Sort of?

I mean unlike 99.9% of the first wave of DotCom startups they managed to avoid actually going bankrupt.

They got lucky and secured a line of credit right before the bust.

That was a dark time. I was living and working near Seattle, and there were basically seven big employers for techies:

* Microsoft * Boeing * T-Mobile * WaMu * Amazon * Concur * Real Networks

And three of the seven were in severe financial distress. It was like, "hmmm is it time to leave Seattle?"

"Will the last person leaving Seattle - Turn out the lights"

https://static.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/c...

And didn't the share price reflect that at the time, which has now grown considerably now that the market has more confidence in them.

I'm sure they ran a lot of experiments in the earlier wild west days of e-commerce that wouldn't look so great today, but we've learned a lot about what a successful e-commerce business looks like since then.