Why Pets.com Died
from the it's-the-VCs,-stupid dept
I've argued many times on Techdirt that venture capitalists have not taken nearly as much blame as they deserve for the many failed dot coms out there. Here's one of the first articles I've seen that agrees with me. While, officially, it's about the demise of Pets.com it talks in generalities about how venture capitalists built companies to flip by pouring in lots of money, pushing them out onto the public market, and then running away with the money. Despite all the hollow talk of "building businesses" and "adding value", many venture capitalists simply bilked the public markets for years in a huge pump-and-dump scam.
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