was a runaway success, as was the company’s mascot. The sock puppet even made an appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America and gave a long interview on Live!

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

What happened? Well, first let me tell you the story of Chewy. No, first let me tell you the story of Pets.com. Pets.com was a true dog. There weren’t enough pooper scoopers to pick up the mess that company and that stock (IPET) left behind. The bankers, analysts, and investors who were involved in that public offering should have been sent to the doghouse . . . permanently. OK, enough of the bad jokes. Pets.com IPO’d in February 2000 at $11 and traded up almost 30% to $14. (IPO trades can be so deceiving.) Pets.com went public with a lifetime revenue of $6 million—$6 million! That’s the entire amount of revenue it had generated up through its IPO.

…

Despite a memorable Super Bowl commercial (a $1.2 million ad that brought national fame to the Sock Puppet—one of which I keep in my office as a useful warning), Pets.com went belly-up nine months later, with its stock at $0.19 the day of the bankruptcy announcement. Pets.com was one of the most egregious examples of the excesses and the folly of the dot-com bubble. Kozmo was another. Kozmo offered free one-hour delivery of “videos, games, DVDs, music, mags, books, food, basics, and more.” Kozmo did better than Pets.com. It lasted three years before going bust. With the tremendous visibility of hindsight, Pets.com and Kozmo had a lasting impact on tech investing because: (1) they helped create an almost permanent Wall of Worry that new tech companies are still climbing today, and (2) they paved the way for Chewy ($40 billion market cap as of mid-2021) and DoorDash ($60 billion market cap as of mid-2021).

…

And yes, comparisons with Pets.com were abundant. An article on CNBC’s website the day of the Chewy IPO couldn’t help but point out that Chewy was joining a long list of unprofitable companies (including Uber, Pinterest, and Survey Monkey) that were going public and that the percentage of companies going public that were unprofitable was “topping numbers seen even in the Dot-Com Bubble.” But Chewy was and is different from Pets.com. Not in its market opportunity or in its basic customer value proposition. But in its scale (definitely) and in its management team (almost definitely). Whereas Pets.com went public with $6 million in trailing 12-month revenue, Chewy went public with $3.5 billion in trailing revenue—which would be 583 times bigger than Pets.com.

Market Sense and Nonsense by Jack D. Schwager

3Com Palm IPO, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brownian motion, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, diversified portfolio, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, Jim Simons, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, negative equity, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, tail risk, transaction costs, two-sided market, value at risk, yield curve

On the contrary, if you were out of dog food or cat litter, waiting for delivery of an online order was not a practical alternative. Given these realities, Pets.com had to price its products, including shipping, competitively. In fact, given the large shipping cost, the only way the company could sell product was to set prices at levels below its own total cost. This led to the bizarre situation in which the more product Pets.com sold, the more money it lost. Despite these rather bleak fundamental realities, Pets.com had a market capitalization in excess of $300 million following its initial public offering (IPO). The company did not survive even a full year after its IPO. Ironically, Pets.com could have lasted longer if it could just have cut sales, which were killing the company.

…

The Price Is Not Always Right A cornerstone principle underlying the efficient market hypothesis is that market prices are perfect. Viewed in the light of actual market examples, this assumption seems nothing short of preposterous. We consider only a few out of a multitude of possible illustrative examples. Pets.com and the Dot-Com Mania Pets.com is a reasonable poster child for the Internet bubble. As its name implies, Pets.com’s business model was selling pet supplies over the Internet. One particular problem with this model was that core products, such as pet food and cat litter, were low-margin items, as well as heavy and bulky, which made them expensive to ship.

…

Ironically, Pets.com could have lasted longer if it could just have cut sales, which were killing the company. Pets.com was hardly alone, but is emblematic of the dot-com mania. From 1998 to early 2000, the market experienced a speculative mania in technology stocks and especially Internet stocks. During this period, there were numerous successful IPO launches for companies with negative cash flows and no reasonable near-term prospects for turning a profit. Because it was impossible to justify the valuation of these companies, or for that matter even any positive valuation, by any traditional metrics (that is, those related to earnings and assets), this era saw equity analysts invent such far-fetched metrics as the number of clicks or “eyeballs” per website with talk of a “new paradigm” in equity valuation.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

See “Excerpt from the Speech by Greenspan,” New York Times, December 7, 1996, and Richard W. Stevenson, “A Buried Message Loudly Heard,” New York Times, December 7, 1996. Pets.com: Jennifer Thornton and Sunny Marche, “Sorting through the Dot Bomb Rubble: How Did the High- Profile e-Tailers Fail?,” International Journal of Information Management 23, no. 2 (April 2003): 128, 130. 77, But it would be a mistake … Many of the same ideas would resurface: For example, Webvan was a forerunner of Instacart and Amazon’s grocery delivery service, and even Pets.com has been reincarnated as Chewy. 78, In his analysis of capitalist … Marx on “formal” and “real” subsumption: “The Results of the Direct Production Process,” included in Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans.

…

“It’s rare to see an industry evaporate as quickly and completely,” a CNN journalist remarked. And 2001 brought more bad news. The dot-com era was dead. Today, the era is typically remembered as an episode of collective insanity—as an exercise in what Alan Greenspan, during his contemporaneous tenure as Fed chairman, famously called “irrational exuberance.” Pets.com, a startup that sold pet supplies online, became the best-known symbol of the period’s stupidity, and a touchstone for retrospectives ever since. Never profitable, the company spent heavily on advertising, including a Super Bowl spot; it raised $82.5 million in its IPO in February 2000 and imploded nine months later.

…

On the web, accommodating this growth was fairly easy: increasing one’s hosting capacity was a simpler and cheaper proposition than the brick-and-mortar equivalent. And doing so was well worth it because, at a certain size, network effects locked in advantages that were hard for a competitor to overcome. A second, related strength was the site’s role as a middleman. In an era when many dot-coms were selling goods directly—Pets.com paid a fortune on postage to ship pet food to people’s door—Omidyar’s company connected buyers and sellers instead. This enabled it to profit from their transactions while remaining extremely lean. It had no inventory, no warehouses—just a website. But both the benefits of being a middleman and those associated with network effects required a third factor as their enabling condition: a certain kind of sovereignty.

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

Krispy Kreme’s newly massive size also created some accounting and reporting nightmares that forced it into a $75 million settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Finally, Pets.com is, by most measures, the epitome of the dot-com boom-and-bust cycle—an example of prioritizing uncontrolled and overfunded growth while doing things like selling products far below cost (which obviously isn’t sustainable). Pets.com spent more than $17 million on advertising involving sock puppets in the second quarter of 2000 alone; meanwhile, their revenue (not profit) at that time was only $8.8 million. Pets.com was spending based on growth it hoped to see, not on where the company was currently at, and it ended up losing an estimated $300 million in investment capital along the way.

…

There is never enough for the hungry ghost, so it’s always looking for more. In business, the hungry ghost is the quest for more growth, more profit, more followers, more likes. Even large and established companies aren’t immune to the perils of chasing the Beast of high and infinite growth. Starbucks, Krispy Kreme, and Pets.com all pursued aggressive scaling and have paid a steep price in various ways. Starbucks was opening hundreds of stores around the world but decided that it could scale faster by adding sandwiches, CDs, and fancier drinks to its offerings. This rapid expansion ended up diluting the Starbucks brand, and in an equally rapid contraction, the company was forced to close 900 stores.

…

What’s interesting is that Southwest turned down over 95 percent of those offers and began serving only four new locations. It turned down exponential growth because company leadership had set an upper limit for growth. Sure, Southwest’s executives wanted to grow each year, but they didn’t want to grow too much. Unlike Starbucks, Krispy Kreme, and Pets.com, they wanted to set their own pace, one that could be sustained in the long term. By doing this, they established a safety margin for growth that helped them continue to thrive at a time when the other airlines were flailing. Southwest is interesting because its leaders did what they could to sustain their business, and not more.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

A lot of that money went into ads featuring the puppet, which people found about as goofy as the idea of shipping 30-pound bags of dog food in the mail. For Pets.com, and other start-ups like it, the only way forward in the medium term was by the grace of the capital markets. If investors supported their plan, they could keep buying customers, but a waver in confidence was a gust of wind through a house of cards. The $50 million that Pets.com raised from Jeff Bezos and friends in 1999 wasn’t enough to finance a build-out of the physical shipping infrastructure, nor was it enough to cover the transactional losses, the advertising, and buyouts of competitors at the same time.

…

But despite spending $10 million a month on marketing—far more than the site’s revenue—and despite getting help from Amazon and institutional investors such as Disney, Pets.com wasn’t establishing a big enough lead over its competitors, including Petopia.com, Petsmart.com, and Petplanet.com.56 Each of them had a napkin like Jim Clark’s, but the “one asshole in the middle” strategy didn’t work with four assholes. (Clark ran into the same problem with Healtheon; he made the best of it by selling out to WebMD in 1999, soon after he found out the site had an investment from the only asshole bigger than he was: Bill Gates.) To kill a site like Pets.com, investors didn’t have to lose faith entirely; a mere pause in the momentum was enough.

…

A robust business can handle a negative readjustment in expectations, but these were not robust businesses—they were gambles. And gambles pay off or they don’t, one or zero. By the end of 2000, Pets.com was the latter, and a whole cohort of start-ups followed it off a cliff. The Y2K bubble was overdetermined; it had more causes than it needed. One was that technology hedge funds bid up stock prices with a plan to jump out at the high and leave less sophisticated capital holding the heavy bag. That strategy worked well enough, and the funds mostly came out of the experience surprisingly whole.57 But if Pets.com brought global investors to their senses and tanked the NASDAQ as capital shifted out of technology stocks, then perhaps the coked-up sock puppy did some good, stopping people before they threw more money down the dog-food-delivery garbage chute and wising everyone up for the next time.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

The crazy ’90s version of this was the fierce battle for the online pet store market. It was Pets.com vs. PetStore.com vs. Petopia.com vs. what seemed like dozens of others. Each company was obsessed with defeating its rivals, precisely because there were no substantive differences to focus on. Amid all the tactical questions—Who could price chewy dog toys most aggressively? Who could create the best Super Bowl ads?—these companies totally lost sight of the wider question of whether the online pet supply market was the right space to be in. Winning is better than losing, but everybody loses when the war isn’t one worth fighting. When Pets.com folded after the dot-com crash, $300 million of investment capital disappeared with it.

…

Kaczynski, Ted Karim, Jawed Karp, Alex, 11.1, 12.1 Kasparov, Garry Katrina, Hurricane Kennedy, Anthony Kesey, Ken Kessler, Andy Kurzweil, Ray last mover, 11.1, 13.1 last mover advantage lean startup, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2 Levchin, Max, 4.1, 10.1, 12.1, 14.1 Levie, Aaron lifespan life tables LinkedIn, 5.1, 10.1, 12.1 Loiseau, Bernard Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) luck, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 Lucretius Lyft MacBook machine learning Madison, James Madrigal, Alexis Manhattan Project Manson, Charles manufacturing marginal cost marketing Marx, Karl, 4.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Masters, Blake, prf.1, 11.1 Mayer, Marissa Medicare Mercedes-Benz MiaSolé, 13.1, 13.2 Michelin Microsoft, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 5.1, 14.1 mobile computing mobile credit card readers Mogadishu monopoly, monopolies, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 5.1, 7.1, 8.1 building of characteristics of in cleantech creative dynamism of new lies of profits of progress and sales and of Tesla Morrison, Jim Mosaic browser music recording industry Musk, Elon, 4.1, 6.1, 11.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 Napster, 5.1, 14.1 NASA, 6.1, 11.1 NASDAQ, 2.1, 13.1 National Security Agency (NSA) natural gas natural secrets Navigator browser Netflix Netscape NetSecure network effects, 5.1, 5.2 New Economy, 2.1, 2.2 New York Times, 13.1, 14.1 New York Times Nietzsche, Friedrich Nokia nonprofits, 13.1, 13.2 Nosek, Luke, 9.1, 14.1 Nozick, Robert nutrition Oedipus, 14.1, 14.2 OfficeJet OmniBook online pet store market Oracle Outliers (Gladwell) ownership Packard, Dave Page, Larry Palantir, prf.1, 7.1, 10.1, 11.1, 12.1 PalmPilots, 2.1, 5.1, 11.1 Pan, Yu Panama Canal Pareto, Vilfredo Pareto principle Parker, Sean, 5.1, 14.1 Part-time employees patents path dependence PayPal, prf.1, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, 14.1 founders of, 14.1 future cash flows of investors in “PayPal Mafia” PCs Pearce, Dave penicillin perfect competition, 3.1, 3.2 equilibrium of Perkins, Tom perk war Perot, Ross, 2.1, 12.1, 12.2 pessimism Petopia.com Pets.com, 4.1, 4.2 PetStore.com pharmaceutical companies philanthropy philosophy, indefinite physics planning, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2 progress without Plato politics, 6.1, 11.1 indefinite polling pollsters pollution portfolio, diversified possession power law, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 of distribution of venture capital Power Sellers (eBay) Presley, Elvis Priceline.com Prince Procter & Gamble profits, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 progress, 6.1, 6.2 future of without planning proprietary technology, 5.1, 5.2, 13.1 public opinion public relations Pythagoras Q-Cells Rand, Ayn Rawls, John, 6.1, 6.2 Reber, John recession, of mid-1990 recruiting, 10.1, 12.1 recurrent collapse, bm1.1, bm1.2 renewable energy industrial index research and development resources, 12.1, bm1.1 restaurants, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1 risk risk aversion Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) Romulus and Remus Roosevelt, Theodore Royal Society Russia Sacks, David sales, 2.1, 11.1, 13.1 complex as hidden to non-customers personal Sandberg, Sheryl San Francisco Bay Area savings scale, economies of Scalia, Antonin scaling up scapegoats Schmidt, Eric search engines, prf.1, 3.1, 5.1 secrets, 8.1, 13.1 about people case for finding of looking for using self-driving cars service businesses service economy Shakespeare, William, 4.1, 7.1 Shark Tank Sharma, Suvi Shatner, William Siebel, Tom Siebel Systems Silicon Valley, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 7.1, 10.1, 11.1 Silver, Nate Simmons, Russel, 10.1, 14.1 singularity smartphones, 1.1, 12.1 social entrepreneurship Social Network, The social networks, prf.1, 5.1 Social Security software engineers software startups, 5.1, 6.1 solar energy, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4 Solaria Solyndra, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 13.5 South Korea space shuttle SpaceX, prf.1, 10.1, 11.1 Spears, Britney SpectraWatt, 13.1, 13.2 Spencer, Herbert, 6.1, 6.2 Square, 4.1, 6.1 Stanford Sleep Clinic startups, prf.1, 1.1, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1 assigning responsibilities in cash flow at as cults disruption by during dot-com mania economies of scale and foundations of founder’s paradox in lessons of dot-com mania for power law in public relations in sales and staff of target market for uniform of venture capital and steam engine Stoppelman, Jeremy string theory strong AI substitution, complementarity vs.

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising by Ryan Holiday

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, data science, growth hacking, Hacker News, iterative process, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, market design, minimum viable product, Multics, Paul Graham, pets.com, post-work, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Wozniak, Travis Kalanick

And most crucially, all this could be tracked and tweaked and improved to drive as many users as possible into the service. You have to understand how revolutionary this was at the time. Consider that just a few years later, Pets.com would try to launch with a multicity television and outdoor advertising campaign that culminated in a $1.2 million Super Bowl commercial and an appearance at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Or that Kozmo.com would blow through literally hundreds of millions with advertising campaigns featuring the Six Million Dollar Man before collapsing like Pets.com in the burst dot-com bubble. But after adopting Draper’s suggestion—which the founders resisted for the first few months because it seemed so simple—growth was exponential: 1 million members within six months.

Wall Street Meat by Andy Kessler

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, automated trading system, banking crisis, Bob Noyce, George Gilder, index fund, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Pepto Bismol, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, undersea cable, Y2K

Even more annoying was that despite running a technologyonly fund, we didn’t get very many IPO shares allocated to us. Sometimes we got a meager 100 shares. Someone else was clearly getting shares in these deals. It pissed me off enough that we soon stopped going to CSFB’s road shows altogether. Many of these new companies going public were selling stuff on the Internet and worse than turkeys. Pets.com, Drugstore.com, Priceline.com, and Buy.com were all lowmargin companies, but their stocks were valued at many times their revenues. As the ducks quacked, these stocks went up anyway. 180 C H A P T E R 1 2 Price Targets as a Marketing Tool W orking on Wall Street from the West Coast is an ordeal, especially for those people like me, who like to sleep.

…

Remembering the 214 The Ax Syndrome summer of 1986, when semiconductor stocks had no bottom, I said that bottoms usually occur when the very last investor pukes his shares out, at any price. This got a good chuckle. Henry had a problem in that he was still recommending a huge basket of stocks, like Yahoo and AOL but also Infospace, Pets.com and other Merrill Lynch banking clients. He said the downturn was almost over. He had to follow his recommendations or risk being called a liar. So Metcalfe took a different tack. “Henry, how can you still recommend shares of these companies that have no prospects of ever making any money?” The ax syndrome whacked Henry as well.

…

The long “right” streak made them superstars and the long “wrong” streak destroyed them. 218 C H A P T E R 1 5 Spitzer Fixer D otcoms were like anchors with a six-month-long rope attached to them. At the other end of the rope about to be yanked into the abyss was telecom. By October 2000, telecom started giving up the ghost as well. The stocks of Pets.com and Drugstore.com and other milk, er, Internet companies were going down as the ducks quacked in reverse and momos were selling. But telecom was a different story. They talked down their exposure to dotcom companies, and talked up their blue chip corporate customers. Worldcom, Global Crossing, and Qwest kept reporting decent revenues, and met analyst expectations.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

We assumed we could raise more later in the year, and then as that money started running out and it got to be the end of the year, we realized, Oh, there’s no more money! Brad Handler: Then in March of 2001, everything just started to implode, companies were failing. Brad Handler: Webvan came and went. Pets.com—whoever thought that was a good idea?—went. The Globe had the highest run-up and then a year later was bankrupt. John Markoff: Pets.com and Webvan—nobody believed in those. They had the air of excess right from the start. Andy Grignon: We were doing stupid stuff: Pets.com and Webvan and Excite@Home. It was the early development of the service economy. Jack Boulware: It was crazy. All this money that was pouring into the Bay Area—ridiculous schemes like Beenz.com, WebVan, Kozmo—and everybody would profit from it.

…

Jamis MacNiven: Nan Omo was looking at pictures of venture capitalists, spying the room, seeing someone, going up and slapping down something the size of an old Manhattan phone book, saying, “This is the new Amazon, you’ve got to look at this!” Chris Caen: At the time everyone wanted to be the Amazon of fill-in-the-blank. “We want to be the Amazon of pets!” Pets.com! Jamis MacNiven: He chased Steve Jurvetson out across the parking lot. So I had to grab him and threaten to drop him in the creek if he didn’t stop. He goes, “Oh, but it’s my dream!” People came here with this big dream, and it was just off the hook. Chris Caen: So imagine there is more money than God, and it has no place to go, but there are a lot of cocktail napkins with things scribbled on them, and those are what are called start-ups.

…

Yves Béhar: Then during the dot-com boom it went from being known as Heroin Park to having Japanese tour buses driving around the loop and taking pictures. Steve Perlman: You couldn’t find a square foot of grass to sit on and cross your legs and eat your lunch—it was that packed. Yves Béhar: It was the epicenter of the dot-com boom: We had eGroups, 21st Century Internet, which was a VC firm, BigWords. We had Pets.com a block away. Scott Hassan: I was mostly doing eGroups at the time, and Yahoo purchased the company for $450 million, which is not bad for two or three years of work. Yves Béhar: All these companies were right there. People have always been looking for where the internet is—and for a little while the internet was “at” South Park.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

The great dot.com land grab, in which anyone with sense could buy a domain name, crank out a bare-bones business model, take the company public and retire a millionaire (an impressive thing to be in those days), commenced. This was the era of high hopes for companies such as pets.com, the aforementioned online pet-supply retailer, which spent lavishly on advertising before collapsing, and boo.com, an online fashion retailer, which also flopped. But while the hype raged, a more important project was under way: the construction of the hardware and software infrastructure of America’s information technology networks, which would persist long after pets.com and its peers had gone belly up. It was firms such as Cisco and Oracle that truly represented the heart of the technology boom.

…

Studies of information-technology adaptation reckon there is generally a gap of between five and fifteen years between investments in new technology and the appearance of measurable gains in productivity associated with that investment.10 When people survey the technology all around them, at work and in their homes, they are seeing the world of technology in a rear-view mirror. America’s productivity boom of the 1990s is associated in popular memory with the crowds of consumer-facing dotcom businesses, such as Pets.com, which spent lavishly on Super Bowl advertising and existed mostly to give their founders a million-dollar payday when the firm went public. But what actually drove the rapid productivity growth of the boom were older and more prosaic technologies, such as the ‘enterprise software’ products sold by Oracle and SAP.

…

Ray labour abundance as good problem bargaining power cognitive but repetitive collective bargaining and demographic issues discrimination and exclusion global growth of workforce and immigration liberalization in 1970s/80s ‘lump of labour’ fallacy occupational licences organized and proximity reallocation to growing industries retraining and skill acquisition and scarcity and social value work as a positive good see also employment Labour Party, British land scarcity Latvia Le Pen, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine legal profession Lehman Brothers collapse (2008) Lepore, Jill liberalization, economic (from 1970s) Linkner, Josh, The Road to Reinvention London Lucas, Robert Lyft maker-taker distinction Malthus, Reverend Thomas Manchester Mandel, Michael Mankiw, Gregory marketing and public relations Marshall, Alfred Marx, Karl Mason, Paul, Postcapitalism (2015) McAfee, Andrew medicine and healthcare ‘mercantilist’ world Mercedes Benz Mexico Microsoft mineral industries minimum wage Mokyr, Joel Monroe, President James MOOCs (‘massive open online courses’) Moore, Gordon mortality rates Mosaic (web browser) music, digital nation states big communities of affinity inequality between as loci of redistribution and social capital nationalist and separatist movements Netherlands Netscape New York City Newsweek NIMBYism Nordic and Scandinavian economies North Carolina North Dakota Obama, Barack oil markets O’Neill, Jim Oracle Orbán, Viktor outsourcing Peretti, Jonah Peterson Institute for International Economics pets.com Philadelphia Centennial Fair (1876) Philippines Phoenix, Arizona Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) Poland political institutions politics fractionalization in Europe future/emerging narratives geopolitical forces human wealth narrative left-wing looming upheaval/conflict Marxism nationalist and separatist movements past unrest and conflict polarization in USA radicalism and extremism realignment revolutionary right-wing rise of populist outsiders and scarcity social membership battles Poor Laws, British print media advertising revenue productivity agricultural artisanal goods and services Baumol’s Cost Disease and cities and dematerialization and digital revolution and employment trilemma and financial crisis (2008) and Henry Ford growth data in higher education of highly skilled few and industrial revolution minimum wage impact paradox of in service sector and specialization and wage rates see also factors of production professional, technical or managerial work and education levels and emerging economies the highly skilled few and industrial revolution and ‘offshoring’ professional associations skilled cities professional associations profits Progressive Policy Institute property values proximity public spending Putnam, Robert Quakebot quantitative easing Race Against the Machine, Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2011) railways Raleigh, North Carolina Reagan, Ronald redistribution and geopolitical forces during liberal era methods of nation state as locus of as a necessity as politically hard and societal openness wealth as human rent, economic Republican Party, US ‘reshoring’ phenomenon Resseger, Matthew retail sector retirement age Ricardo, David rich people and maker-taker distinction wild contingency of wealth Robinson, James robots Rodrik, Dani Romney, Mitt rule of law Russia San Francisco San Jose Sanders, Bernie sanitation SAP Saudi Arabia savings glut, global ‘Say’s Law’ Scalia, Antonin Scandinavian and Nordic economies scarcity and labour political effects of Schleicher, David Schwartz, Anna scientists Scotland Sears Second World War secular stagnation global spread of possible solutions shale deposits sharing economies Silicon Valley Singapore skilled workers and education levels and falling wages the highly skilled few and industrial revolution ‘knowledge-intensive’ goods and services reshoring phenomenon technological deskilling see also professional, technical or managerial work Slack (chat service) Slate (web publication) smartphone culture Smith, Adam social capital and American Constitution baseball metaphor and cities ‘deepening’ definition/nature of and dematerialization and developing economies and erosion of institutions of firms and companies and good government and housing wealth and immigration and income distribution during industrial revolution and liberalization and nation-states productive application of and rich-poor nation gap and Adam Smith and start-ups social class conflict middle classes and NIMBYism social conditioning of labour force working classes social democratic model social reform social wealth and social membership software ‘enterprise software’ products supply-chain management Solow, Robert Somalia South Korea Soviet Union, dissolution of (1991) specialization Star Trek state, role of steam power Subramanian, Arvind suburbanization Sweden Syriza party Taiwan TaskRabbit taxation telegraphy Tesla, Nikola Thatcher, Margaret ‘tiger’ economies of South-East Asia Time Warner Toyota trade China as ‘mega-trader’ ‘comparative advantage’ theory and dematerialization global supply chains liberalization shaping of by digital revolution Adam Smith on trade unions transhumanism transport technology self-driving cars Trump, Donald Twitter Uber UK Independence Party United States of America (USA) 2016 Presidential election campaign average income Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) Constitution deindustrialization education in employment in ethno-nationalist diversity of financial crisis (2008) housing costs in housing wealth in individualism in industrialization in inequality in Jim Crow segregation labour scarcity in Young America liberalization in minimum wage in political polarization in post-crisis profit rates productivity boom of 1990s real wage data rising debt levels secular stagnation in shale revolution in social capital in and social wealth surpasses Britain as leading nation wage subsidies in university education advanced degrees downward mobility of graduates MOOCs (‘massive open online courses’) and productivity see also education urbanization utopias, post-work Victoria, Queen video-gamers Virginia, US state Volvo Vox wages basic income policy Baumol’s Cost Disease cheap labour and employment growth and dot.com boom and financial crisis (2008) and flexibility and Henry Ford government subsidies and housing costs and immigration and industrial revolution low-pay as check on automation minimum wage and productivity the ‘reservation wage’ as rising in China rising in emerging economies and scarcity in service sector and skill-upgrading approach stagnation of and supply of graduates Wandsworth Washington D.C.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Turf battles escalated between banks vying for hot initial stock offerings and merger deals. VCs chased after fresh-faced, wide-eyed dot-com entrepreneurs. Companies such as At Home and Real Networks had impressive IPOs, as did Verisign, Exodus, CyberCash, UUNet, and Inktomi. Companies like Priceline, eToys, Pets.com, GoTo.com, and Webvan experienced dazzling growth—as measured by eyeballs, page use, and unique customers. Sonja was at work when she got a call from her friend Kim Davis, a venture capitalist at IDG Ventures in San Francisco. Kim had earned her bachelor’s degree at Stanford and had been a year behind Sonja at Harvard Business School.

…

SONJA By early 2000, Eve, the online cosmetics giant, had surpassed even Sonja’s expectations, becoming nearly twice the size of Sephora online. The Internet darling was beginning to attract some high-caliber suitors. One of Eve’s biggest fans was seed investor Bill Gross at Idealab. Idealab was comprised of more than forty dot-com companies, including eToys, GoTo.com, Pets.com, Friendster, NetZero, and CarsDirect. EToys was worth $7.8 billion when it went public, making Idealab’s original $200,000 stake worth $1.5 billion. GoTo.com was worth $5 billion when it went public, and Idealab owned 20 percent of it. But Bill Gross wasn’t the only one paying attention to Eve.

…

The call center was located in Westwood, Los Angeles, and most of their employees were UCLA students or graduates. Dot-com companies signed up in droves to outsource their customer support, sending their own employees to Westwood to train the PeopleSupport team. But suddenly PeopleSupport was losing clients in droves. The darlings of the dot-com boom were going under. Pets.com, begun in February 1999, closed after buying a $1.2 million Super Bowl ad and burning through $300 million in investment capital. Webvan, a grocery home-delivery service that attracted funding from Sequoia Capital, Goldman Sachs, Benchmark, and others, filed for bankruptcy after burning through hundreds of millions of dollars.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

But that risky approach also generated many big flops like the Fire Phone and Pets.com. He has survived this string of flops because while these failures were all big bets, none were “bet the company” bets. If a company is constantly innovating, a few of those winning bets are bound to more than make up for the losses. If a company doesn’t innovate, it might one day find itself in a position where it will have to make a Hail Mary bet to save the company. “I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally billions of dollars of failures,” Bezos told Business Insider’s Blodget. “You might remember Pets.com or Kosmo.com. It was like getting a root canal with no anesthesia.

…

In 2019, the company closed its Amazon Restaurants food delivery business, finding it difficult to compete in a highly crowded field that included players such as DoorDash and Uber Eats. That same year it discontinued its Dash buttons, which allowed consumers to reorder laundry detergent and other everyday items with a push of a button—customers didn’t find them very useful. During the dot-com bubble, Amazon invested in the delivery service Kosmo.com and Pets.com, two online businesses that flopped spectacularly. Perhaps the company’s most public failure was the Amazon Fire Phone. Apple’s iPhone, launched in 2007, had become a huge success, and Google had its fast-growing Android operating system. Why not, thought Bezos, develop a phone that would appeal to Amazon’s Prime members?

…

See also shopping addiction to, 18–19 Amazon Prime’s behavior change in, 98 Amazon’s investment in, 25 combining best of brick-and-mortar retail with, 165, 187, 270 difficulty knowing what is being ordered in, 190 integrating in-store experience with, 193, 194–95, 197–98, 205, 213, 270 search result clutter in, 21 shortcomings in, as opportunities for businesses, 208 smart algorithms needed in, 271 smart home devices for, 116 social isolation and, 105 tedious aspect of, 207 vision recognition for, 116–17 Walmart stores and, 186, 187 Ooton, Carletta, 133–34 Open Markets Institute, 258 operating system, Amazon as, 14–15 Optum, 227–28 Ostendorf, Mari, 113 Otellini, Paul, 51 Otto, 9 Outnet website, 201 Overstock, 203 Oxfam, 241 Page, Larry, 57, 58 Paltac, 139 Pandora, 26 Parker, Sean, 17 Parviz, Babak, 224–25 patents, 175, 230, 232, 240 payment systems Amazon Pay for, 234 China and, 234–35 facial recognition for, 198–99 PayPal, 234, 235 Peripheral, The (TV series), 102 Pets.com, 64, 65 pharmacy industry Amazon Care app and, 230–31 Amazon’s entry into, 225–26 Drugstore.com acquisition and, 223–24 PillPack online pharmacy and, 27, 216, 223, 226, 229 philanthropy Bezos family history of, 251–52 Bezos’s donations in, 30, 251, 252 Pickens, T. Boone, 242 picking process, with robots, 129–30, 135–36, 137–39 PillPack online pharmacy, 27, 216, 223, 226, 229 Pinterest, 210 Porter, Brad, 135–36, 138 Posner, Richard, 260 Posner, Victor, 242 Prasad, Rohit, 109, 110, 115–16 prefab housing manufacturers, 216–27, 238 Prime.

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland, Jj Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, business cycle, call centre, clean water, death of newspapers, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, Kaizen: continuous improvement, knowledge worker, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, pets.com, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, work culture

But despite megadoses of imagination, inspiration, and hard work, the people making the product can never figure out how to actually make money with it. What’s the difference between a Pets.com and a Zappos? They both saw a market segment that people spend billions of dollars a year on. They both saw a way to deliver products more easily and cheaply online. One became emblematic of dot-com excess and the squandering of millions and millions of dollars; the other company is worth more than a billion dollars. They both had vision—what Pets.com didn’t have was a sense of priorities. They didn’t know what to do when. I like to show people this Venn diagram. Every company needs to think about this diagram.

…

., 7.1 Omaha Beach OODA loop, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 8.1, 185, 8.2, 8.3 OpenView Venture Partners, 1.1, 3.1, 5.1, 8.1 Org Chart Orient, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 8.1, 185 output, as measurable standard Overburden Palm paper airplanes, PDCA cycle in making Pashler, Harold passivity, elimination of PatientKeeper, 7.1, 7.2 patterns: negative in Scrum PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act), 2.1, 2.2, 5.1, 7.1 peer review “Perils of Obedience, The” (Milgram) Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) personal growth Petraeus, David Pets.com, 8.1 planning, 1.1, 6.1 Waterfall, see Waterfall method weddings, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Planning Poker, 6.1, 6.2, 9.1 Porath, Christine Portal poverty, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 prioritization, 1.1, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1 process, happiness in product attributes, 172 Product Backlog, see Backlog product development: incremental value in productivity happiness and hours worked and, 5.1, 103, 8.1 Scrum and Product Marketing Product Owner, 2.1, 8.1, 8.2, app.1, app.2 essential characteristics of feedback and, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 incremental value and as internal customer product vision, 8.1, 172, 8.2 Backlog and profit margins Progress Out of Poverty Index projects, prioritizing between, 93 ProPublica, purpose, 2.1, 7.1 Putnam, Lawrence Quattro Pro for Windows Rand Corporation, 6.1, 6.2 rat race Reasonableness, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 relative size, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 releases, incremental, see incremental development and delivery renovations, time frame for Rethink Robotics retrospective revenue, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 in venture capital review rituals re-work RF-4C Phantom reconnaisance jet rhythm, 5.1, 5.2 risk robots, 2.1, 4.1, 9.1 rockets Rodner, Don Rogers Commission Roomba Roosevelt, Theodore rugby as analogy New Zealand All Blacks team in Rustenburg, Eelco Said, Khaled Salesforce.com, 1.1, 3.1 Agile practices at sales teams Sanbonmatsu, David Schwaber, Ken Scrum Backlog as power of freedom and rules in and Heathcare.gov, 1.1 implementing in Japan, 2.1 managers’ difficulty with and Medco, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 at NPR at OpenView origins at Easel, 2.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 origins in software development of positive behavior rewarded in productivity increases with reaching greatness with at Salesforce.com, 3.1 system examined and fixed in team size in time conceptualized in transparency in at Valve workweek and, 103 Scrum board, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 9.1, app.1 in education “SCRUM Development Process” (Sutherland and Schwaber) Scrum Master, 3.1, 4.1, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2, app.1, app.2, app.3 “Secret Weapon: High-value Target Teams as Organizational Innovation” (Lamb and Munsing) self-control, decision making and Senate Judiciary Committee set-based concurrent engineering Shook, John short cycles short term memory, retention in Shu Ha Ri, 2.1, 9.1 single-tasking sizing, relative, 6.1, 6.2 skills small teams, superiority of, 3.1, 3.2 SMART government Smithsonian Institution soccer social motivation software, fixing bugs in software development, 2.1, 3.1 Sony Soviet Union space travel, private specialization, communication damaged by, 4.1, 4.2 Special Operations Forces (SOF), U.S.

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy by Christopher Leonard

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet Archive, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, obamacare, pets.com, power law, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, too big to fail, yield curve

One such asset was shares of stock in a San Francisco–based company called Pets.com, which went public in February 2000. These shares were like those Florida land deeds Galbraith had written about. Quite suddenly, the traders started to reexamine the value of the real-world asset that underpinned the paper asset. They saw that Pets.com had failed to think about the high cost of shipping dog food. The company’s stock had debuted at $11 a share, but began to fall steadily. This was the signal that the self-reinforcing logic of ever-rising asset values was over, and it was over because the Fed was raising rates. Pets.com declared bankruptcy in November.

…

., 218 JPMorgan Chase, 66, 115, 191, 210, 244, 269, 271 junk bonds, 72, 143, 146, 156, 164, 176–78, 259, 271, 272, 281, 286, 299 defined, 347 Kansas, 55, 206 Kansas City Fed, see Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Kavanaugh, Brett, 151 Kelley, Kathleen, 35, 38 Keynes, John Maynard, 81, 347 Keynesian economics, 81, 100–101, 347 KFC, 193 KKR, 180 Kocherlakota, Narayana, 130 labor unions, 14, 61, 79, 110, 166, 194, 196–98, 344, 348 Rexnord and, 190, 194–96 Lacker, Jeffrey, 27, 30, 31, 128, 141 Lehman Brothers, 5, 6, 8, 23 Lemann, Nicholas, 81 leverage, 193n, 257, 262–63 deleveraging events, 247 leveraging up, 252, 253 leveraged loans, 142, 149, 155, 156, 162, 168, 170, 172–75, 178–80, 182, 199, 270–72, 277, 279, 281, 298, 305 collateralized loan obligation, see CLO coronavirus relief and, 288 defined, 347 downgrading of, 271 with covenants stripped out (Cov-lite), 179–81 variable rates in, 177 Liang, Nellie, 148 liberals, 16, 109–11, 257, 346 see also Democratic Party libertarians, 225 Liesman, Steve, 145 liquidity mismatch, 224–25 living wills, bank, 208–9, 269 LMR Partners, 254 loans, 27, 43, 53, 55, 88, 133 assets and, 49–51, 57–60 business development corporations and, 181 collateralized loan obligation, see CLO consumer, 43, 56 defaults on, 271, 279 demand for, 57, 61–62, 212 home (mortgages), 23, 56, 96, 97, 99–100, 102–3, 137–38, 147, 149 interest rates on, see interest rates leveraged, see leveraged loans loan-shark rates in, 251 overnight, 114, 238, 242, 243, 247–52, 254–57 by Penn Square, 63–65 repo, 243–58, 264, 265 risky, 14, 19–20, 27, 33, 49–51, 63, 91, 97, 105, 146–47 securitization and, 63 short-term corporate, 266 to small businesses, 279 zero bound and, 19–20 lobbyists, 206–7 Lockhart, Dennis, 130, 140 Logan, Lorie, 241–43, 245–47, 249, 250, 255, 263 Long-Term Capital Management, 111 LSAP (large-scale asset purchase), 132 Macy’s, 298 Maffei, Greg, 86 Main Street Lending Program, 279, 286–87, 297 Mallaby, Sebastian, 83, 87 Man Who Knew, The (Mallaby), 83, 87 McConnell, Mitch, 201–2, 276–77, 283 McDonald’s, 193 McKeon, Jon, 38, 39, 41, 206 McKinney, Stewart, 66–67 McKinsey Global Institute, 211, 216 McWilliams, Jelena, 230 media, 108–12, 144–45 Mellon, Andrew, 17–18 Meltzer, Allan, 60, 62 Mercatus Center, 257, 301 Mercury Asset Management Group, 157 Messonnier, Nancy, 262, 263 Mester, Loretta, 267–68 Mexico jobs moved to, 196–99 and search for yield, 216, 217 middle class, 295–96 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 191 Minerd, Scott, 262–63, 268, 269, 282 Mnuchin, Steven, 229, 282 career of, 275–76 coronavirus relief programs and, 273, 276–77, 283, 285–86, 299 Powell and, 275, 277–78, 299 Trump and, 275, 276 monetary base, 6, 102, 120 monetary policy, 9, 46, 56, 60, 88, 148 defined, 347 fiscal policy and, 78–79, 346, 347 Hoenig’s views on, 62–63, 68, 82, 94–96 inflation and, 61–62 quantitative easing’s role in, 127 short-term and long-term problems and, 62–63 Trump and, 233–34 money currencies, 45, 112, 217, 225, 350 Fed’s control of, 47 politics of, see politics of money value and quantity of, 4, 6, 46, 347 see also dollar money creation, 4, 6, 17, 19, 26, 27, 45, 46, 47, 50, 58, 60–63, 79–81, 84, 101–2, 113–16, 120–21, 170, 211, 223, 297, 305, 343, 348, 349 asset prices and, 224 deflation and, 223 quantitative easing and, 113, 115–16, 120–21, 177, 211 money markets, 242 monopolies, 348 Moody’s, 198, 271, 347 mortgage-backed securities, 214–16, 247, 254, 266, 268, 304, 349 mortgages, 23, 56, 96, 97, 99–100, 102–3, 137–38, 147, 149 Mozer, Paul, 158, 161 MSNBC, 109 mutual funds, 177 Nasdaq, 84, 86 National Bureau of Economic Research, 140 natural gas, 55 Navistar, 189, 295 Nebraska, 55 negative-interest-rate debt, 217–18, 347–48, 351 Nelson, Edward, 61 New Deal, 79–80, 204 defined, 348 New York Federal Reserve Bank, see Federal Reserve Bank of New York New York Times, 13, 14, 41, 86, 109, 218 Nixon, Richard, 41, 67 Nomura Securities International, 115 NPR (National Public Radio), 109, 120 Obama, Barack, 13–14, 100–101, 103, 108, 122, 126, 135, 159, 203, 204, 207, 229 Occupy Wall Street, 286 oil, 49–51, 55, 57, 61, 63, 64, 97, 117, 118, 235, 263, 345 embargo on, 344 fracking and, 213–14, 216 and search for yield, 213–14 Oklahoma, 55 OneWest, 276 Only Game in Town, The (El-Erian), 231–32 OPEC, 344 open market operations, 247–48, 349 defined, 348 Operation Twist, 127 defined, 348–49 Paul, Ron, 225 Paulson, Hank, 23 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), 284, 285 Pelley, Scott, 112 Pelosi, Nancy, 276, 283 Pence, Mike, 197 Penn Square Bank, 63–65, 67–69, 97, 98 pension funds, 119, 143, 173, 175, 177, 211, 271 Pentagon Papers, 41 Pets.com, 86–87 Pianalto, Sandra, 130, 140 Plosser, Charles, 12, 27, 30, 31, 112 Poland, 216, 217 politics, 16, 80, 202 see also Democratic Party; Republican Party politics of money, 9, 11, 46, 78 see also doves; hawks Poole, William, 85, 86 Popp, John, 174–76 populists, 46, 47 Portnoy, David, 288–90 Potter, Simon, 249–50 Powell, Jerome “Jay,” 121–22, 125–29, 132, 151–63, 199–200, 221–22, 224–29, 231–34, 236–38, 244, 246, 247, 250, 255, 256, 258, 275, 300, 305 career of, 125–26, 152–53, 163, 169, 272, 290 at Carlyle Group, 126, 161–63, 165–69, 185, 186, 229, 290 Catholic University speech of, 225–26 coronavirus crisis response and, 265, 267, 268, 272–73, 277–78, 280, 280n, 283, 290, 291, 296–97 at Dillon, Read & Co., 153–56, 161, 270 Duke and, 125, 127–28, 142–43 early life of, 126, 151–52 economics conference speech of, 256 Fed’s image and, 286 golfing of, 167 growth of influence of, 222 Hoenig compared with, 222 Hoenig’s meeting of, 200 listening tours of, 286, 290 Mnuchin and, 275, 277–78, 299 news conference of, 236–37 normalization process and, 221, 224–25, 233, 234, 236–37, 243, 245, 256 physical appearance of, 156 political alliances of, 233 political standing of, 298 as pragmatist, 153 quantitative easing and, 121–22, 127–29, 132, 141–44, 148–49, 221–22, 236 reversal of opinion on quantitative easing and ZIRP (Powell Pivot), 225–27, 236–37 Rexnord and, 163–70, 185, 186, 199 Salomon Brothers and, 159–61 speeches of, 225–26, 256, 290 at Treasury Department, 126, 156–61, 290 Trump and, 229, 233–34 warning of, 272 wealth of, 169 Williams and, 246 Powell, Patricia, 151 Power and the Independence of the Federal Reserve, The (Conti-Brown), 132 prices of assets, see asset prices and value controls on, 62 deflation of, 96n, 223–24, 237 of gasoline, 17, 50, 54, 72, 73, 83, 84 of gold, 235 of housing, 92, 93, 100 inflation of, see inflation spread in, 268–69 of stocks, 84, 119, 131, 212, 235 primary dealer(s), 26, 101, 115–16, 285, 350 defined, 349 Salomon Brothers as, 159, 160 private equity firms, 97, 116, 122, 149, 156, 161–64, 166, 168–70, 174, 178–82, 187, 202, 221, 291 Apollo Management, 168–70, 173–74, 180, 186, 191 Carlyle Group, 126, 161–63, 165–69, 174, 178–80, 182, 185, 186 put contracts, 345–46 Fed Put, 237, 257, 272, 279, 345–46 Qualcomm, 86 quantitative easing (QE), 8–11, 114–15, 126–49, 154, 170, 173, 182, 225, 247, 249, 251, 252, 262, 292, 295, 302, 304n, 305, 344, 350–52 allocative effect of, 27, 28 asset price inflation and, 119, 132, 148, 182, 300 basic mechanics and goals of, 26 Beck on, 110 Bernanke and, 10, 25–34, 105, 112–13, 118n, 121, 126–30, 132–34, 136, 140–46, 148, 182, 247 bonds in, 101, 110, 139, 227, 231–34, 236, 267, 280 coronavirus pandemic and, 267, 279–80, 297 defined, 349 developing nations and, 216–17 difficulty of undoing, 32–33, 128, 130, 140, 143, 258 Duke and, 127–28, 141–44 end of, 147–48, 227 European Central Bank’s version of, 235 excess bank reserves and, 248 Fed’s research on, 30 Feldstein on, 133 in financial crisis of 2008, 25, 101 FOMC debates on, 9, 10, 16, 27–34, 112, 121, 126–30, 132, 134, 137, 140, 142, 143 FOMC presentation on, 136–39 FOMC voting on, 3, 8–11, 18, 21, 29, 32–34, 105, 107–9, 112, 113, 134, 136–37, 141, 148 forecasting errors and, 138–40 growth-boosting channels of, 148 Hoenig’s critiques of, 27–28, 31–33, 62, 112, 120 Hoenig’s predictions about, 34, 200 Hoenig’s public condemnation of, 29, 34 Hoenig’s vote on, 3, 8–11, 18, 21, 32, 34, 105, 107–9, 112, 258, 280 inflation and, 33, 112–13, 119–20 interest rates and, 116–19, 133, 137–39 job creation and, 119, 139, 182 media and, 108–12, 144–45 money supply and, 113, 115–16, 120–21, 177, 211 negative-interest-rate bonds and, 218 normalization (reversal) of, 221, 223–25, 227–29, 231, 233–37, 243, 245, 249, 256 as normal tool of monetary policy, 127 NQE (non-QE) program, 256–57 open-ended program of, 136, 141 open market operations and, 247–48 Operation Twist, 127, 348–49 policy options in, 128–29, 132, 136, 141 political backlash against, 144 Powell and, 121–22, 127–29, 132, 141–44, 148–49, 221–22, 236 Powell’s reversal of opinion on (Powell Pivot), 225–27, 236–37 public perceptions of, 119–20, 136 risk seesaw and, 145–46 risks of, 32–33, 130, 132, 143, 226 risky loans and, 27, 33 second round of, 32, 114–15, 118n, 144, 173, 349 stock prices and, 119, 212 Taper Tantrum and, 145–47, 217 unemployment and, 121 Yellen and, 130 quantitative tightening, 233, 237 defined, 349–50 Quarles, Randal, 229, 230, 280n Reagan, Ronald, 80, 156, 158–59 real estate, 50, 51, 55, 91, 92, 262 in Florida, 54–55, 86 quantitative easing and, 117–19 and search for yield, 214–16 see also housing real estate investment trusts (REITs), 147 recessions, 8, 22, 24, 50, 56, 60, 72, 73, 75, 80, 81, 136, 186, 225, 236, 302, 347 reconciliation, 158–59 Reddy, Sudeep, 34 Reifschneider, David, 148 relative-value funds, 253–54 repo market, 243–58, 264, 265 Republican Party, 21, 80, 101, 103, 135, 197, 201, 203, 233, 276, 304 Tea Party movement in, 14, 103, 109, 135, 206, 286 see also conservatives reserve accounts, 26 defined, 350 reserve currency, 350 revolving credit facility, 170 Rexnord, 163–70, 171–73, 176–79, 183, 185–99, 281 Adams at, 186–88, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198 Apollo Management and, 168–70, 172, 173, 186, 191 Carlyle Group and, 163, 165–69, 185, 186 closure of factory and move of production to Mexico, 196–99 Feltner at, 188–91, 196–99, 293, 295 labor unions and, 190, 194–96 Powell and, 163–70, 185, 186, 199 Rexnord Business System (RBS), 186–87 SCOFR plan of, 195–96, 198, 199 stock buyback of, 193–94 ZIRP and, 187–88 Rickards, James, 111 Riksbank, 218 risk parity funds, 265 risk seesaw, 145–46, 304, 305 Robinhood, 289, 290, 300 Roblox, 297–98 Romney, Mitt, 133 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 79–80, 100, 204 Rubenstein, David, 161 Russia, 85, 111, 238 Sahm, Claudia, 267, 286 Salomon Brothers, 157–61 SARS epidemic, 261, 263 Saudi Arabia, 263 Saxton, Jim, 76, 78 Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF), 281 Secrets of the Temple (Greider), 47 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 155, 159, 160, 162, 175, 215, 348 securitization, 63 September 11 attacks, 88, 91 S.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

Even high-profile support didn’t count for much once the correction began. Sequoia’s Mike Moritz had invested in one of the dot-com boom’s highest flyers: the pet supply site Pets.com. In January 2000, Pets.com purchased a pricey thirty-second Super Bowl advertising spot titled “If you leave me now.” On November 7, 2000, just 282 darkly ironic days after the ad’s debut, Pets.com shut down and its assets were liquidated—turning “Pets.com” into a synonym for the dangers of dot-com speculation. During the bust, fuckedcompany.com—a snarky twist on the technology magazine Fast Company—became popular with the tech crowd.

…

Mimicry earned Alando fifty thousand registered users in just weeks—and a $42 million acquisition offer from eBay months after launch. 20 BLINDSIDED “We will have a thermonuclear IPO,” declared Musk in the summer of 2000. Employees ranked it among his more memorable Musk-isms. But a year past PayPal’s founding, the markets had just survived a major blast of their own—and gone sour on technology IPOs. The Amazon-backed Pets.com was exhibit A. The much-hyped online pet food company IPO-ed in February 2000, opening at $11 per share and later reaching a peak of $14 per share. By November, the stock had cratered to 19 cents a share. Only months after its IPO, the company was forced into liquidation. It wasn’t alone: in 2000, internet stocks collectively lost three-quarters of their value, wiping out a staggering $2 trillion in market capitalization.

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

And everybody celebrates. Maybe this whole redemption thing wasn’t so smart.” “People who celebrate Dow 10,000 and NASDAQ 5,000 are the same ones who obsess over stock splits,” Fred noted. “Good point. Still . . .” “Still what? Yahoo is $200. Amazon is $70 after splitting. AOL is buying TimeWarner. Pets.com actually has a bid,” Fred said with his best dripping sarcastic tone. “It’s crazy.” “Twilight Zone,” I said. We’d just seen the list from the folks that track hedge funds— our 377% gain in 1999 made us the fourth best hedge fund for the year. We are on our way to being up 40% for the first quarter of 2000, our sixth quarter of big gains in a row.

…

But those trades don’t clear for a few days. This may be something else,” Fred said coldly. “Buyer exhaustion?” “I wish. That’s how all these bubbles end. We’re getting beat up, but it looks like they’re taking the Internet names out first.” “Out back to the woodshed, like Old Yeller.” “And that silly Pets.com sock puppet. Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of names,” Fred said, almost a little too gleefully. “Maybe this is real. I haven’t seen that bag lady return to the bench outside.” “She was the ghost of bear markets past.” “Here’s another one for you, Fred. Your friends at Internet Capital Group?” “Yeah?”

…

See Xerox PARC Panasonic, 253, 254, 255, 257 PARC. See Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Parliament, 55, 56, 92, 272 Parsons, Charles, 94–95 patents, 55, 56, 57, 64, 65 pricing and, 58, 59, 137 PCs. See computers PDP-8, 103 Pearse, Edward, 92 peer-to-peer file sharing, 190 people costs and demands, 246–48 personal computers. See computers Pets.com, 223, 224 phone network, 61, 183–84, 185–86, 290, 291 Pinnacle Systems, 96–97, 98 piracy, 46, 206–7, 263 Pittman, Bob, 69–73 planar process, 101–2 Porat, Marc, 97 power, cost of, 64, 65, 77–79 computer and, 121 steam engine and, 58–59, 66 power looms, 66 pricing. See competitive pricing productivity, 64, 123 profitability, 256, 258, 275 gross margin, 130, 132, 135 Progressive Networks.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

It took a leap of faith. Even twenty years later, Pets.com was still the poster child for e-commerce excess in Silicon Valley. Taking advantage of a hot market for anything dot-com, it went public with hardly any revenue in 1999, but it spent heavily on advertising, including a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and an infamous sock puppet ad in the 2000 Super Bowl. Star analyst Henry Blodget, who would be permanently banned from the securities industry for making stock recommendations that he disavowed in private, had a “buy” rating on Pets.com for much of its time as a public company.[2] That wasn’t very long—the e-tailer ran out of cash and declared bankruptcy in 2000, just nine months after its initial public offering.

…

., 179 Klarman, Seth, 184 Koss, 132, 169, 188, 224 Kruger, Justin, 28 Kynikos Associates, 77 L Ladies’ Home Journal, 150 Lamberton, Cait, 54, 62 Lamont, Owen, 80 Langer, Ellen, 27 Langlois, Shawn, 45 Laufer, Henry, 237 Lay, Kenneth, 85 Lebed, Jonathan, 163 Leder, Michelle, 239 Ledger, Heath, 138 Left, Andrew, 39, 116–26, 148, 191, 214, 217 GameStop and, 120–24, 129, 130, 133, 146 harassment of, 122 WallStreetBets and, 121–23, 126, 129, 130, 133, 136, 238 Lehman Brothers, 80, 117 Lending Tree, 162 Levie, Aaron, 26 Lewis, Michael, 16, 88 Lindzon, Howard, 24, 49, 176 LinkedIn, 239 Livermore, Jesse, 78–79 locating a borrow, 72–73, 80 Loeb, Dan, 111 Lombardi, Vince, 8 Long-Term Capital Management, 260 Loop Capital, 128 Los Angeles Times, 215 loss aversion, myopic, 236 lotteries, 62, 239, 241, 242 Lowenstein, Roger, 260 Lucid Motors, 164 M Mad Money, 254 Madoff, Bernie, 117, 206 MagnifyMoney, 162 Mahoney, Seth, 19, 31, 176–77 Malaysia, 75 Malkiel, Burton, 253 Manias, Panics, and Crashes (Kindleberger), 179 Manning, Peyton, 64 Man Who Solved the Market, The (Zuckerman), 237 Maplelane Capital, 217 March Madness, 57 Marcus, 257 margin calls, 203–5 margin debt, 58–59, 62, 67, 138, 188 Markets Insider, 103 MarketWatch, 45, 180 MassMutual, 87, 131, 171 Mavrck, 142 Mayday, 48–50, 66 McCabe, Caitlin, 128–29 McCormick, Packy, 23, 35, 104, 202 McDonald, Larry, 99 McDonald’s, 154 McHenry, Patrick, 239 McLean, Bethany, 85 Medallion Fund, 237 MedBox, 117 Melvin Capital Management, 6–8, 56, 72, 94–96, 110–12, 114, 119, 121, 123, 128–30, 132, 135, 136, 146, 189, 190, 202, 205, 217, 218, 222, 227 meme stocks, xii–xiv, 5, 7–9, 11, 12, 14, 22, 30, 32–34, 36, 39, 40, 47, 54, 63, 67, 72, 73, 76, 100, 108, 123, 125, 127, 129, 132–33, 135, 137–40, 146, 147, 153–55, 157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 169, 170, 178, 179, 181, 183, 185, 191, 193, 194, 198–99, 204–5, 208, 219, 220, 222, 227, 229, 230, 237, 238, 240, 246 AMC, 39, 93, 125, 127, 132, 169, 188, 220–21, 224–26 Bed Bath & Beyond, 115, 133, 188 BlackBerry, 93, 115, 133, 169, 178, 188, 224 bot activity and, 165, 166 GameStop, see GameStop, GameStop short squeeze insiders of, 224 Koss, 132, 169, 188, 224 margin debt and, 58 Naked, 132, 188 Nokia, 169, 178, 188 payment for order flow and, 207 Robinhood’s trading restrictions on, 187–89, 194, 195–200, 203, 206 Merton, Robert, 101, 102, 108 Microsoft, 46, 93 Mihm, Stephen, 48 millennials, 21, 26, 27, 56, 71, 88, 142, 143, 148, 162, 242, 246, 255 Minnis, Chad, 126, 157, 242 MoneyWatch, 59 monthly subscription services, 32 Morgan Stanley, 28, 55, 178, 219 Morningstar, 216, 244, 245, 254, 255 Motherboard, 131–32 Motter, John, 215–17, 226 Mudrick, Jason, 220–21 Mudrick Capital Management, 220 Mulligan, Finley, 230 Mulligan, Quinn, 142, 214 Munger, Charlie, 183–84, 241 Murphy, Paul, 78 Musk, Elon, 19, 75, 82–83, 92, 124, 143, 149, 152–53, 155–57, 160, 161, 167, 212, 216 tweets of, x, 60, 82, 83, 124, 144, 152–54, 161, 170 Must Asset Management, 221 mutual funds, 139, 151, 221, 234, 244, 245, 254–56 myopic loss aversion, 236 N Naked Brand, 132, 188 Nasdaq, 60, 92, 98, 104 Nasdaq Whale, 98, 104–6, 108, 109, 227 Nathan, Dan, 192 National Council on Problem Gambling, 31, 57 National Futures Association, 118 Nations, Scott, 99 Nations Indexes, 99 NCAA Basketball, 57 Netflix, x–xi, 15, 50, 98, 133, 208 Netscape, 24 Neumann, Adam, 105 New Yorker, 143 New York Mets, 8, 161 New York Post, 124, 172 New York Stock Exchange, 49 New York University, 20, 82, 177 Nikola, 64 NIO, 120 Nobel Prize, 101, 260 Nokia, 169, 178, 188 nudges, 31–32, 235–36 Nvidia, 98 O Obama, Barack, 13, 38 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 160, 197 Occupy Wall Street movement, 12, 125 Odean, Terrance, 235, 238, 243 Odey, Crispin, 126 Ohanian, Alexis, 12, 37–38, 125 O’Mara, Margaret, 38, 156, 157 Omega Family Office, 191 O’Neal, Shaquille, 64 Oppenheimer, Robert, 83 options, 34–35, 99–107, 217 call, see call options delta and, 107, 108 losses and quick approval processes for, 103 put, 46, 99, 106, 111–12, 148 Robinhood and, 34–35, 102–4, 106, 108–9 Options Clearing Corporation, 102 P Pagel, Michaela, 235 Palantir Technologies, 120 Palihapitiya, Chamath, 143, 144, 152–53, 155, 157–58, 160, 164, 212, 234, 246, 253 Palm, 84 PalmPilot, 84 Pao, Ellen, 38 Paperwork Crisis, 49 Parker, Sean, 38 payment for order flow, 10, 33, 153, 196, 206–9 Penn National, 57 penny stocks, 60, 120, 133, 166, 167 Permit Capital, 223 Pershing Square Holdings, 56 Pets.com, 90 PetSmart, 89 Pew Research, 71 Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, The (Hirst), 7 Piggly Wiggly, 78–79 PiiQ Media, 166 PIMCO, 216 Plotkin, Gabriel, 41, 56, 67, 73, 80, 85, 86, 95–96, 110–12, 114–15, 116, 122, 123, 129, 130, 133, 140, 146, 148, 157, 158, 161, 191, 197, 213–14, 217, 218, 227, 240, 246, 250, 253 at congressional hearing, 6–11 Porsche, 77 Portnoy, Dave, 57, 152–55, 158–59, 161, 181, 188–89, 212 Povilanskas, Kaspar, 195 Pruzan, Jonathan, 219 Psaki, Jen, 192 Public.com, 196, 207, 209 pump and dump, 163 put options, 46, 99, 106, 111–12, 148 Q Qualcomm, 46 R RagingBull, 163 Random Walk Down Wall Street, A (Malkiel), 253 Raskob, John J., 150–52, 154, 156 Raytheon, 153–54 RC Ventures LLC, 114 Reagan, Ronald, 156, 234 Reddit, xi, xii, 11–12, 19, 22, 23, 25, 36–39, 41, 42, 107, 122, 125, 162, 164, 199 founding of, 37–38 Gill’s influence on, 141–42; see also Gill, Keith; WallStreetBets karma on, 47, 141–42 mechanics and demographics of, and GameStop, 37 offensive subreddits on, 38 r/ClassActionRobinHood, 196 r/GMEbagholders, 140 r/investing, ix, 46 r/wallstreetbets, see WallStreetBets Super Bowl ad of, 12 Volkswagen squeeze and, 78 Reddit Revolution, xv, 41, 42, 75, 99, 152, 170, 192, 206, 211, 219, 220, 230, 246, 261 see also GameStop, GameStop short squeeze; WallStreetBets rehypothecation, 80, 92 reinforcement learning, 35 Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Lefèvre), 78 Renaissance Technologies, 237 retail trading, xiii, xiv, xvi, 4, 7, 9–14, 49, 56–59, 63–64, 66, 67, 81, 98, 140–41, 143, 169–70, 178, 181, 183, 186, 194, 218, 237, 238, 244, 247 retirement accounts and pension funds, 5, 13, 27, 31–32, 41, 69, 76, 77, 81, 171, 182, 234, 235, 245, 252, 255, 256 Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 135–36 RiskReversal Advisors, 192 Ritter, Jay, 63, 65 Roaring Kitty (Gill’s YouTube persona), 2, 18, 45, 48–49, 92, 130, 133, 144, 171, 174–75, 191, 211, 213 Roaring Kitty LLC, 171 Robinhood, xi, xiii, xv, 4–6, 13–14, 19, 22–35, 41–42, 50, 53, 55, 57, 61, 66, 70, 81, 98, 139, 141, 153, 154, 157, 158, 161, 176, 178, 183, 184, 187–90, 193, 194, 195–210, 212–13, 219, 237–38, 243, 245, 246, 259 account transfer fees of, 54 average revenue per user of, 66–67 Buffett on, 240–41 call options and, 97–98 Citadel and, 10, 11 clearinghouse of, 187 commissions and, 49, 50 customer loan write-offs of, 205 daily average revenue trades of, 59 daily deposit requirement of, 205 former regulators hired by, 239–40 founding of, 3, 23–25, 90 funding crisis of, 187–88, 193, 198, 203, 205–6 gamification and, 29–31 Gold accounts, 32, 58, 97, 202 growth of, 25–26, 50 herding events and, 238 Hertz and, 61 hyperactive traders and, 193, 202, 207, 236 initial public offering of, 200–201, 219 Instant accounts, 32 Kearns and, 103–4 lawsuits against, 196 margin loans of, 58–59, 205 median account balances with, 50, 54 options and, 34–35, 102–4, 106, 108–9 payment for order flow and, 10, 33, 196, 206–9 revenue from securities lending, 73 risky behavior encouraged by, 202–3 Robintrack and, 53, 61 SPACs and, 64 stimulus checks and, 56 Super Bowl ad of, 28, 30, 200 technical snafus by, 53–54 Top 100 Fund and, 61 trading restricted by, 187–89, 194, 195–200, 203, 206, 209 valuation of, 49 WallStreetBets and, 22–23 wholesalers and, 33–35, 49, 104, 106 Robin Hood (charitable foundation), 196–97 robo-advisers, xv, 27, 257–58 Betterment, 27, 54, 183, 193, 242, 257, 258, 261 SoFi, 27, 56, 57, 158 Rockefeller, John D., 9 Rodriguez, Alex, 64 Rogers, Will, 163 Rogozinski, Jaime, 23, 39, 46, 50, 53, 55, 70–71, 97, 122, 138, 144, 190, 231 Roper, Barbara, 29–30, 35, 54, 185, 241 Rozanski, Jeffrey, 46 Rukeyser, Louis, 156 Russell 2000 Value Index, 125, 191 S S3 Partners, 76, 81, 130, 133, 170, 217 SAC Capital Advisors, 7, 110 Sanders, Bernie, 65–66, 198 S&P (Standard & Poor’s), 83 S&P Dow Jones Indices, 70, 254 S&P 500, 76 Sanford C.

How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day

The problem was that the structures, timing, and valuations of these startups were all dependent upon assumed growth and the execution of ambitious business plans, and those assumptions and executions often weren’t reasonable or achievable. One example of many was the perfect catastrophe of pets.com, which sold retail pet supplies. The company launched in early 1999 and found quick success, mainly through ultra-aggressive advertising campaigns and by offering its products for a third of the price at which it had purchased them, with free shipping. The management team running pets.com gambled that if they could convince enough people to begin buying pet goods online, then they could capture adequate market share—even while losing money on every sale—to establish themselves as a viable company.

…

Yet they pressed on, spending lavishly to erect a “falloon” of their sock-puppet mascot (a thirty-six-foot-high balloon attached to a float) and entering it in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, then purchasing a Super Bowl ad for $1.2 million, even as the company hemorrhaged money. Seventeen days after the Super Bowl, they had a successful IPO on the Nasdaq at $11 per share. Less than nine months later, the stock bottomed out at nineteen cents, and they liquidated all assets and went out of business. The entire meteoric run of pets.com—from launch to falloon to Super Bowl to IPO to handing in its keys—spanned barely more than two years. There was a gold rush atmosphere in the fledgling days of the internet boom, and indeed it evoked memories of the first California gold rush, which was its own sort of bubble. Exactly a century and a half earlier, gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada by a former carpenter from New Jersey.

…

., 4, 312–19, 323–28, 330–36, 342–45, 351–52, 365 Citron in, 315–20, 324, 326, 343–45, 352, 367 pension system in, 345 Project Robin Hood in, 331–33 Orange County Register, 315 Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA), 334–35 Orwell, George, 210 Osnos, Evan, 306, 307 other line, see privilege ownership, asset division and, 246 Oyster Bay golf outings, 134–36 PAIX (Palo Alto Internet Exchange), 223, 228 Partinoli, Dave, 185–86 Patriot Bank, 372–73 Paul, Jake, 282–83, 295, 299, 301–2, 305 Paul, Logan, 282–84, 293–96, 299–303 PayPal, 233, 307 Pendergrass, Kristina, 336 pension systems, 335–39, 353–54, 359 accountability and, 369 in Orange County, 345 oversight or review board for, 366–67 in Stockton, 335–36 Penthouse, 244 PeopleSoft, 261 Perez, Monalisa, 303–4 pets.com, 229–30 PewDiePie, 304–5 Pfefferman scandal, 31 phone minutes: as currency, 245 see also prepaid calling cards Podesto, Gary, 320, 321 pooling, 170–72, 176 pornography, 218, 219, 233, 244 Danni’s Hard Drive site, 226, 227, 231–33 portfolio insurance, 37 poverty, 349 Predators’ Ball, 93–94 Predators Ball, The (Bruck), 93, 94 prepaid calling cards, 220–21, 223, 245, 246 SmarTalk, 218, 221–23, 244 preppers (survivalists), 305–8 Pretty Woman, 98–103, 106 Prince, Chuck, 208–10, 211 private companies, 177 Private Jet Studio, 303 privilege, 280–310, 362 air travel and, 299–300 Disneyland and, 289–90 education and, 291–92 extended across generations, 291 healthcare and, 291 social media influencers and, 283–84, 291–99, 301–3, 305 Project Passion culture committee, 204–6, 211, 264–65, 365–66 Project Robin Hood, 331–33 Purcell, Tom, 133, 325 Purpdrank, Jerry, 295 quarterly earnings expectations, 177–78 of Lucent, 194 of U.S.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

The splashier the brand, the greater the public relish in its fall. Exhibit A in this regard was Pets.com, online purveyor of cat food and doggie toys, which had gone public at the tail end of the boom with a valuation of close to $300 million. It threw most of its money into marketing, saturating television airwaves with ads featuring a canine sock-puppet mascot who bantered with pets and crooned Blood, Sweat & Tears to a mailman (“What goes up, must come down . . .”). And come down it did—less than a year after the Pets.com puppet appeared as a float in the 1999 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and 268 days after its IPO, the dot-com retailer shuttered for good.

…

The commander-in-geek was out of a job, and the Valley’s brief love affair with Washington sometimes seemed like it never happened. * * * — For entrepreneurs and investors who had ridden tech’s boom-and-bust cycle for decades, however, times were bleak, but endurable. The boom this go-round had been so long-lived, and so enormous, that the Valley remained larger and richer even after the market crashed and burned. Pets.com and its peers might have bitten the dust, but Internet retail sales continued their steady upward climb. People had gotten comfortable with buying things online, and they weren’t turning back. Four years of fevered deal-making had made rich investors even richer, even if billions of dollars in paper wealth had evaporated overnight.

…

Zach Schiller, “Morgenthaler Scores in IPO,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 4, 2000, C3; Alex Berenson, “Stocks End Gloomy First Quarter,” The New York Times, March 31, 2001, C1; Burt McMurtry, interview with the author, October 2, 2017; Ann Hardy, interview with the author, September 19, 2017. 4. Mike Tarsala, “Pets.com Killed by Sock Puppet,” MarketWatch, November 8, 2000, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sock-puppet-kills-petscom, archived at https://perma.cc/T6WU-HKW5 [inactive]. Also see Jennifer Thornton and Sunny Marche, “Sorting through the dot bomb rubble: how did high-profile e-tailers fail?” International Journal of Information Management 23, no. 2 (April 2003): 121–38. 5.

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

The Internet revolution resulted in an explosion in entrepreneurship, and the amount of venture capital investment in start-ups climbed from $10 billion in 1996 to nearly $100 billion in 2000. Average fund returns exploded to 30-50 percent per year during the first half of the 1990s and climbed even from there as the IPO market seemed to accept companies on concepts alone. For example, Pets.com, an online community for pet lovers, went public in February 2000. The IPO resulted in a $300 million valuation. The only problem was that the company had negligible revenue and no sustainable business model. It went out of business in November 2000, less than a year later. Since the Internet bubble burst, the VC industry has rationalized.

…

See Global venture capital Overture Page, Larry Paley, Eric background information Brontes 3D, development of pitch to VC selling Brontes 3D 3M, role at Parker, Randy Participation feature capped participation full participation, example of nonparticipation option waterfall calculations PayPal Pelz, Bryan Perkins, Kleiner, fund size Pets.com Pincus, Mark blog of on control elements on making mistakes on VC/entrepreneur match Pitch assessing VC for and deal flow and eccentric entrepreneurs entrepreneurial team evaluation of entrepreneurs, assessing from experiment to company example importance of networking toward VC overselling, avoiding rejection by VCs risk, presenting to VC rushed decision making, avoiding time allowed Upromise, example Polaris Venture Partners.

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

My host paused and smiled and continued, “And then, with magic, companies start to make money, profits. They cut—how you say—fat?” as he grabbed his belly, “and stocks go up and they get more money to grow.” MARKETS GET A bad name—stock markets any way. Mostly because they are so volatile and do unexplained things—like going up when bad news comes out, putting a huge value on Pets.com, and crashing precipitously every once in a while. No doubt, the stock market trades to inflict the maximum amount of pain. If everyone thinks it’s going to go up, it’s sure to drop. Why is that? Well, the market measures sentiment every day, and figures out what everyone thinks, a consensus if you will, and for the most part prices that into the market.

…

Then the credit crisis and a Lehman Brothers bankruptcy sent the market into a free fall, bottoming out at 6,547 only seventeen months later. Contrast this with a decade earlier, when the dot-com-laden NASDAQ peaked at 5,048, only to bottom coincidentally on October 9, 2002, at 1,114. Back then, companies like Pets.com were going to fundamentally reshape the economy in the new millennium into a Kool-Aid-induced nirvana of spectacular growth and well-being. Or something like that. No one would blame you for thinking the market is a textbook delusional paranoid schizophrenic, not knowing the difference between the real and the unreal.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

In August 2000, The Guardian wrote that Flooz had a chance of realizing “Hayek’s dream of companies challenging governments for the right to issue money,” referring to Friedrich Hayek, the great libertarian economist. Those two companies wouldn’t run into serious trouble until the end of the year. Few noticed the crash, in fact, until the fall, when the first dot-coms started running out of money. Pets.com announced, suddenly, that it was insolvent, the launch parties grew scarcer, and tech workers began nervously checking a new parody news site, FuckedCompany.com. But Thiel had noticed. In fact, almost as soon as he’d raised the $100 million and just before the bubble began to burst, he disappeared.

…

“The PayPal Mafia philosophy became the founding principle for an entire generation of tech companies,” said McNamee. * * * — even so, in late 2000, Thiel wasn’t thinking about moving fast and breaking things. The tech crash was well underway, and he was thinking about surviving. If Thiel wanted to avoid the fate of companies like Pets.com, he desperately needed to reduce PayPal’s losses, which meant dealing with fraud. Criminals had begun to notice that the company’s growth hacks—one of which was its decision not to verify users’ identities when they opened an account—had made it an ideal place to launder money stolen from victims of identity theft.

…

Army and, 234–35, 258–59, 284 Wolfe Schiff appointed to board of, 312 Palin, Sarah, 184 Palm, 51 PalmPilot, 50–52, 58 Pan, Yu, 53 parabiosis, 325–27, 329, 330, 335 Paris Climate Agreement, 261, 264 Parker, Sean, 106–9, 112, 119–20, 126, 134, 150, 159, 160 Parscale, Brad, 246 Path, 164 Patriot Act, 112, 116 Patterson, Daniel, 97, 99 Paul, Rand, 183–86, 221 Paul, Ron, 82–83, 134, 177–86, 277 2008 campaign of, 134, 178 2012 campaign of, 177–86, 226 Paul, Terry, 149 Paulson, John, 132 PayPal, viii, xii–xiii, xvi, 51–54, 56–61, 63–65, 68–74, 75–92, 94–96, 100–102, 105, 109, 112, 114, 119–21, 126, 132, 135, 137, 146, 147, 175, 192, 208, 211, 213, 218, 224, 250, 271, 292, 298, 302 eBay and, 56, 59, 64–66, 70, 80–81, 84–85, 147, 274 eBay’s acquisition of, xii, 76, 88–91, 105, 108 fraud and, 64–65, 69–71, 73, 78–82, 112–14 gambling and, 81–83 IPO of, 86–88, 90, 95, 96, 109 political action committee of, 83–84 porn and, 81, 82, 86 World Domination Index of, 59–61, 76 X’s merger with, 65–67, 70–73 PayPal Mafia, xiii, xvi, 77, 121, 143, 161, 172, 211, 333, 335 PayPal Wars, The (Jackson), 96, 121 Pearson, Todd, 53, 60, 81, 83–84 Pell, Barney, 23, 120, 169 Pence, Mike, 242, 257, 310, 322 Perino, Dana, viii Pesca, Mike, 137 Pétain, Philippe, 328 Peterson, Jordan, 278 Petraeus, David, 215 Pets.com, 68, 78 Petty, Richard, 98–99 Pichai, Sundar, 263, 288 Pixar, 75 Places (Google), 274 Plaxo, 106, 119 Poindexter, John, 115–16, 152 political correctness, 35, 99, 142, 239–40, 270, 278, 282, 321 Politico, 177, 332 Poo-Pourri, 180 pornography, 81, 82, 86, 314 Portal, The, 278 Portman, Rob, 332 Postal Service, U.S., 265 Pound, Ezra, 335 Powerset, 120 Predator drone, 152 preppers, 208, 307 presidential election of 2008, 135 Paul in, 134, 178 presidential election of 2012, 182–83 Paul in, 177–86, 226 presidential election of 2016, xi–xii, xvi, 182, 183, 184, 186, 221, 223–26, 233 Cambridge Analytica and, 215, 220, 323 Facebook and, 299, 323 Russian collusion in, 301 Trump in, xi–xii, xvi, 41, 220, 221, 223, 226–27, 229, 230, 233–40, 241–49, 259, 299 presidential election of 2020, 265, 300, 319–22 Capitol attack and, 322–23 voter fraud allegations in, 319–20, 322 Priebus, Reince, 249, 257 privacy, 80, 113, 116 Palantir and, 116–17, 119 private equity, 212 Project Dragonfly, 288–89 Project Maven, 290 Project Veritas, 298 Pronomos Capital, 175 Property and Freedom Society, 231 Prospect, 31 Protect Ohio Values, 332 Proud, James, 167 Pushkin Industries, 160 Putin, Vladimir, 200, 266 QAnon, 265, 300, 322, 332 Quayle, Dan, 82 Quillette, 231 Rabois, Keith, 33–37, 40, 53, 82, 126, 203, 315–16, 330 racism, 14, 134, 186, 196, 197, 203, 246, 261 see also white supremacists, white nationalists RAICES, 287 Rand, Ayn, xiv, xvii, 19, 77, 129, 131, 137, 174 Atlas Shrugged, 53 The Fountainhead, 176 rape, 35–36, 41, 200 Rattner, Steve, 212 Ravikant, Naval, 246 Raytheon, 147, 259, 284 Reagan, Ronald, 4, 15, 17, 19, 30, 38, 60, 115, 250 Reaganomics, 15 Reagan Presidential Foundation, 24 Reason, 181 Recode, 230–31 Reddit, 202–3, 296, 330 Redford, Robert, 98 Red Pill, The, 277–78 red pilling, 176–77 Rees-Mogg, William, 175 The Sovereign Individual, 175, 208–9 Republican National Convention (2012), 182–83, 195–96 Republican National Convention (2016), 236–40 Thiel at, xi, 226, 237–40, 241, 243, 248, 258, 295 Republican Party, x, xi, 4, 184, 313, 314, 320, 328, 330 antitrust law and, 281 gay rights and, 177 Rand Paul and, 185 Ron Paul and, 83, 178, 181, 185 Reider, Jon, 31 Renaissance Technologies, 99 Revolution PAC, 179 Reynan, Jack, 40 Rice, Condoleezza, 42, 312 Robbins, Chuck, 260 Robert A.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think by Matthew Yglesias

Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, gentrification, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, land reform, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, pets.com, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, statistical model, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white picket fence

This trend is especially odd when you consider that the economic expansion in question was substantially driven by housing investment. What’s strange here is that you normally expect an investment boom, even a bubbly one, to be driven by some genuinely new innovation. The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s led to some stupid ideas (Pets.com) and to the overbuilding of fiber-optic cables, but the Internet was a real advance over previous communication technology and one from which we continue to benefit. American housing, by contrast, is mostly characterized by technology retrogression. We know how to fit large numbers of people into comfortably sized homes on small plots of land.

How to Kick Ass on Wall Street by Andy Kessler

Andy Kessler, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, buttonwood tree, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, eat what you kill, family office, fixed income, hiring and firing, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, London Whale, low interest rates, margin call, NetJets, Nick Leeson, pets.com, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk

So in effect, banks operate under another societal bargain, we allow them to create money, under the supposed watchful eye and quasi control of the Federal Reserve, which creates money supply, which lets the rest of us to go about our business and grow the economy. Unfortunately, this shadow banking system was also creating money supply, but outside the reach of regulators to control it. Which ended up being a problem. Because it is so easy to misallocate capital. Investors are human and prone to spasms of momo-isms. Momentum investing. I’ll invest in Pets.com because dotcom stocks only go up (because there wasn’t much liquidity and every growth fund piled in). I’ll make take on another sub-prime loan derivative in my portfolio because home prices can’t go down, (because the Fed is so accommodative with low interest rates and this whole housing finance monstrosity is too big to fail, or so went the thinking.)

Heads I Win, Tails I Win by Spencer Jakab

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fear index, fixed income, geopolitical risk, government statistician, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, price anchoring, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, transaction costs, two and twenty, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Stocks rose by nearly 10 percent, but investors lagged that by six percentage points, probably for two reasons. It was a very volatile month that saw technology stocks peak, but also an era during which many investors had abandoned so-called old-economy stocks that still made up a big chunk of the benchmark S&P 500 stock index. It was a bad time to own Cisco or Pets.com but a pretty decent one to own, say, Pfizer or Ford. There’s a reason that five of the seven worst months were bad ones for the market rather than good ones. Losing money hurts in two ways—financially and psychologically. The pain of a loss has been shown to be far worse than an equivalent monetary gain, a concept called prospect theory that won its cocreator, psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize in Economics.

…

In fact, they made a fool out of the smartest person almost anyone has known. No less a genius than Isaac Newton took a bath in a speculative mania. He even sold for a nice gain but jumped back in near the peak. It was called the South Sea Bubble, and at one point it was worth about five times all the money in Europe. And you thought Pets.com was loony! “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people,” said Newton at the time. One definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Burned by a previous round of poor timing, for example, we find it hard to let go and allow the ebb and flow of the market to take over.

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market by Daniel Reingold, Jennifer Reingold

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, deal flow, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, George Gilder, high net worth, informal economy, junk bonds, margin call, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, Michael Milken, new economy, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Telecommunications Act of 1996, thinkpad, traveling salesman, undersea cable, UUNET

This was because Reg FD made it no longer acceptable to do a slow leak à la MCI in the old days. A Week from Hell By the Fall of 2000, it was obvious that what many people had believed was just another protracted episode of volatility was, in fact, a true market crash—at least on the NASDAQ, which had dropped 39 percent since its March 10 peak. Dot-coms such as Pets.com and Boo.com were in dire straits or had already gone under; layoffs had replaced luaus; and tech funding was rapidly drying up. But even though tech and telecom had in many ways become fully entwined, now the two paths seemed to be diverging, in my view. I had been cynical about many of these tech startups from the beginning, so I didn’t find the news of their demise particularly surprising.

…

I’m sure he now wishes I’d been more negative on the stock at the time, not less. I certainly wish I had. There had been countless press stories romanticizing the stock market and the brilliant minds behind it, and now, as the indices began to sink into an unforgiving quicksand, the pendulum swung to the other extreme. First came the dot-com debacle. Pets.com was one of the first newly public American companies to go under, in November of 2000, with hundreds of others soon to follow. A bitterly funny Web site, Fuckedcompany.com, sprang up to spread the latest gossip about each failed dot-com and the number of layoffs associated with it. In a split second, the market psychology on these new companies switched from “anything is possible” to “nothing is real.”

…

Orwell, George Outperform. See Accumulate rating over the Wall analysts’ improper use of Grubman’s use of proposed ending of Pacific Capital Group Pacific Telesis (PacTel) PaineWebber Palo Alto Research Center Pathnet Peek, Jeff pension funds Perella, Joe Peru Peter Kiewit & Sons Pets.com pheasant hunting philanthropy Pincus, Mark Portugal Telecom price-to-earnings ratio Prince, Charles (Chuck) private-to-public discount (private market value) privatization proprietary calls PT Indosat Puck, Wolfgang Purcell, Phil Putnam quarterly-earnings reports faking of at IDB stock prices and Quattrone, Frank earnings of federal investigation/indictment/conviction of Grubman’s negative press and influence of IPO share spinning and Reingold’s e-mail to Quinton, Adam Qwest Communications background of CEOs’ stock sales at congressional hearings on “culture of fear” at current CEO of Deutsche Telekom bid and as disastrous stock pick diversification of employee savings losses at finances of Internet and IPO and MCI vs.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

But at the end of the day, no one appeared to be building anything. In Peter’s mind, the competition would be real only when the hardware was real. In the same way Peter was jonesing for hardware, he was hustling for dollars. He was pitching his heart out, and here he was, in the middle of a dot-com bonanza, when wildly speculative companies including Pets.com and Webvan were taking in hundreds of millions of dollars in investment capital, and he was coming up empty handed, for something that could make history and launch an industry. To make matters worse, his keynote speaker for the XPRIZE gala had canceled at the last minute. Buzz Aldrin had phoned a few days before the event to say he couldn’t make it.

…

Netscape had gone public five years earlier, Google had begun operating in a garage in Menlo Park two years earlier, and eToys had a value of $7.8 billion on its first day public in 1999. Idealab, founded by a small, wiry, constantly-in-motion engineer turned entrepreneur named Bill Gross, was worth $9 billion and comprised more than forty dot-com companies, including eToys, Pets.com, Friendster, NetZero, and CarsDirect. An inventor from an early age, Bill Gross had found inspiration for Blastoff from a new company called eBay. Bill had gone to the online auction site to try to buy a Moon rock, which he had dreamed about owning since he was eleven years old and transfixed by the Apollo 11 lunar landing.

…

Unwelcome surprises presented themselves at every corner. One engineer resigned, fed up with what he saw as unsubstantiated promises made to potential investors. Blastoff management was trying to hawk a product that engineers found illegitimate. Dot-com companies, meanwhile, were running out of cash or liquidating. Idealab’s Pets.com, with its popular sock puppet, had closed its doors and filed for bankruptcy. During a meeting in early November, Peter asked his team for support, as part of his feverish bid to save Blastoff from the same fate. But Peter got no sympathy. Blastoff’s avionics systems head, Doug Caldwell, told Peter in the meeting that he didn’t have the backing of engineers.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

(Nakamura 2001; Nakamura 2010). And in Paris, the OECD was actively thinking about frameworks to incorporate these wider immaterial assets (Young 1998). The excitement of the late 1990s dot-com bubble wasn’t to last. It turned out that making money from the new economy was harder than the investors in Pets.com and Enron had assumed. But the broader idea of investment in ideas, knowledge, and networks, whether enabled by new information technologies or not, endured. In the spring of 2002, with the high-tech NASDAQ index down 65 percent from its dot-com-bubble high, a group of economists began a project to think seriously and rigorously about measuring investment in the new economy.

…

See MOOCs Matthews, Colin, 1–2 Maxjet, 162 Mazzucato, Mariana, 161, 168, 232 McAfee, Andrew, 30, 123 McDonald’s, 67 McKinsey & Company, 73, 135, 195 McKinsey Global Institute, 81 McLean, Andrew, 194 McNerney, James, 194 McNichols, Maureen, 204 measurement, of intangibles, 36–43, 46–49; and different types of investments, 43–46; future challenges in, 52–55 Mickey Mouse Curve, 78–79 Microsoft, 4–5, 7–8, 40, 175, 222–23; scalability of, 67, 102, 105 microwave ovens, 80, 81, 85, 239 Milanovic, Branko, 120, 124 Miles, David, 168 Milgrom, Paul, 194, 196 Mills, Les, 17–18, 21, 187, 239 Mills, Philip, 17 Mintzberg, Henry, 53 Miyagawa, Tsutomu, 42 mobile intangibles, 139–40, 248n4 Mokyr, Joel, 64 monitoring and management, 188–91 monopolies, 76, 78 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), 230 Moore, Lyndon, 132–33, 134 Moore’s Law, 30 Mowery, David, 226 Mukai, Kentaro, 42 mule-spinners, 126–27 multi-factor productivity, 98–101 Musk, Elon, 187, 198, 220 Myhrvold, Nathan, 152, 223 Mylan, 112, 113 Nakamura, Leonard, 41 Napster, 18 Nardelli, Robert, 194 national accounts, 20–21, 43, 51 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 38 National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, 154 Nature of Technology, The (Arthur), 80 neoliberalism, 119 network effects, 66 New Growth Theory, 66 Nightingale, Paul, 155 NIMBYs, 139, 150 Nohria, Nitian, 194 Nokia, 104 nonexcludable ideas, 72 non-rivalry, 66 obliquity, 161 Ocado, 23 Occupy Wall Street, 120 O’Connor, Sarah, 183 Office for National Statistics (ONS), 46 Oliner, Steve, 39 open innovation, 83–84, 103–4, 110 openness to experience, 141–42 option value, 72, 87, 175 oral rehydration therapy (ORT), 66, 67 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 5, 38, 41, 43, 52; on employment strictness, 32; on productivity gap, 96; on quality adjustment figures, 40 organizational development, 50–51 Other People’s Money (Kay), 205 Oulton, Nicholas, 41 ownership, of intangibles, 211–14 Parlophone records, 59, 61 Pasteur, Louis, 64 patents, 76, 153, 165, 213; blocking, 113–14 patent trolling, 78–79 Patientslikeme, 152 PayPal, 78, 184–85, 187 pensioners, 121–22 Pepsi Co., 49 Perez, Carlota, 146 Pets.com, 42 Pfizer, 31 Piketty, Thomas, 19, 118, 121; on capital accumulation, 124–25; on housing, 136–37, 139; on the income gap, 127–28 Pinch, The (Willetts),121 Pisano, Gary, 84–85 place, inequality of, 122, 128–29, 136–39, 249n3 populism, 122–23 Porter, Michael, 148 post-Fordist economy, 4 post-industrial future, 4 prescriptive knowledge, 64 Presley, Elvis, 61 Price, David, 129 producers, 20; and profitability explained, 97–101 production, 20–21 Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, The (Machlup), 38 productivity: of intangibles, 28–30, 95–96; labor, 96; profits and, 97–101, 103–7; and the ratchet effect, 195–96; total factor, 96, 98, 102, 107–9 profitability, 97–101, 103–7, 247n2 profits, and secular stagnation, 94–96 property rights, 153, 212 propositional knowledge, 64 public investment: challenges of, 231–34, 234–36; and public procurement, 226–28; in R&D, 33–34, 55, 77, 223–24; in training and education, 228–30 public policy, 208–9; challenges for, 209–11, 231–34; and cultivating synergies, 214–18; and financing for intangible investments, 218–21; and government-funded investment in intangibles, 223–30; and intangible inequality, 236–38; and ownership of intangibles, 211–14 public procurement, 226–28 Pumping Iron, 16, 17 purchases of investment assets, 47 Purposeful Company project, 220 Quarterly Acquisitions and Disposals of Capital Assets Survey, 46 Radio Taxis, 82 Rajgopal, Shiva, 168 R&D (research and development): accounting treatment of, 202–4; cost of, 28, 41, 71; definition of, 244n4; effect on GDP of, 38, 43; government spending on, 33–34, 55, 77, 223–24; in-house, 47; as intangible investment, 7, 22, 28, 43, 44, 49; investment in, 169–74; Microsoft’s investments in, 5; returns on, 29, 31; scalability and, 60; and spillovers, 72–73 ratchet effect, 195 Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity, The (conference), 38 Rauch, Ferdinand, 49 Raytheon, 80 Reich, Robert, 133, 134 rent-seeking, 113 Ridley, Matt, 81 Rise and Fall of American Growth, The (Gordon), 93–94 Roberts, John, 194, 196 Roberts, Richard, 126 Roberts, Russell, 188 Rognlie, Matthew, 128, 137 Rolls-Royce, 31 Romer, Paul, 41, 62, 63, 66, 147 Rosen, Sherwin, 130 Rowling, J.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

By Silicon Valley standards, it meant we had the first ICO “unicorn.” But unlike other highly profitable $1 billion–plus unicorns—like Uber and Airbnb—Gnosis hadn’t sold a thing. Meanwhile, the ICO ideas kept coming—some brilliant, some way outside the box, some highly dubious, many that just seemed born of sheer opportunism. Comparisons to Pets.com, that iconic IPO of the dot-com bubble, were increasingly heard as a wild array of ICO press releases flowed into Paul’s inbox at The Wall Street Journal. REAL was a cryptocurrency-based real estate investment firm. Prospectors was an online multiplayer game set in the gold rush days; the game’s token was called, predictably, gold.

…

They will hopefully foster fiduciary standards that hold issuers to account for objective assessments and for making disclosures and putting trusteeship control over the money they receive. If all this happens, the industry should start to look less like the Wild West. It may have to take some painful losses first, but that, too, could be cathartic. It’s worth remembering that it took the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the disappearance of Pets.com and friends to bring focus onto the real innovative breakthroughs of the Internet. Those failures paved the way for Google, Facebook, and Amazon. The Golden Age of Open Protocols While the flood of money into ICOs gets the attention, it’s the potential for a new economic paradigm, for new ways to value the preservation of public goods, that’s most compelling about the emerging token economy.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

It’s the ultimate alternative newsweekly, available on the Web or by e-mail, using the Internet to collect and syndicate content from sources that just couldn’t get published any other way. And it’s free. It’s not that the original Internet community went into some sort of remission. No, not all. While e-commerce customers were waiting for return authorization numbers for misordered merchandise from Pets.com, the participants in AOL’s chat rooms were exchanging tips on caring for their Chihuahuas. While DoubleClick was reckoning with plummeting click-through rates on its banner ads, the personal ads in the Nerve singles classifieds were exploding. While the value of many E*Trade portfolios was falling into the red, people who’d never sold anything before were making money peddling items through the auctions on eBay.

…

Search Marketing Ovid Oxford English Dictionary Page, Larry PageRank Palin, Sarah Paperbacks Paradise Lost (Milton) Participatory media Pashler, Harold Patterson, Thomas Paul, Ron PayPal Penchina, Gil Perceptual coherence field Pergams, Oliver Perl Perry, Bruce Personalization Peterson, Lloyd Peterson, Margaret Petrilli, Michael Pets.com Pew Charitable Trust Pew Internet and American Life Project Phaedrus (Plato) Photoshop PHP PickupPal PimpMySpace.org Pinkerton, Brian Plastic Plato PlayStation Podcasts Poe, Edgar Allan Poets and Writers (magazine) Pokémon Politics campaign websites Digital Natives and fund-raising in Internet and Internet media for Net Geners and participatory media and social networking sites and television and Wales, J., and Pong (video game) Portraits Post-Gutenberg economics Postman, Neil Post-traumatic dissociative disorders PowerPoint Prensky, Marc The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor) Printing press Privacy Procter & Gamble Producer public Progressive Group of Insurance Companies Project Muse Protean self The Protean Self (Lifton) Proust, Marcel Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Wolf) Psychoanalysis schools Ptolemy Publishing Purohit, Sanjay Python Quake (video game) Ranadive, Vivek Rather, Dan Raymond, Eric RAZR phone Reading brain and deep expert Internet use and teenagers’ skills at time spend in Web use skills and Real-time feedback loops Real-time search Real World (television series) Reason Foundation Reflection Reformation Reintermediation Religious fundamentalism Republic (Plato) Research skills, Internet use and Research strategies Results-only work environment (ROWE) Reynolds, Glenn Rheingold, Howard Robinson, Marilynne Rock, Jennifer Romanticism Romantic solitude Rosen, Jay ROWE.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning

Entering your name, address, and credit card information three or four times, only to find that the site can't sell you everything you need and a trip to the atom-based store is necessary anyway, has the unfortunate effect of making the entire online sale completely unnecessary and undesirable. Today, simply lowering costs for the vendor doesn't guarantee success. When Pets.com sold dog food over the Internet, it didn't offer better dog food, and it didn't offer a customer experience better than you could get at the local brick-and-mortar pet store; it didn't offer any better information, intelligence, or confidence. All it offered was cheaper shipping, stocking, and selling— variable costs all—for Pets.com. It was a classic industrial-age-economy tactic of cost reduction that ignored the fundamental principles of the new economy. Far from being the first breath of a new economy, it was the last gasp of the old.

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum by Camila Russo

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, altcoin, always be closing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asian financial crisis, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Cody Wilson, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, East Village, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hacker house, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, mobile money, new economy, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Turing complete, Two Sigma, Uber for X, Vitalik Buterin

There was TrumpCoin, PutinCoin, Dentacoin (“the blockchain solution for the global dental industry”), and the scathingly honest “Useless Ethereum Token,” which promoted its ICO as “the world’s first 100% honest Ethereum ICO,” saying it “transparently offers investors no value.” Its logo was a hand raising its middle finger and the website said, “seriously, don’t buy these tokens.” Still, people handed over almost $75,000 in its ICO. At the height of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, Pets.com became the poster child of irrational hype. In the middle of the ICO mania, Pets.com would have been one of the most conservative, well-grounded business ideas. And it wasn’t just the niche crypto enthusiasts buying these coins. Celebrities started promoting them, usually in exchange for pay, encouraging their fans to buy obscure digital tokens.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Companies were starting to issue reversals of revenue statements, and investors began to realize that many once-lauded start-ups were more style than substance. Once the Fed decided to raise interest rates, the die was cast. The “easy money” had officially run out. DotComDoom.Com Everyone remembers companies like Pets.com going under, but there were thousands more companies that either folded or got acquired in the months and years following the downturn—eToys.com, Excite, Global Crossing, and iVillage, to name a few.15 Marimba, the company founded by Kim Polese, the mistress of Java whom I’d interviewed years before during my first trip to Silicon Valley, flamed out just a couple of years after Polese was named one of Time magazine’s “most influential Americans” in 1997.16 And in London, the aforementioned Boo.com shuttered its offices after spending a good chunk of its $125 million in capital on advertisements in glossy magazines, in-office champagne, first-class airfare, and lavish parties—while apparently neglecting to invest in building a site that actually worked.

…

What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, a book about the role of Silicon Valley in our bifurcated economy. “But in another way, it reflects the financialization of the tech sector. Jawbone rode a wave of enthusiasm that was ultimately speculative in nature and reflective of the ‘tulip’ quality of the tech market right now.”23 It seems not so much has changed since 2000, when start-ups like Pets.com were able to go public and jack up share prices even as they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Yes, the digital ecosystem has since grown, changed, and deepened. And yes, today it is harder for companies to receive funding just by sticking .com behind their names. But now, as then, you do not necessarily need profits—or even paying customers—to draw investor interest.

Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

collective bargaining, Garrett Hardin, iterative process, pets.com, Silicon Valley, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

And sadly, Apple couldn’t resist muddying the metaphorical waters by using the same drag-to-trash action to eject diskettes—ultimately resulting in millions of identical thought balloons saying, “But wait. Won’t that erase it?” Many sites have started using tabs for navigation. www.catalogcity.com www.drugstore.com mitsloan.mit.edu And… 800.com Amazon.com Beyond.com bn.com Borders.com Buy.com CDNOW eToys.com Fatbrain.com Fidelity.com LandsEnd.com Pets.com Quicken.com Schwab.com Snap.com ToysRUs.com I think they’re an excellent navigation choice for large sites. Here’s why: > They’re self-evident. I’ve never seen anyone—no matter how “computer illiterate”—look at a tabbed interface and say, “Hmmm. I wonder what those do?” > They’re hard to miss.

The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments by Pat Dorsey

Airbus A320, barriers to entry, book value, business process, call centre, carbon tax, creative destruction, credit crunch, discounted cash flows, intangible asset, John Bogle, knowledge worker, late fees, low cost airline, Network effects, pets.com, price anchoring, risk tolerance, risk/return, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Stewart Brand

Great doughnuts, but no economic moat—it is very easy for consumers to switch to a different doughnut brand or to pare back their doughnut consumption. (This was a lesson I had to learn the hard way.) Or how about Tommy Hilfiger, whose brands were all the rage for many years? Overzealous distribution tarnished the brand, Tommy clothing wound up on the closeout racks, and the company fell off a financial cliff. And of course, who can forget Pets.com, e Toys, and all the other e-commerce web sites that are now just footnotes to the history of the Internet bubble? More recently, the ethanol craze is an instructive example. A confluence of events in 2006, including high crude oil prices, tight refining capacity, a change in gasoline standards, and a bumper crop of corn (the main input for ethanol), all combined to produce juicy 35 percent operating margins for the most profitable ethanol producers, and solid profitability for almost all producers.

The Firm by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset light, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, book value, borderless world, collective bargaining, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, family office, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, vertical integration, young professional

The third: While the firm would never admit as much, under Gupta, McKinsey began working for just about anyone with a fat bank account and a checkbook. From the days of James O. McKinsey, the whole idea had been that McKinsey could secure its place at the top of the consulting pyramid by working only for companies at the top of the corporate pyramid. That policy went out the window when the likes of Pets.com and eB2B commerce—firms well below McKinsey’s long-held standard of quality—came calling. The firm had a thousand e-commerce assignments at the height of the madness. The fourth: The firm’s cherished culture of dissent was smothered under an “everything is good” attitude engendered by the sheer amounts of money being made.

…

See also directors, McKinsey; specific person Pascale, Richard, 149 A Passion for Excellence (Peters), 152 Patsolos-Fox, Michael, 273, 274 Patton, Arch, 65–66, 120, 121, 128–29, 155–56 Peace Corps, 327 Pearl, David, 208 Pearson, Andrall, 121, 303 Pechiney, 79 Pemex, 103 Pendleton Dudley, 46 PepsiCo, 148, 182, 303 Perez, Javier, 238 Perkins, Tony, 228 personalizing of McKinsey, 275 personnel committees, McKinsey, 121 Perspective on McKinsey (Bower), 275 Perspectives (BCG), 111, 116 Pet Quarters, 265 Peters, Tom, 66, 136, 146–55, 164, 180, 239, 308 petroleum industry, 93 Pets.com, 266 Petters Group, 291 Philip Morris, 64, 92–93 Pichette, Patrick, 327 Pinault, Lewis, 190, 212, 251 Ping An Insurance, 229 Planning Research Corporation, 118 PlaNYC, 283 Polaroid, 233 political appointments, 67 Polli, Rolando, 162 Poor Charlie’s Almanack (Munger), 334 The Pope of Wall Street (Coleman), 62 Porter, Michael, 90, 164, 198 Porter, Suzanne, 207 The Power of Productivity (McKinsey & Co.), 156 practice bulletins, Gluck’s, 141, 278 practice information system/practice-development network, 142–43 The Practice of Management (Drucker), 55 Price Waterhouse/ PricewaterhouseCoopers, 199, 200, 322, 328 Principal Candidate Evaluation Committee (McKinsey), 105 principals, McKinsey: compensation for, 208, 233 promotions to, 208 Principles of Accounting (McKinsey and Hodges), 21 Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor), 26 private equity firms, 232 Proctor & Gamble, 53, 211, 224, 295, 311, 314, 315, 316 Professional Standards Committee, McKinsey, 317 professionalism: Bower’s views about, 51–52, 68, 105, 260 Project Alpha, 145 Project Destiny (AIG-McKinsey), 293–94 Prudential, 307 public/private partnerships, 176 publicity: and advertising by McKinsey, 45–46 and impact of Kumar and Gupta cases on McKinsey, 324 and Matassoni as communications chief, 155 about McKinsey accomplishments, 218–19 and McKinsey relationship with the press, 156–57 McKinsey reluctance about, 76 and McKinsey self-assurance, 206 and McKinsey’s Condé Nast consulting, 279–80 publishing industry: McKinsey clients in, 279–81.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Flooz.com launched a special offer to American Express platinum card holders allowing them to buy $1,000 of Flooz currency for just $800. Shortly before declaring bankruptcy, Flooz itself was Floozed when Filipino and Russian gangs bought $300,000 of its currency using stolen credit card numbers. • Consider Pets.com, a real dog if there ever was one. The company had a sock-puppet mascot that starred in its TV commercials and even made an appearance at a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Unfortunately, the popularity of its mascot did not compensate for the fact that it’s hard to make a profit individually shipping low-margin 25-pound bags of kibble.

…

Standard & Poor’s 500, 179, 181 see also specific funds Nagel, Stefan, 250 NASDAQ, 80–81, 82, 109, 128, 254 National Cash Register, 48, 53 national income changes, as element in systematic risk, 224 National Student Marketing (NSM), 67–68, 69 “naughties,” 344, 411 New Economy, 241, 249 accounting fraud in, 93–95 Internet-driven, 79–97, 104–5 New Economy stocks, 172, 177 New England Patriots, 148 new investment technology, 26, 31, 189–228 alpha in, 219 beta in, see beta CAPM in, see capital-asset pricing model MPT in, see modern portfolio theory risk in, 190 new issues, 257, 318 caution with, 75 of Internet stocks, 84–87 of 1959–62, 57–59 of 1980s, 70–75 Newsweek, 57 Newton, Isaac, 47 New Yorker, 88 New York Post, 89 New York State Teachers Association, 384 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 56, 109, 144, 151, 397 Babson Break in, 51–52 speculation in, 48–55 New York Times, 91, 393 Nifty Fifty, 36, 68–70 NINJA loans, 101 Nobel Prize, 35, 183, 197, 209 No-Brainer Step, 379, 380–82 NO-DOC loans, 101 no-equity loans, 100 Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street, A (Lo and MacKinlay), 139 Nortel Networks, 83, 90, 161, 166 NSM, see National Student Marketing NTT Corporation, 76 nucleus theory of growth, 64 NYSE, see New York Stock Exchange odd-lot theory, 149 Odean, Terrance, 93, 234, 246, 256 O’Higgins, Michael, 150 Once in Golconda (Brooks), 49 “one-decision” stocks, 69 online brokers, Internet bubble aided by, 91–92 online investment advisers, 408 OPEC, 337 open-end funds, 402 operating expenses, 402 option premiums, 39 O’Shaughnessy, James, 150 Outlook (S&P), 393 overconfidence, 231, 232–35 overtrading, 234, 255–56 PalmPilot, 83 Paternot, Stephen, 86 P/BV ratios, see price-to-book value ratios P/E effect, 263 P/E multiples, see price-earnings multiples pension funds, 167, 182, 184, 303–4 P/E ratios, see price-earnings multiples performance, 65–68 of buy-and-hold strategy, 158 of common stocks (1970s), 340 of concept stocks, 65–68 of mutual funds, 66, 174–82, 398–400 vs. future results in mutual funds, 399, 401 Performance Systems, 68, 69 Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), 83 Peters, Thomas J., 233 Pets.com, 84 Philadelphia 76ers, 145 Phillips, Don, 400 Phoenix, University of, 169 Pittsburgh Steelers, 148 Polaroid, 68, 69, 161 Ponzi schemes: Internet investment as, 80, 242 of Madoff, 258–59 ZZZZ Best as, 74 portfolio management, 66, 160–61, 164, 170, 174–84, 261, 349–50, 351, 361–62, 366–67, 389, 398 see also “smart beta” Portfolio Selection (Markowitz), 197 portfolio theory, see modern portfolio theory positive feedback loops, 80 Pound, John, 253 PowerShares, 270, 281 Prechter, Robert, 151–52 present value, 32, 125n price-dividend multiples, 330, 340, 341, 343 price-earnings (P/E) multiples, 57, 64, 65, 126, 264, 274, 336, 344, 346–47, 394–95 of blue-chip stocks, 68 crash in (1970s), 340 cyclically adjusted (CAPE), 347, 387 of growth stocks, 121–23, 130–33, 406 of high-tech stocks, 81 inflation of, 64 performance and, 263, 396 see also performance, of common stocks (1970s); performance, of concept stocks Priceline.com, 83 price stability, 54 price-to-book value (P/BV) ratios, of stocks, 264, 270, 274 price-volume systems, 143–44 Price Waterhouse, 153 Princeton University, 161 probability judgments, 233–34, 238 Producers, The, 166 product asset valuation, 72 professional investors: limitations of, 162–63 profit-maximizing behavior, as argument against technical analysis, 116–17 profits, 339 in inflation, 339 measurement of, 339 profit-sharing plans, 304 Prohibition, 52 property taxes, 314 prospect theory, 243–45 prospectuses, warnings on, 59 PSI Net, 90 psychological factors in stock valuation, see castle-in-the-air theory; technical analysis Puckle Machine Company, 45 Puerto Rico, 404 purchasing power, effects of inflation on, 28–29, 125n, 307, 315 Purdue University, 82 Quandt, Richard, 140 quant, defined, 221n Quinn, Jane Bryant, 91 Qwest, 166 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 48, 53 railroad industry, 91, 96 RAND Corporation, 197 Randell, Cortes W., 66–68 random events, forecasting influenced by, 164–65, 176 random walk: defined, 26–28, 139, 140 difficult acceptance of, 145–46 fundamental conclusion of, 154 summarized, 35–36 random-walk theory, 105–6, 266–67 assumptions of, 190, 229, 230 fundamental analysis and, 182–84 guide for, 291 and housing bubble, 105–6 index funds and, 379–80 role of arbitrage in, 248–49 semi-strong form of EMH, 26, 182–84 strong (broad) form of EMH, 26, 182–84 technical analysis and, 137–41, 154–57 weak (narrow) form of EMH, 26, 140, 183 Raptor, 94 rate of return: after inflation, 338 for bonds, 194–96, 307, 315–21, 342–43, 344, 345 in CAPM, 213–19 for common stocks, 194–96, 307 compounded, 351 diversification and, 198–200 expected, see expected rate of return future events and, 30, 343–48 high, for bearing greater risk, 194–96, 212–13, 350, 408 investment objectives and, 306–13 negative, 196 for real estate, 313 rebalancing to, 360 risk-free, 215–18 “small caps” vs.

Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit, Susan Schwartzenberg

blue-collar work, Brownian motion, dematerialisation, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Loma Prieta earthquake, low skilled workers, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, pets.com, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave

The eviction of Edith Love fi-om the modest Ingleside house Brown owned allegedly took place so that he could run for election in that district rather than against erful Supervisor Mabel Teng, who lives in the (wealthier) district pow- where Brown currently resides. With help fi-om a homeless organization she contacted, Love found new a place to her deposit and other acts that She sary. later went public to say she job at to, in to her son, the eviction far crueler than neces- was not happy with the poorer part because the Pets.com — new neighbors made and that the reverend had pressured her had moved voluntarily rather than was Supervisor Leslie Katz tive made despite Brown's refusal to return to say that she neighborhood she had moved homophobic remarks live, evicted.^ — another Brown appointee who had got a lucra- is proposing an end run around Proposition M, the 1986 slow-growth initiative that limits new office space to a hardly sparse 950,000 square feet a year.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, in which the exuberance behind higher stock prices reflected an abiding belief that the first Web site retailers in every sector would win just by carving out a niche and marketing to it, makes the case. Neighborhood pet stores weren’t killed by Pets.com, no more than wedding planners were made redundant by OurBeginning.com, whose representatives joined Pets.com’s talking sock puppet among a host of overhyped Super Bowl XXXIV ads in 2000, but whose domain name has since passed to a Seattle day-care center. Remember also the Y2K threat, which reached its anticlimax weeks before that Super Bowl. We’ll never know whether it amounted to nothing because computer consulting firms successfully convinced everyone to upgrade their mainframes or whether they just brilliantly hyped a nonevent.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Private estimations of company values soared. Businesses with no revenues and enormous losses were valued at tens of millions of dollars. More than 4,700 companies went public from 1990 to the mid-2000s, many of which had no business doing so. After they hit the public markets, shares in the companies—from Pets.com (dog food delivery) to Webvan (grocery service)—initially skyrocketed. Investors trolled the markets for speculative new internet stocks while bankers cold-called fledgling internet companies to pitch them on going public, since bankers made fees on every IPO. Some companies were indeed good bets.

…

Uber and, 233–36, 255–56, 338–39 Palms Hotel, 7, 93 Palo Alto, California, 35, 36, 38, 40, 72, 105 Pape’ete, French Polynesia, 307–8 Paris, France, 84 Parker, Sean, 21, 121 Partovi, Ali, 92n Partovi, Hadi, 92n Paul, Sunil, 85–86 Paul, Weiss, 289, 294 Paulson, Henry, 33 PayPal, 170–71 Pennsylvania, 113 Perazzo, Steve, 338 Pets.com, 26 Pham, Thuan, 142–47, 153, 165, 201, 309 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 83, 114, 244, 245–46, 247 Philadelphia Parking Authority, 244, 245–46 Pishevar, Shervin, 179, 192–93, 315–16, 337 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 151, 184 Pixar, 35 Planet Hollywood, 10 Plouffe, David, xii–xiii, xvi, 115, 225 Poetzscher, Cam, 301 Politico, 128 Portland, Oregon, xi–xvii, xviii, 115, 243–44, 247 Portland Bureau of Transportation, xi Posados, Miguel, 338 “Preacher,” 336 Priceline, 27 Prodigy, 67 “Project Chauffeur,” 180–81 Pronto.ai, 333 Puff Daddy, 89 Pulp Fiction, 45 Qualcomm, 317 Quattrone, Frank, 67, 69–70 Quentin, 153–54, 155, 156, 157, 161, 245, 246 Quill, Mike, 204 Quince, 328 Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart & Sullivan, 234 Rancho Palos Verdes, California, 176 Rand, Ayn, 84, 120 Recode, 248–49, 262 Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 24, 26, 28, 29 Reddit, 42, 200 Red Swoosh, 28–30, 31, 33, 47, 74, 81, 106, 192n Richter, David, 301 The Rideshare Guy, 248 Rigetti, Chad, 215 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 134, 174 Ritz-Carlton Hotel, 292, 295, 296–300, 302, 304 Robb, Walter, 292 Romania, 170, 172 Ron, Lior, 181–82, 234 Rubenstein, Steven, 239n, 289, 289n, 295 Rumayyan, Yasir al-, 270–71, 272 Sacca, Chris, 57, 74, 78, 288, 293 Sacks, David, 300 Safe Rides Fee, 135–36 Salesforce, 201 San Bernardino, California, 162, 206 Sandberg, Sheryl, 201, 239n Sanders, Jeff, 324 San Francisco, California, xiii–xiv, 5–6, 27–28, 31–32, 40–41, 67, 85, 100, 107, 130, 160, 183.

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice by Julian Guthrie

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Benchmark Capital, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, fear of failure, Ford paid five dollars a day, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, pets.com, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, warehouse automation, white picket fence, Yogi Berra

“We got rid of the cancer,” he said, “and now we can be a team.” 13 Redwood Shores, California Spring 2002 SITTING IN HIS eleventh-floor office in the bayside tidelands of Redwood Shores, south of San Francisco, Larry said to Safra Catz at Oracle, “I was beginning to think I should retire. Everyone has been telling me how great these companies like Pets.com and Webvan are. ‘Larry, don’t you know?’ they said. ‘All that matters is eyeball traffic and clicks.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but what about actually making money? What about that old-school idea of revenue?’” It was March and Oracle’s stock had plummeted to $7.70 a share from $45 a share, wiping out 80 percent of Larry’s net worth.

…

Oracle’s underlying business was strong—the company made over $800 million in operating profit and had a 35 percent operating margin in its second fiscal quarter—but the markets were crashing and Oracle’s stock price was crashing along with them. Nearly half of the Internet companies created since 1995 were gone, casualties of the dot-com bust, which wiped out an estimated $5 trillion in market capitalization. Pets.com began in February 1999 and closed in November 2000, after buying a $1.2 million Super Bowl ad and burning through $300 million in investment capital. Webvan, the Foster City–based grocery home-delivery service created by executives who had no experience in supermarkets—yet attracted funding from companies including Goldman Sachs, Benchmark Capital, Sequioa Capital, and Yahoo—filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after burning through hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a fleet of trucks, build automated warehouses, and expand aggressively nationwide.

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, Californian Ideology, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, Dunning–Kruger effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, functional programming, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, margin call, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, operational security, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, slashdot, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

“A Tour of the Ethereum Token Bubble”. 18 June 2017. (archive) [313] e.g., Emin Gün Sirer, Phil Daian. “Bancor Is Flawed”. Hacking, Distributed (blog), 19 June 2017. [314] “SNT Creation and Status Project Creation Conditions: Explanatory Note & Governance Terms”. status.im. (archive) [315] Edan Yago. “Ads on Taxis – Is EOS.io the PETS.com of ICO?” Twitter, 11 July 2017. [316] “EOS.IO Technical White Paper”. EOS.IO. (archive) [317] Red Li. “EOS Triples in 2 Days, Making Yunbi Top Tier Exchange With Over 230k BTC Volume”. 8BTC, 3 July 2017. [318] “Frequently Asked Questions”. EOS.IO. (archive) [319] “EOS Token Purchase Agreement”.

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive by Dean Baker

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, medical residency, patent troll, pets.com, pirate software, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, transaction costs

Measured as a share of private-sector GDP, the financial sector more than quadrupled between 1975 and 2009.[84] The enormous expansion would be justifiable if it resulted in a better allocation of capital, so that promising start-ups, say, could more easily raise funds than they could in the 1960s. A better allocation of capital would also mean that hare-brained schemes like Pets.com or Webvan would be less likely to receive funding today than in prior decades. But neither seems to be the case, or at least not obviously enough to justify the quadrupling of the sector as a share of GDP. Moreover, productivity growth, the most direct measure of the rate of innovation, was more rapid in the 1950s and 1960s than in the last two decades.

Firefighting by Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, Henry M. Paulson, Jr.

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doomsday Book, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pets.com, price stability, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail

Some executives worried about the breakdown of risk management, but those qualms could be expensive during the boom. As Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince observed in 2007: “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” Not all bubbles threaten the stability of the broader financial system. When the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s burst, investors in busted internet stocks like Pets.com lost their money, but there wasn’t much of a ripple effect, just a mild recession. The real problems emerge when bubbles are financed with borrowed money, especially when that money can run. And leverage can be alluring, because it’s the ultimate profit multiplier. If you spend $100 to buy an asset without leverage, then sell it for $120, your profit is 20 percent.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

In 2001 the conventional wisdom was that tech investment bubbles fuel mainly junk companies, so no one was surprised that year when the collapse of the dot-com bubble led to multiple spectacular flameouts, like Pets.com. Subsequently, the Harvard Business School professors Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf found that, compared to stock bubbles in other kinds of companies, tech bubbles are likely to fund more start-ups that fail but also more that go on to become extremely successful (judged by how much money they attract when they go public) and innovative (judged by how many patents they win).5 For every few dozen companies like Pets.com that went under in 2001, there was a pioneering survivor like Google or Amazon that would help make the United States much more productive.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

But if you’re a fan of those companies, I predict that pretty soon, you will. CHAPTER 11 MARKETING: RETHINKING THE FOUR P’S Quick—when I say marketing, what do you think of? I bet you visualize Super Bowl ads, or Don Draper from Mad Men. Maybe it’s the Apple 1984 commercial, or the Geico gecko. Or all those crazy dot-com commercials from 2000: the Pets.com sock puppet, the Webvan fleet. Loaded with VC cash, the marketing departments of all those companies decided to take all that money and do what they do best: advertise. Because that’s what you did if you were in marketing. You advertised. Back in the old days of doing business, there was a very good reason marketing departments thought this way.

Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn, Robert McLean

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deep learning, Donald Trump, driverless car, drop ship, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fail fast, fake news, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Hyperloop, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, iterative process, loss aversion, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, nudge unit, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, pets.com, prediction markets, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart contracts, stem cell, sunk-cost fallacy, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, WikiLeaks

The shape of the S will vary a lot depending on the reference class you select and particular reasons for faster or slower take up in your case. Charles led a successful start‐up in the early days of Internet adoption. At that time, many forecasters overestimated the impact of Internet penetration in the short term (think of Webvan or Pets.com), but underestimated adoption in the longer term of 10 to 15 years. It looks in hindsight very clearly to be a classic S‐curve. In 1995 fewer than 10% of Americans had access to the Internet. By 2014 it reached 87%. The S‐curve can take many specific profiles as Exhibit 5.2 shows. Like any heuristic, you don't want to apply this rigidly or blindly, but rather use it as a frame for scoping a problem.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

Competitive signaling can lead to perverse, even destructive outcomes for the companies involved. It might help explain why, in the year 2000, nineteen internet start-ups spent millions buying advertising time during the Super Bowl. It’s also telling that eight of the nineteen—including, famously, Pets.com, with its sock puppet mascot—no longer exist. Ironically, their efforts to signal they had the deep pockets and quality offerings that would allow them to be one of the survivors in the internet’s winner-take-all economy may have helped to drive these big spenders into bankruptcy.10 You might think that such a failure rate would discourage a repeat, but the trend is back: during the 2015 Super Bowl, start-ups, including Wix.com (a company that helps users build websites), and Loctite (a glue maker) spent $4.5 million for each thirty-second spot.11 Whether this all has the desired effect on someone in the market for a new truck or soft drink is another matter.

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

Spore top-10 game: NPD Group/Retail Tracking Service. 38% efficiency: Will Wright made this quote at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in July 2008. Create status differences to drive behavior Bruce Schneier: “E-Mail After the Rapture.” (schneier.com/blog). June 2, 2008. Retrieved February 2013. Eternal Earth-bound Pets: eternal-earthbound-pets.com. Bart Centre quote: Mike Di Paola. “Caring for Pets Left Behind by the Rapture.” Bloomberg Businessweek (businessweek.com). February 11, 2010. Retrieved February 2013. Emphasize achievement as a form of status Two clipped: Joseph C Nunes and Xavier Dreze. “The endowed progress effect: How artificial advancement increases effort.”

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

, 36-38,227 ideological fiinction, 38 Internet and, 24—26 lack of diversity and, 233 as neoUberahsm's you«55ance, 228 Utopian aspects, 37-38, 229-230 New Eras, history of, 6—8 new social movements, 179 New York City, 172 fiscal crisis, 228 income distribution, 103-104 Nike, 19,159,165 Norberg-Hodge, Helena, 171-173 North American Free Trade Agreement, 175 nostalgia nationalist, 169-174,182-183 for nonexistent Golden Age, 164 O'Neill, Paul, 233 occupational crowding, 94-96 occupations female-dominated, 95-96 future growth in, 71-74 Oliner, Stephen, 57 Orshansky, MoUie, 108-109 output, measuring, 58—59 outsourcing, 215 Pacioh, Luca, 17 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 115-116 Parenti, Christian, 77—78 paternahsm, 35 patriarchy, 165 pay. See income pensions, Enron-style, 35 Petras, James, 150,178 Pets.com, 196 phlogiston, 51 place, meaning of, 147-148 Plender, John, 35 Polanyi, Karl, 167 polarization, 29, 225; see also income distribution; wealth distribution pohtics of finance, 202-207 267 and income distribution, 79—81 market democracy, 22 polls New Economy, 31—32,231 poverty and, 110 Pope, Carl, 162 pop culture, stock market and, 187 portfolio investment, 176 Porto Alegre, 185 potential GDP, 47 poverty, 105-114 absolute vs. relative, 109—111 composition of the poor, 111-114 defining, over time, 106-109 global perspective, 129-130,133-141 historical perspective, 106,111—114 popular perceptions, 110 see also income distribution "poverty line," coinage of phrase, 237 Prins, Nomi, 196 privatization, 221,231 productivity 1960s enthusiasm, 8 acceleration in, accounting for, 56-62 and the business cycle, 47 competing estimates, 60-61 definitions, 41—42 and deflation, 228 and earnings, 45, 56 high-tech vs. rest, 52—54 historical perspective, 48 by industry, 49, 64—67 international comparisons, 41—42 labor, 41 measurement problems, 42—45, 58—60 multifactor (total factor), 41,45 historical perspective, 49 outsourcing and, 51-52 where it went, 56 and workload, 39—41 work hours, measuring, 67 profitability historical view, 203—204 MNCs and, 157 prosocial behavior, 76 protectionism, 220 public subsidy to private sector, 6 purchasing power parity, 131, 238 quabty changes, measuring, 43—45 declines in, 55-56 inputs, adjusting for, 58 Quattrone, Frank, 199 Qwest, 197 race educational attainment, 98—99 Gilder on, 12-13 wealth distribution and, 125—126 race to the bottom, 155 racism and nationahsm, 239 neo- or diflferentiahst, 172—173 Ramone, Joey, 190 Rand, Ayn, 15 Rapaille, G.

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

The business of funding new companies in their early days, or rather the business of turning ideas into businesses, is called venture capital. Its spiritual homes are Silicon Valley in California and Greater Boston in Massachusetts. It has given us EBay, Google, Amazon.com, and a host of biotechnology companies. It has also given us a host of financial dogs, including pets.com. At its best, venture capital fuels the creativity and A Tour of the Financial World and Its Inhabitants dynamism of the U.S. economy. Its only contact with the capital markets is when the venture capitalist, a private investor risking his or her own money, want to ‘‘cash out’’ one of their companies by having the broker dealers ‘‘bring it to market.’’

Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cost per available seat-mile, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, housing crisis, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Ellison, late fees, legacy carrier, McMansion, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, young professional

But, as with Chemtrak’s management team, they hadn’t analyzed the thing that would make them money: the way people in the real world actually behave. This failure to account for real-life human behavior also brought down the most overhyped company of the dotcom bubble (besides perhaps the still unbelievable Pets.com), Webvan. If you aren’t familiar with the story, Webvan delivered groceries. Despite that modest premise, it managed to raise and then blow hundreds of millions of dollars in a few short years. I was not dumb enough to invest in Webvan. I was even dumber. I invested $50,000 of my own money in a copycat business, a small start-up in Texas called Groceryworks.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

It ended with massive bailouts and something called quantitative easing (QE). We will get to QE. That’s the biggest thing going. The bubble all started in the late 1980s but really ramped in the 2000s, when the world moved away from rational thinking, away from Markowitz and modern portfolio theory to Pets.com. Alan Greenspan, the top guy at the Fed in those days, was there to drive the bubble even bigger. That’s when the central banks changed. At the time, it looked innocent enough. Greenspan gave us low interest rates. They dubbed it “lower for longer.” But this was really just lighter fluid on a fire.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

The internet search company instituted a twoclass share structure so investors could profit from but not determine its long-term strategic plans. This alternative view took a hit in 2000, when the tech bubble burst and trillions of dollars in valuations were lost in the span of a few months. Observers wondered how anyone could ever have believed that Pets.com’s electronic shop window was a viable business model and worried that the promise of the internet was mostly hype. Maybe the economist Paul Krugman’s prediction that the internet’s impact on the economy would be no greater than the fax machine was right.9 The massive infrastructure buildout of cell phone towers and fiber-optic cable crisscrossing the country certainly seemed like overkill, a waste of excitement and resources.

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Sales volumes are slowing, prices are flattening or even declining, mortgage demand is easing and the inventory of unsold houses is rising. So what’s next? Deflating the housing bubble is likely to take some time. The housing market isn’t like the stock market; it’s a lot slower, and its harder to dump one’s house in a panic than 1,000 shares of Pets.com. But removing the stimulus responsible for about half the economy’s recent growth has to have an effect. That effect could be anything from a mild drag on an already limp economy to a real financial crisis. What it is depends on whether other sectors pick up some of the slack—say, if businesses were to start hiring and investing rather than hoarding their plentiful cash or distributing it to their stockholders.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

He envisioned a new and superior retail experience. Swinmurn could have waited a long time, insisting on testing his complete vision complete with warehouses, distribution partners, and the promise of significant sales. Many early e-commerce pioneers did just that, including infamous dot-com failures such as Webvan and Pets.com. Instead, he started by running an experiment. His hypothesis was that customers were ready and willing to buy shoes online. To test it, he began by asking local shoe stores if he could take pictures of their inventory. In exchange for permission to take the pictures, he would post the pictures online and come back to buy the shoes at full price if a customer bought them online.

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff by Clara Shih

Benchmark Capital, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, glass ceiling, jimmy wales, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, pets.com, pre–internet, rolodex, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social web, software as a service, tacit knowledge, Tony Hsieh, web application

It wasn’t until nearly a decade later that we began to realize and then slowly tap into the unique attributes of the Internet to do things that simply were not possible prior to the Internet: search engine marketing, user-generated content, automating manual business processes in Web applications, and allowing people to interact with those applications. It took a generation of visionaries, early adopters, and believers to make Web 2.0 a reality. In the process, companies came and went—Netscape, CompuServe, Webvan, Napster, Pets.com, to name a few. Nor should you expect that the kings of today’s era will reign in tomorrow’s era. More likely, the kings don’t see it coming, don’t want to see it coming, or see it coming but can’t get organizationally aligned around doing anything about it. This is a classic example of the innovator’s dilemma, a concept introduced by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen to describe the inability of most large companies to embrace radically new technologies because they are disruptive to the existing business.

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

In the early days of the automobile, many car manufacturers failed, including ABC, Acme, Adams-Farwell, Aerocar, Albany, ALCO, American Napier, American Underslung, Anderson, Anhut, Ardsley, Argonne, and Atlas – and that’s just the As.3 In the realm of video games, Sears Tele-Games systems, Tandyvision, Vectrex, and Baily Astrocade all fell by the wayside when the industry contracted in 1983. When the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, companies like Boo.com, Freeinternet.com, Garden.com, Open.com, Flooz.com, and Pets.com went under, costing investors hundreds of millions of dollars. Biotech companies have a 90 percent failure rate: in recent years, Satori, Dendreon, KaloBios, and NuOrtho are among the large companies that have gone belly up. Most of those names are forgotten, so we don’t fully appreciate how many corpses litter the plains of innovation.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

Once Web enterprises figured out their business models and how to securely process credit cards, clicks turned to dollars, forging some of the most powerful companies in the world, companies that have since become titans in distribution, media, and even space travel. Commercialization changed the Web for everyone. It had an indelible effect on the kinds of sites being built, and on the nature of the content being distributed there: less “my name is Lisa and here’s my dog” and more Pets.com. Where Echo managed to remain community focused by charging for its service, one of the few ways that social platforms and content sites make money on the Web—and today, in social apps—is by turning their users into the product, selling demographic information and targeted ad space to advertisers.

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

Other times he hung out in the 550-foot-long park, an ovate patch of grass that looked like it belonged in front of the royal palace in London, not in San Francisco’s warehouse district. In the center of the park was a rickety old brown swing set. South Park had played a crucial role in the late nineties as home to many of the now-defunct start-ups that quickly wilted away after the technology bubble burst. Pets.com and other start-ups that had collectively squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on ridiculous parties, asinine salaries, and expensive TV ads met their timely demise overlooking South Park. It hadn’t always been the epicenter of tech. Before the start-ups had moved in, the park had been home to brothels, drug dealers, dive bars, and sordid hotels.

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe by Greg Ip

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, air freight, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double helix, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global supply chain, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, savings glut, scientific management, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, value at risk, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

The Fed, these critics said, should prick the bubbles to prevent a bigger disaster later on. Both times, the Fed refused. In the case of the Nasdaq bubble, that turned out to be a good thing. In those years, more than five hundred companies listed shares on the stock market including such memorable stinkers as pets.com (known for its sock puppet) and webvan, an online grocer that went bust less than two years after going public. Then there was Amazon.com, which went public in 1997. Amazon fascinated investors, but it bled money. Much of its strategy was based on selling books at knockdown prices and zero profits.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, medical residency, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Quicken Loans, risk free rate, Robert Bork, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, the new new thing, too big to fail, value at risk, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

By this time the craze for Internet stocks was completely out of control and had infected the Stanford University medical community. "The residents in particular, and some of the faculty, were captivated by the dot-com bubble," said Burry. "A decent minority of them were buying and discussing everything--Polycom, Corel, Razorfish, Pets.com, TIBCO, Microsoft, Dell, Intel are the ones I specifically remember, but areyoukiddingme-dot-com was how my brain filtered a lot of it.... I would just keep my mouth shut, because I didn't want anybody there knowing what I was doing on the side. I felt I could get in big trouble if the doctors there saw I wasn't one hundred and ten percent committed to medicine."

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

Spice was a craving, not a necessity. “To limit their function to food preservation and explain their use solely in those terms,” the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes, “would be like calling champagne a good thirst quencher.” Were spices just a financial bubble, like Dutch tulips and Pets.com stock? Almost certainly not. To begin with, if spices were merely a bubble, it was the longest in the history of markets; it took almost two thousand years to burst. More importantly, the market price of spices like pepper and cinnamon was rarely influenced by second-order speculation: people driving up the price by betting that the price will go up.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

behavioural economics, billion-dollar mistake, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job satisfaction, Kevin Kelly, loss aversion, Max Levchin, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, young professional

Most ER docs and nurses get good short-term feedback (I either help the patient stop bleeding or I don’t) but bad long-term feedback, since they don’t see what happens to a patient once he or she leaves the emergency room (e.g., did something we did to stop the bleeding cause greater complications down the road?). The learning environment for new-product launches is wicked on all three dimensions. Feedback is unclear (perhaps Pets.com was a bad idea or perhaps it was just ahead of its time), it is delayed (often for months or years), and it is biased by the very act of prediction (classifying a launch as high priority or low has self-fulfilling ramifications for, say, its ad budget or the quality of the personnel on the launch team).

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

airport security, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Broken windows theory, crack epidemic, desegregation, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, mental accounting, moral hazard, More Guns, Less Crime, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pets.com, profit maximization, Richard Thaler, school choice, sensible shoes, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, War on Poverty

The price of cocaine had been falling for years, and it got only cheaper as crack grew more popular. Dealers began to underprice one another; profits vanished. The crack bubble burst as dramatically as the Nasdaq bubble would eventually burst. (Think of the first generation of crack dealers as the Microsoft millionaires; think of the second generation as Pets.com.) As veteran crack dealers were killed or sent to prison, younger dealers decided that the smaller profits didn’t justify the risk. The tournament had lost its allure. It was no longer worth killing someone to steal their crack turf, and certainly not worth being killed. So the violence abated.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

A lot of folks are interested in doing space now, either because they already owned a sports team or they weren’t into sports,” Garvey says. “We can argue whether it made sense or not. It was like, ‘Okay, if they want to spend their money, that’s why America is great.’” Bill Gross was a Caltech grad who had made billions off an incubator that invested in internet stock darlings like eToys, Pets.com, and Webvan. The latter, a grocery delivery concern, would come to epitomize the unrealistic business plans of the era, at least until a wave of start-ups—notably Amazon—embraced aspects of its model a decade later. Wealthy, and apparently moonstruck by the heady fumes of their digital riches, Bill and his brother Larry were disappointed by their inability to purchase moon rocks or lunar dust on eBay, or anywhere else, for that matter.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Through the ages, virtually every potentially profitable new frontier opened up to investment has led to a speculative bubble, as investors have scrambled to tap into its promise only to stampede in retreat a few years later. A decade before the housing crisis we experienced the dot-com bubble. The NASDAQ index, heavy with technology stocks, quadrupled between 1996 and March of 2000. Drunk on information technology’s promise, people poured retirement savings into companies like Pets.com, which achieved fame, though never profit, on the strength of a cute ad with a sock puppet. In 2000, AOL could use its pricey stock to take over media goliath Time Warner, which had more than five times its revenue. By October of 2002 the NASDAQ was back where it had been in 1996. In 2010, Time Warner quietly spun off AOL for a tiny fraction of its price a decade before.

My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture by Guy Branum

bitcoin, different worldview, G4S, Google Glasses, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pets.com, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, tech billionaire, telemarketer

The summer before I went to law school, I was living at my parents’ house and had finally worked up the nerve to use the Internet to get naked photos of men. Some will rail against this broad presence of the salacious online, but I must respect it. The desire of people with dicks to look at the stuff that turns us on is a potent fuel that powered the Internet bubble that became Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune and the precipitous rise and fall of Pets.com. Yeah, stealing music is cool, but online porn is the stack of cinder blocks that built our current culture. And the thing is, in the long run, online porn is why I can get married in this country. It’s why we have an openly gay U.S. senator and a whole slate of Ryan Murphy productions on FX. In a history department, they teach you that the printing press changed Europe for centuries afterward.

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, carried interest, cloud computing, compensation consultant, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, family office, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, index fund, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Lean Startup, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Paul Graham, pets.com, power law, price stability, prudent man rule, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, VA Linux, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 11 The Deal Dilemma: Which Deal Is Better? Now that we have a basic understanding of the major terms of a VC financing, let’s put it to use in a hypothetical fund-raising. Let’s evaluate a trade-off between two different financing options for our make-believe startup, HappyPets (yes, this is an homage to the famous bubble-era company Pets.com). In this scenario, we have set out to raise VC money and have had very successful meetings. We are lucky enough to get two term sheets. One term sheet is from Haiku Capital and the other is from Indigo Capital (all names have been changed). As we talked about in chapters 9 and 10, let’s evaluate both the economic and the governance terms, starting with the economic terms.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Yet again, monetary easing, intended as a solution, fueled a bubble. The Nasdaq shot higher to the applause of investors posting huge gains. It was beyond time to remove the punchbowl by tightening access to credit, yet the Fed resisted doing so. By now, any stock in a company with any claim to a digital future was red-hot. Do you remember Pets.com and Webvan, or Worldcom and Global Crossing? With so many companies skyrocketing in paper value, the phrase “irrational exuberance” was coined by economist Robert Shiller. The dot-com craze popped in 2000, erasing three-fourths of the market value of technology stocks listed on the Nasdaq. By 2002, a time frame that included the deadly attack on the World Trade Center, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled by 43 percent.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Investors who early on saw potential in Internet stocks encountered the devastating dot-com bubble. Stock in Books-A-Million saw its price soar by over 1,000 percent in one week simply by announcing it had an updated website. Subsequently, the price crashed and the company has since delisted and gone private. Other Internet-based high flyers that ended up crashing include Pets.com, Worldcom, and WebVan.11 Today, none of those stocks exist. Whether specific cryptoassets will survive or go the way of Books-A-Million remains to be seen. What’s clear, however, is that some will be big winners. Altogether, between the assets native to blockchains and the companies that stand to capitalize on this creative destruction, there needs to be a game plan that investors use to analyze and ultimately profit from this new investment theme of cryptoassets.

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

As an old-media Internet venture, Hulu aroused the ire of technology business blogs like TechCrunch and GigaOM, which predict the decline of television networks with the shoe-banging subtlety of Nikita Khrushchev. The former gleefully reported that Google staffers had nicknamed the new venture “Clown Co.” The latter ran a gag interview on the topic with the Pets.com sock puppet (which would seem to symbolize the hubris of technology start-ups rather than that of television networks). When bloggers finally tried Hulu a year later, however, they liked what they saw. An intuitive interface lets users stream shows from NBC, Fox, and some of their related cable channels, and ABC joined in 2009.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

The internet would democratize access to information, with benefits to all. Idealism ruled. In 1997, Martha Stewart came in with her home-decorating business, which, thanks to an investment by Kleiner Perkins, soon went public as an internet stock, which seemed insane to me. I was convinced that a mania had begun for dot-coms, embodied in the Pets.com sock puppet and the slapping of a little “e” on the front of a company’s name or a “.com” at the end. I knew that when the bubble burst, there would be a crash that would kill Integral if we did not do something radical. I took my concerns to our other partner, Morgan Stanley, and they gave me some money to figure out the Next Big Thing in tech investing, a fund that could survive a bear market.

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

The Nasdaq’s market makers and the NYSE’s specialists are critical components to maintaining a liquid market.” Island also had several close calls with its computer system. In early 2000, the stock market started to buckle as the dot-com mania collapsed. Trading volumes surged to record levels, especially on Nasdaq, full of massively inflated tech outfits from America Online to Pets.com to eBay. By then, nearly 15 percent of all Nasdaq stocks were flowing through Island’s pipes. The Nasdaq index peaked at 5049 on March 10, a Friday. The following Monday, before trading started, a wave of sell orders for bellwether tech stocks such as Cisco and Dell swept into the market. Many flowed through Island, a haven of before-hours trading.

That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph

Airbnb, Apollo 13, crowdsourcing, digital rights, high net worth, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, late fees, loose coupling, Mason jar, pets.com, recommendation engine, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, Travis Kalanick

It had been an age of decadence, in other words. And like all decadent eras, it hadn’t lasted. By the time we were headed to Alisal Ranch, there wasn’t much decadence left. Boo.com, the online clothing e-tailer, had filed for bankruptcy after spending more than $175 million in only six months. The rumor mill had Pets.com on the verge of collapse after the company spent more than $150 million in the first half of the year. Webvan’s stock would fall from $30 per share to 6 cents per share after the online grocer spent nearly a billion dollars on expansion. Drkoop.com, the online portal founded by 82-year-old retired surgeon general C.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

Aware of her large ambitions, her Disney boss, Charles Adams, stepped in as a mentor. “If you want to be a CEO or a general manager, the Harvard Business School is where you want to go.” As an alumnus, he put in a good word for her. After graduating with honors, she held a number of executive jobs over the next several years, including the ill-fated Pets.com, followed by two years at Zagat and three years at PriMedia, Inc., before joining Viacom. Then, in 2010, with a nudge from Kassan, one of his consulting clients, Microsoft, offered Everson a position as vice president of global advertising sales and trade marketing teams in Seattle. After Everson received the offer, she turned to Kassan for advice.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

[back] * * * † Adam had quit his job at the Carnegie Institution several months earlier in an attempt to qualify for the 2000 Olympics with the US sailing team. [back] * * * * Between the time Adam and Eric reconnected on their flight home in 1998 and they got their first product on store shelves in 2001, Pets.com would be born, raise eight figures in venture capital, be acquired by Amazon, IPO, crater, and then be shuttered. [back] * * * * A surprising number of founders I interviewed used their own mobile phone numbers as the customer service line and printed them on the packaging of their products.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Pink Shirt for future stock picks, we have to look carefully at the rest of his grid. No professional investor or stock-picker can survive by recommending only one stock every fourteen years. He must have picked others, but we have no idea whether those did well or poorly. It’s quite possible that the list includes duds like Zynga, MySpace, and Pets.com (“Because pets can’t drive!”). Stocks like those would fall in the upper-right cell: stocks he picked that were bombs. We wouldn’t regret missing out on those picks! We also know he failed to pick some highly successful stocks, like Google, Facebook, and Mastercard, because if he had picked them, he would have bragged about them as much as he did about Amazon and Tesla.

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, Donald Trump, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, fear of failure, financial deregulation, hiring and firing, income inequality, junk bonds, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, medical residency, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, p-value, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Predators' Ball

Promising a positive report on a particular company was an effective way of paving the way for more advisory fees on deals. The classic case was Henry Blodget, the star Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch who said in 1998 that he believed shares of Amazon were worth $400. He publicly praised companies like Pets.com and eToys.com while his firm courted business from them. In private emails to colleagues, however, he said that he really thought the companies were overhyped, calling Excite@Home “a piece of crap” and other dotcom companies “dogs.” When the attorney general’s office exposed these conflicts of interest and settled with Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, J.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, book value, BRICs, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, framing effect, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Flooz.com launched a special offer to American Express platinum card holders allowing them to buy $1,000 of Flooz currency for just $800. Shortly before declaring bankruptcy, Flooz itself was Floozed when Filipino and Russian gangs bought $300,000 of its currency using stolen credit card numbers. Consider Pets.com, a real dog if there ever was one. The company had a sock-puppet mascot that starred in its TV commercials and even made an appearance at a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Unfortunately, the popularity of its mascot did not compensate for the fact that it’s hard to make a profit individually shipping low-margin 25-pound bags of kibble.

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website by Matt Blumberg

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Broken windows theory, crowdsourcing, deskilling, fear of failure, financial engineering, high batting average, high net worth, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype

Pretty soon, you’re spending money as recklessly as they are and there isn’t any left in the bank. The second possibility is subtler but just as damaging: when investors see a certain kind of idea fail, spectacularly, they’re less likely to fund a good idea along the same lines. (Selling pet food online isn’t a bad idea but it took a long time for investors to take another shot after Pets.com failed to the tune of some $300 million.) The response? Have the stomach to wait them out. While some techniques for winning are specific to the type of competition you’re facing, most of them are universal. Concede that competitors will sometimes out-think you, so out-behave, out-prepare and out-execute them.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

In 1998 Bezos and venture capitalist John Doerr saw an opportunity for an online pharmacy and founded Drugstore.com, recruiting longtime Microsoft executive Peter Neupert to run it. Amazon owned a third of the company. The venture got off to a promising start, so for the next two years, Tinsley and Bezos invested tens of millions of Amazon’s cash in a variety of dot-com hopefuls, including Pets.com, Gear.com, Wineshopper.com, Greenlight.com, Homegrocer.com, and the urban delivery service Kozmo.com. In exchange for its cash, Amazon took a minority ownership position and a seat on the board for each, and the company believed it was well positioned for the future if those product categories succeeded on the Internet.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Students and faculty alike were dropping out of school to launch fledgling technology businesses. Inevitably, the market came crashing down. Beginning in March 2000, trillions of dollars’ worth of paper valuations vanished in a matter of months. Yet amid the rubble, certain companies survived. While Webvan and Pets.com disappeared, Amazon and eBay survived and thrived. Steve Jobs, who had lost Apple to mistakes he made earlier, recovered, returned to Apple, and built it into a juggernaut. Eventually, the online world emerged from the depths of the 2000 downturn to become stronger than ever. Why were some Internet-based businesses successful while others were not?

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

While today’s market may be, in another favorite Silicon Valley-ism, “a bit frothy,” Rock Health graduates are competing successfully for real dollars from mature, no-nonsense funders. And many of the start-ups appear to be building sustainable businesses. In mid-2014, Augmedix signed a deal with the Dignity Health system, which manages hospitals in 17 states, and Lift Labs was bought by Google. This is not Pets.com, or any of the other dot-com flameouts we’ve seen over the years. More important, these products are not indulgent and silly—they are solving real problems for clinicians and for patients. Augmedix, CellScope, and Lift Labs each have compelling human stories: helping a doctor who is struggling to satisfy both his patients and his EHR; a working mom who is confronting a wailing, febrile toddler; a proud elderly man who is too embarrassed to eat in his favorite restaurant.

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

In 1994, having tried going east, he now went west, moving to California just in time for the first dot-com bubble. He joined a start-up run by his little brother’s best friend from high school, and learned to build websites.2 He helped code the first CNET.com, and, in a sin that still haunts him, some of the first banner ads ever put on the internet. The dot-com bubble was still inflating – Pets.com, which would go on to be one of its most notable failures, had not even been founded – but Haig was put off by the rush to commercialisation and the ever increasing focus on money. He decided to return to his Tibetan studies, and signed up for a course in Tibetan medicine at a school in Dharamsala, in the Indian Himalayas, the de facto capital of the Tibetan government in exile, and where the Dalai Lama had fled in 1959.

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy by Iain Martin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, call centre, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Thorp, Etonian, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, interest rate swap, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, pets.com, proprietary trading, Red Clydeside, shareholder value, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, value at risk, warehouse robotics

For a time it seemed that any young, chino-clad technology geek with half an idea could secure millions or tens of millions in funding from venture capitalists keen to surf the wave of the future. On 10 March 2000 the boom peaked when the NASDAQ, the technology index on Wall Street, burst through the 5000 mark. Shortly afterwards firms with names such as WorldCom and Pets.com, which had rocketed in value, came crashing down. At the height of the madness, Yahoo had thought it sensible to pay $5.7bn for Broadcast.com, a website that was soon defunct. There had even been a widely tipped business called Startups.com, dealing in Internet start-ups, which failed. But the US authorities dealt calmly with the after-effects.

Competition Demystified by Bruce C. Greenwald

additive manufacturing, airline deregulation, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fault tolerance, intangible asset, John Nash: game theory, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, PalmPilot, Pepsi Challenge, pets.com, price discrimination, price stability, revenue passenger mile, search costs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, vertical integration, warehouse automation, yield management, zero-sum game

One of the articles of faith that drove the Internet mania during the last half of the 1990s was that this new medium would transform the way consumers bought books, computers, DVDs, groceries, pet supplies, drugs, banking services, fine art, and virtually everything else. Any traditional retailer that did not completely revise its business model was going to end up as roadkill on the information superhighway. The dominant merchants in this new economy would be dot-coms like Amazon, Webvan, Pets.com, Drugstore.com, and Wingspanbank.com, leaving Wal-Mart, Kroger, and Citibank in their wake. After the mania subsided, it became obvious how excessive those predictions were about the rate at which online commerce would supplant traditional shopping. The expectation that the newly hatched, Internet-only retailers would displace their brick-and-mortar competitors also proved mistaken.

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

I got a little seed money and then I was in it. I had to build a company. And not a side-job, small-potatoes college startup. A real company. A serious business. Fig. 3.0.1 We used these drawings in the Fuse pitch deck to illustrate how the internet and music and TVs could come together. The MP3 player makes me chuckle. The ad for pets.com makes me laugh out loud. Tony Fadell I was going to get it right this time. We were going after the world’s biggest players. We were going to challenge Sony. But first I had to convince people to come work with me. I’d walked away from Philips’s enormous infrastructure, their mountains of process and cash, and walked right onto a blank slate.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The financial returns from trans-Atlantic trade and investment in the American economy—the “fantasies” on which the South Sea and Mississippi Companies were founded—far exceeded the deluded speculators’ wildest dreams. Such historical examples do not prove that the speculators in property and financial derivatives before the crash of 2007 will ultimately be proved right. On the contrary. The buyers of Squared-CDOs, who were as foolish as the late investors in Pets.Com and the leveraged buyers of South Sea promissory notes, will never recover a penny of their reckless speculations. But the idiocies of CDO-2 investors do not necessarily imply a structural decline in the United States and British economies, just as the idiocies of Dutch speculators in striped-black Semper Augustus bulbs did not reflect the imminent demise of the Dutch economy.

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

Webvan proclaimed itself the future of retailing, its enthusiasts predicting the demise of"bricks and mortars," and even attracted George Sheehan to relinquish charge of the Accenture consulting business for a seat at the driving wheel of this home delivery service, not long before closing in 2001. Pets.com and etoys will forever be symbols of the implausible expectations for online retailing. As these businesses failed, breathless predictions of the future were transferred from B2C (business to consumer) retailing to B2B (business to business). Eventually reality broke in here also. The ease with which money could be raised to fund businesses such as these was widely applauded as a demonstration of the vitality of financial markets. 13 In reality, it represented a collapse of market discipline.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

Then the 254-page document used to sell the bonds spelling out all of WeWork’s financials got in the hands of the media, with The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and others alerting the world to WeWork’s unusually aggressive, and amusingly named, metric. “Community-adjusted EBITDA” was mocked relentlessly online. On Twitter, users questioned whether WeWork was the next Pets.com, a 1990s dot-com flameout. The blog Dealbreaker called the metric a “rage-inducing Silicon Alley pile of thought horseshit.” Neumann was caught flat-footed, unprepared for any public blowback—on WeWork’s finances or community-adjusted EBITDA. Until this point, he had enjoyed years of largely fawning press.

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K