How the World Got Wired · Sock Puppets and Pet Food

The Catalog

Let me give you a small catalog of companies from those years, because the specific stories are more useful than any general description.

There was Webvan, an online grocery delivery service in California. It raised about $375 million in its public offering, and went on to spend more than $800 million building enormous high-tech warehouses across the country. Its idea — that people would order groceries online and have them delivered the same day — was, in the long run, completely correct. (Look around. Your family probably uses something like Webvan now.) But it was right about twenty years too early. Most people in 1999 did not have fast internet connections at home. Most people did not have credit cards on file with online stores. Most people, when they thought about it, still preferred to go to the supermarket. Webvan was bankrupt by July of 2001.

There was Boo.com, a Swedish online fashion store, headquartered in London, with offices in eight countries. It set out to sell trendy designer clothing through a fancy 3D website. The website turned out to require a very fast internet connection that almost nobody in 1999 had. Customers couldn’t load the pages. Boo.com burned through $135 million dollars in eighteen months — its founders flew across the Atlantic by Concorde, the supersonic jet, on a regular basis — and then went bankrupt in May of 2000. The site had been operating, in total, for six months.

There was Kozmo.com, a delivery company in major American cities that promised to deliver almost anything — a snack, a movie rental, a book, a quart of ice cream — to your door, by bike messenger, within one hour, with no delivery fee. The customers loved it. They especially loved ordering very small things, like a single candy bar, which the company would then deliver across town for free. Kozmo lost money on essentially every order. It burned through $250 million dollars and shut down in April of 2001.

There was theglobe.com, an online community site that went public in November of 1998. Its stock more than quintupled on the first day of trading — it rose 606 percent, the largest one-day IPO rise in history at that point. Its two co-founders, both twenty-four years old, were on the cover of business magazines. The company never figured out how to make money, and was effectively gone by 2001.

There was eToys, an online toy store, which at its peak was worth, on the stock market, more than the entire chain of Toys R Us — a company that ran more than 1,500 actual stores. eToys went bankrupt in 2001.

There were hundreds more. Companies that sold furniture, gardening supplies, medicine, makeup, music, movies, news, advice, gifts, sports gear. Most of them used the word “internet” or “.com” in their names. Most of them are gone.

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