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Losses · 10 March 2000 · Nasdaq Composite 5,048.62

The intraday high the index reached on 10 March 2000, and did not see again for fifteen years.

The Nasdaq Composite peaked at 5,048.62 on 10 March 2000 and lost approximately 78% of its value by October 2002 — the largest destruction of paper wealth in US market history to that point.

The Nasdaq MarketSite wall carries the composite through the session; the index closed above 5,000 on two trading days and next did so in 2015.Photo: Dominic Müser / Pexels

Four dated entries

Record

Named companies, named dates, the documents they filed — the startup form as a sequence of events that actually happened.

Adults at trading terminals on a listing morning, mid-reaction — faces visible, screens reflecting green and red figures — Netscape’s first day of trading ran from $28 to $58.25; the company was sixteen months old and had no meaningful profit.Photo: Tima Miroshnichenko / Pexels

RecordTwenty-Eight Dollars at Open, Fifty-Eight at CloseNetscape listed on 9 August 1995 at $28 a share and closed at $58.25, having never turned a profit — the IPO that set the template for the decade that followed. RecordForty Hours: Silicon Valley Bank, March 2023Silicon Valley Bank held $175.4bn in deposits on 31 December 2022; regulators closed it on 10 March 2023 after a bank run that played out partly on group chats. RecordNo Underwriter, No Lock-Up, No New SharesSpotify's April 2018 direct listing on the NYSE was the first at that scale to bypass the traditional IPO machinery entirely — no investment bank setting the price, no new capital raised, existing shareholders selling directly.

All seven entries in Record

Money

Where the capital came from, who structured it, and what the instruments looked like — from Fairchild 1957 to the Vision Fund 2017.

MoneyEight Names on One Resignation Letter, 1957When the 'traitorous eight' left William Shockley's laboratory in 1957, Arthur Rock helped structure the financing that created Fairchild Semiconductor — the first company widely described as venture-backed in the modern sense. MoneySummer 2005, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Eight CompaniesY Combinator ran its first batch in the summer of 2005 — eight companies, $6,000 per founder, a three-month programme that turned the seed round into a class. MoneyOne Hundred Billion Dollars and What It Did to the Market MoneyWhat a SAFE Actually Is, and Where It Came From

Fairchild Semiconductor traitorous eight resignation letter — 844 East Charleston Road, Palo Alto: the building Fairchild Semiconductor occupied from 1957, financed on Arthur Rock’s introduction to Fairchild Camera and Instrument.Photo: Fairchild Bldg · Wikimedia Commons

All eight entries in Money

Losses

The documented failures — filings, indictments, withdrawals and the numbers as they appear in the public record.

Adults standing outside a bank branch on a weekday morning, phones out, waiting — natural light, no posed subjects — Silicon Valley Bank held $175.4bn in deposits at 31 December 2022 and had a negative cash balance by the morning of 10 March 2023.FDIC statement, 10 March 2023

LossesThe Sock Puppet and the Warehouse: Two Ways to Spend a Billion LossesWhat the Grand Jury Found, June 2018 LossesThe S-1 That Killed the IPO

All six entries in Losses

Vocabulary

Unicorn — a private company valued at $1bn or more

Aileen Lee · TechCrunch · 2 November 2013 · thirty-nine companies qualified

Adults seated around a table in a glass-walled meeting room — CB Insights, tracking the category Lee created, recorded more than 1,200 unicorns globally by the end of 2023.Photo: Jason Goodman / Pexels

VocabularyAileen Lee Counted Thirty-Nine, November 2013Aileen Lee's TechCrunch piece of 2 November 2013 — 'Welcome to the Unicorn Club' — identified 39 US software companies founded since 2003 that had reached $1bn in private valuation; she called them unicorns. VocabularyThe Phrase Marc Andreessen Posted in June 2007Marc Andreessen defined 'product-market fit' in a June 2007 blog post — 'being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market' — and the phrase became the industry's primary benchmark for early-stage viability. VocabularyFrank Robinson Coined It; Eric Ries Made It Mandatory

All six entries in Vocabulary

Addresses

5 entries

Sand Hill Road Menlo Park aerial photograph — Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park: two miles of low-rise offices between Interstate 280 and Stanford.Photo: Road sign and anti-trump graffiti at Menlo Park · Wikimedia Commons

AddressesThe Two Miles That Priced Half the Internet AddressesEurope's Largest Startup Campus, in a Former Rail Freight Depot AddressesWhere the Prototypes Actually Get Made AddressesThe Databases That Keep the Score

The full archive, all 32 entries

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