Pets.com CEO: The Five Big Mistakes That Changed My Life and How I Moved Past Them | Hacker News Reader

Pets.com CEO: The Five Big Mistakes That Changed My Life and How I Moved Past Them

smartnow.com

90 pointsjkopelman34 comments

How unique and courageous to see someone that has had a very public failure talk so honestly about it. I wish there were more people with that kind of guts.

Lots of respect to Julie Wainwright...

There's a temptation to resist talking about failure. It's easy to think that you'll retain your self-image (or tribal status), but that's not usually the case.

Openness actually helps when you fail publicly. You gain status, so to speak.

But how do you strike a balance?

It's probably better to err towards openness. But I do find that revealing too much feels draining.

"I had people laugh in my face when I introduced myself for years after the company closed."

Julie,

On behalf of everyone here at HN, you are welcome here anytime.

You will have the last laugh, I'm sure.

Frankly I found the narcissism a little off-putting. Lately It seems to be the main requirement for being a CEO. Among other things:

- She couldn't check the spelling of "Visacalc"(sic)?

- Titling every second paragraph with "How I moved on" - just asks to have the phrase ", leaving wreckage in my wake" after it.

- "feed my soul"

- "I rented funny movies" So now you're basically competing with every stay at home mom for work at home plans.

- "And I lived in that space for too long" Space? If it was that difficult, couldn't you have learned to talk like a real person, rather than an executive drone.

- "I respond to visual goals, so I did a vision board: I took white poster board and I pasted pictures and phrases that represented my goals." - so now you're competing with elementary school students.

- "I mean, I wasn’t crying every day nor did I drive to the Golden Gate Bridge and contemplate jumping." - so she actually lives in the Bay Area - which has massive support systems for failed entrepreneurs and giant egos. Boo fucking hoo.

Now if she goes on and actually does something great with smartnow.com I'll eat my words. Till then I'll repeat "Boo fucking hoo."

And I'll pose a question - when pets.com was crashing down around her ears, how much money did she walk away with? Apparently enough to not work till several years later, for starters.

Having a bad day? There are many lessons to be learned in life. You may not resonate with her but the lessons she has learned are universal.

I dunno - I also found the article to be really heavy on platitudes and light on real advice. It basically boiled down to one mistake - "I took it personally and started wallowing in self-pity" - and one piece of advice - "Get over it." And ironically, her advice almost makes it seem like she hasn't taken her own advice, because the article is all about her. I was kinda hoping for some mistakes she made running the business and what she's learned from them.

Do you have any idea how many people are "wallowing in self-pity" and do need to "get over it"?

Why should she write about the Pets business failure? It's on her site SmartNow, which in the bio says: "She founded SmartNow.com last year to help women help themselves." I don't think people coming to the site care about sustainable revenues, cost structures, brand management, etc. But seeing a successful woman take a hard knock and pull herself together better than ever might be interesting.

So you think she wasn't really depressed? Lot's of people are depressed, even though their living circumstances don't seem to warrant it. Boo fucking hoo?

Maybe it is just a variant of what is described in "Fooled By Randomness" about this guy who was being on of the top earners of the country, but because he lived in a neighborhood of even richer people, he still felt like a loser. All relative?

Okay, so half a million dollars above and beyond her no doubt titanic salary and she's still depressed. I can believe that easily. Our happiness doesn't have much relationship to our financial status.

So perhaps it would have cheered her up to donate half of it to a charity operating in the third world. $500,000 will buy a whole lot of anti-malarial medication, mosquito netting, goats, and microloans.

To be honest I don't think $500000 is that much money, especially if you are depressed and worried about the future. It is good to have safety net, and $500000 is at most the minimum required amount (depending on where you live).

I live smack dab in the middle of Manhattan, and $250,000 would let me keep up a modest lifestyle for about four years without any job at all. The other $250,000 could save the lives of thousands. Downmod me for being self-righteous, but don't downmod me for being wrong.

I didn't downmod you (can't, anyway). However, by your logic, you should really move out of Manhattan to somewhere where you can live for 50000$ and donate the remaining 200000$ to save the lives of thousands. Ultimately, by your logic, none of us in the western world has the right to live, because any money we spend could be used to save lots of people (supposedly).

Also who is to say that a safety net of 4 years is enough? If you are too old to work, you might still live another 30 years (say you quit work life at 65 and live to 95). So with your numbers, you need to save about 2000000$ (8*250000, where 8 =~ 30/4) to feel safe enough. Not counting inflation, either, so in reality you need even more.

I don't pursue it to the "ultimately" stage -- it's a moderate belief, that only holds true within certain boundaries. I have no plan to skate off the edge of the slippery slope. What's more, my opinion rests on further subjective opinions like what constitutes "well-off", what constitutes "a good lifestyle", and dozens of other terms which could each spawn a debate.

That said, I think most people would agree that there is a degree of wealth at which some amount of it can safely be considered superfluous to the needs -- including the entire hierarchy, unless one must self-actualize as an airplane collector -- of one person. At that point, I submit that sizeable charitable donations are in order. (The utility of such donations is, of course, yet another debate.)

So how much money do you reckon is necessary? Don't you agree with the 2000000$? There is a huge difference depending on your age, too. At a younger age you might not be aware how much money you really need. You still have infinite opportunities to earn money. Once you get older, they fade away, and you might have an increasing number of health problems.

I think it is OK to worry about saving enough for retirement first, and worry about saving the world later.

Nah, I'm well aware of the sums necessary to secure, say, 20 years of retirement at $80,000 a year. I see that "what's your number" ad on TV and laugh at anyone carrying around less than a million. It just seems to me that if you're in a position where failing and being fired nets you half a million in a stainless steel case, retirement is just never going to be a topic of concern ... if you're willing to adopt a middle-class lifestyle, of course.

Giving away money might have helped a little, but it probably wouldn't have helped her deal with her deeper problems.

Why does titling paragraphs "How I moved on" ask to have the phrase "leaving wreckage in my wake" after it?

>> - "I rented funny movies" So now you're basically competing with every stay at home mom for work at home plans.

My partner is chronically ill, which can be pretty depressing. Awhile ago we realized that the illness is there every day, eroding our ability to be positive and enjoy life. One of the ways we deal with this is to rent funny movies. It helps, and we'd be pretty stupid to not do it because we thought we were being like stay at home moms.

I don't see how this is indicative of narcissism. Also, she's describing what worked for her - I don't know how you can argue with (or downplay, or whatever it is you're doing) someone's description of their own experience.

Last - you use the phrase "now she's competing with x". I have no idea why you think it's a competition in any way. She's describing techniques that worked for her. It sounds like you wanted her to radiate a smiley face, and convince it to bite her so she could develop superhuman happy powers.

I just don't understand your attitude. It seems like you're viewing her as a cutthroat business person trying to fleece women in need of help by providing them with a free article.

Because in general, CEOs are held up to the world as superheroes demanding and getting astronomical salaries (usually set by compensation committees stocked with similar pampered upper class twits), and represented in the press by PR companies who generally extoll how they're better than everyone else. And then when their company fails and the employees walk away with nada, they not only get golden parachutes but somehow manage to evoke sympathy while not working for 5 years, supported by the lost investments of, generally, pensioners.

I didn't mean to insult you or your partner, I'm in fact saying that you're probably more deserving of sympathy and respect than the person this story is about.

Not to worry -- this new website is already passe, eclipsed by Capessa and others of higher quality.

Read her bio at the bottom. If that's failure, sign me up!

Funny that with all that (decades of success and one public fiasco), she still wasn't happy. That's a great lesson that all the success in the world made her overweight and with a crumbling marriage, but a humiliating public crash caused her to find herself and joy in life. I wish her the best, and it sounds like she's going to get it.

From wikipedia:

[after the company shut down], CEO Julie Wainwright received $235,000 in severance on top of a $225,000 "retention payment" while overseeing the closure.

At least she felt bad about what happened.

There's no way ~$450,000 is worth going through what she did.

Money can't buy happiness, but it helps. (It certainly gives you the freedom to pursue happiness and do so comfortably.) I suppose that by the time you reach that level of seniority, it ceases being your primary concern, or even a real source of comfort.

Like Stephen Colbert says - Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you stuff which makes you happy. ;)

It is amazing how the crowd thinks in waves good or bad, everybody kills for an ipod, everybody hates or loves the same things, we belive more in general opinion than in our own opinions.

True. Maybe it's some survival instinct. When everyone is running from the tiger maybe you should start running too.

Its called "Wisdom of the Crowds".

Going with the flow could hardly be called "wisdom".

Pets.com pulled its Sock out of the pack, created an enduring brand and achieved over revenue of $46M in just nine months in 2000.

Amazing.

It's pretty easy to make $46M by spending $110M, which is what Pets.com did.

The rest of Julie's career is pretty impressive - I remember playing with You Don't Know Jack in high school and finding it pretty entertaining. But Pets.com was basically an ill-conceived disaster.

"Mystics might say I am entering a new seven-year cycle. I kind of think that's true because I believe there are universal laws and truths. I do know I have been on a journey."

Well, she hasn't learned any lessons about trying to get away with sloppy thinking whenever she thinks she won't get called on it.

You don't think your way out of crushing depression. It's not about logic.

You can think your way deeper into one, though.

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