GREG MCLEMORE

We sold dog food online and shipped 30-pound bags to people's doors. The shipping cost more than the dog food. We knew that. We thought scale would fix it. Scale did not fix it.

We had a Super Bowl commercial. A puppet sock dog. It was the most memorable ad of the year. Everyone loved the puppet. Nobody bought enough dog food to justify the $1.2 million we spent on the ad.

We raised $82.5 million in our IPO. Nine months later we shut down. From IPO to liquidation in nine months. That has to be some kind of record.

Amazon invested in us. Amazon. The company that would eventually dominate online retail invested in us and we still failed. That tells you how broken the model was.

The sock puppet is in the Smithsonian now. Our mascot outlived our company by 25 years. At least something survived.

Twenty years later, Chewy does exactly what we tried to do — sell pet supplies online — and it's worth $10 billion. We were right about the market. We were just 15 years too early and $300 million too short.