Thirty-two entries across five sections, each one naming the document it comes from.

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

• 01Twenty-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. The piece runs through the S-1, the underwriting, and what the day's trading looked like on the tape.
• 02Books, Then Everything: Amazon's First FilingAmazon incorporated in 1994, listed in May 1997 at $18 a share on the Nasdaq, and spent its first years reporting losses that analysts treated as a sign of recklessness. The piece reads the 1997 prospectus against what the company became.
• 03The $38 Share Price That Nobody Wanted by AfternoonFacebook listed in May 2012 at $38 a share on the Nasdaq — a price it fell below within days and did not regain for more than a year. The piece sets the S-1 figures against the trading record and the Morgan Stanley underwriting questions that followed.
• 04Thirteen Employees and a Billion DollarsFacebook acquired Instagram in April 2012 for approximately $1bn — at the time the largest acquisition of a company with no revenue at that scale. The piece documents the deal terms as reported and the regulatory filings that followed.
• 05What Glitch Left BehindSlack launched in August 2013 as the internal messaging tool built for a failed multiplayer game called Glitch; Stewart Butterfield announced the pivot in a public memo that is still findable. The piece traces the documented path from game studio to $27.7bn Salesforce acquisition in 2021.
• 06No 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. The piece documents the mechanics and the SEC filings.
• 07Forty 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. The piece follows the FDIC filings, the timeline, and what the collapse revealed about the startup ecosystem's concentration in one institution.

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

• 01Eight 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. The piece documents Rock's role, the $1.5m Fairchild Camera investment, and the lineage of companies that followed.
• 02The Federal Statute That Made Sand Hill Road PossibleThe Small Business Investment Act of 1958 created licensed investment companies that could use federal leverage to fund early-stage businesses — the legislative origin of the modern venture structure. The piece reads the Act against the first SBICs and the capital flows that followed.
• 03Sand Hill Road, 1972: Two Firms, One Address, Forty Years of ReturnsKleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital both opened on Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park in 1972 and between them funded a disproportionate share of what became the Nasdaq's largest companies. The piece documents the founding structures, the LP terms as they were reported, and the portfolio record through PitchBook data.
• 04The Pension Rule Change That Opened the FloodgatesA 1979 Department of Labor clarification of the ERISA 'prudent man' rule allowed pension funds to allocate to venture capital for the first time — and the amount of capital available to the industry roughly quadrupled within a decade. The piece documents the regulatory text and the capital flow data from the NVCA's historical figures.
• 05Summer 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. The piece documents the founding structure, the batch, and how the model scaled from Mountain View through the Winter and Summer cycles.
• 06What a SAFE Actually Is, and Where It Came FromY Combinator published the Simple Agreement for Future Equity in 2013 as a one-page alternative to the convertible note — no interest rate, no maturity date, conversion triggered by a priced round. The piece reads the original document and sets it against the convertible it replaced.
• 07One Hundred Billion Dollars and What It Did to the MarketSoftBank's Vision Fund closed in May 2017 at $98.6bn — roughly twice the size of all other active venture funds combined, according to PitchBook — and proceeded to write cheques that reset valuation expectations across the industry. The piece documents the fund structure, the LP roster, and the downstream effect on round sizes.
• 08The Round Alphabet: What Each Letter Actually MeantSeed, Series A, Series B — the labels have stayed the same while the amounts attached to them have changed by an order of magnitude since 2005. The piece compares Crunchbase median round sizes at five-year intervals and documents when the definitions stopped matching the practice.

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

• 015,048.62The 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 piece reads the peak against the trough using Nasdaq's own historical data and documents which companies disappeared and which did not.
• 02The Sock Puppet and the Warehouse: Two Ways to Spend a BillionPets.com and Webvan both burned through venture capital at a scale that looked, in 2000, like a new kind of ambition — and both were liquidated within a year of their IPOs. The piece compares the S-1 filings, the burn rates as reported in their quarterly filings, and what the investors received.
• 03What the Grand Jury Found, June 2018Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Balwani were indicted on federal wire fraud charges on 14 June 2018; Holmes was convicted in January 2022. The piece reads the indictment document and the SEC complaint against the company's investor materials and the valuation figures Theranos reported to the press.
• 04The S-1 That Killed the IPOWeWork filed its S-1 in August 2019 with a stated valuation of $47bn (SoftBank's figure, per PitchBook) and withdrew the IPO six weeks later after analysts and journalists read the document carefully. The piece goes through the S-1 — the governance structure, the losses, the related-party transactions — and the sequence of events that followed.
• 05Nine Days in November 2022FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 11 November 2022, eight days after a CoinDesk report on its balance sheet triggered a liquidity crisis that turned into a run. The piece follows the court filings and the documented timeline — not speculation about individuals beyond what the Southern District of New York has established.
• 06What a Down Round Looks Like on the Cap TableThe 2022–23 correction produced a wave of down rounds — financings at valuations below the previous round — that Crunchbase and PitchBook tracked quarter by quarter. The piece reads the aggregate data against specific documented cases and explains what a down round does to the existing shareholders mechanically.

The terms the industry coined — each one given its author, its year, and where it first appeared in print.

• 01Frank Robinson Coined It; Eric Ries Made It Mandatory'Minimum viable product' was first used publicly by Frank Robinson of SyncDev in 2001; Eric Ries put it into wide circulation in The Lean Startup (2011). The piece traces the term through its two published origins and documents how the definition shifted between them.
• 02The 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. The piece reads the original post against how the term entered pitch decks and investor letters.
• 03Aileen 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. The piece reads the original article against the count as it stood by the end of 2023.
• 04Grow Faster Than Is Sensible: The Argument Reid Hoffman Made in 2018Reid Hoffman's Blitzscaling (2018, co-authored with Chris Yeh) argued that in winner-take-most markets, speed of growth mattered more than efficiency — and that accepting operational chaos was the rational choice. The piece reads the book's central claim against the companies it cited and their subsequent records.
• 05The Pivot Was Always There; Someone Just Named ItThe term 'pivot' — a structured course correction that preserves one element of the original strategy — entered startup vocabulary through Eric Ries and Steve Blank's writings in the late 2000s, but the practice predates the word by decades. The piece compares the documented pivots of Slack, YouTube and PayPal against the definition as written.
• 06Three Numbers Every Investor Update CarriesBurn rate, runway and the J-curve are the three metrics that appear in almost every venture investor update, yet each has a different origin and a different definition depending on who is using it. The piece traces each term to its earliest documented use in venture correspondence and fund reporting.

The places where it happened and the databases that kept score — Sand Hill Road, Station F, Silicon Roundabout, Crunchbase, PitchBook.

• 01The Two Miles That Priced Half the InternetSand Hill Road runs for roughly two miles through Menlo Park, California, and at its peak held more venture capital per square foot than any other address in the world. The piece names the firms, the buildings and the moves — who arrived when, which partnerships split, which addresses changed hands.
• 02Europe's Largest Startup Campus, in a Former Rail Freight DepotStation F opened in Paris in June 2017 in a 34,000-square-metre Halle Freyssinet that had been a rail freight terminal; Xavier Niel led the renovation. The piece documents the building, the resident programmes and the French government's Tech.gouv endorsement.
• 03Old Street, 2010: A Roundabout Becomes a PolicyDavid Cameron announced the 'Tech City' initiative at the Old Street roundabout in November 2010, turning an existing cluster of small technology companies into a named government project. The piece documents the announcement, the East London Tech City Investment Organisation that followed, and what Crunchbase records for the area.
• 04Where the Prototypes Actually Get MadeShenzhen's Huaqiangbei district became the world's primary source of consumer electronics components and rapid hardware prototyping — the supply chain infrastructure that made the hardware startup wave of the 2010s possible. The piece documents the district, the manufacturers that are named in public filings, and the shift in Western founder trips from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen.
• 05The Databases That Keep the ScoreCrunchbase (founded 2007, spun out of TechCrunch), PitchBook (2007, acquired by Morningstar 2016) and CB Insights (2008) are the three primary sources for the round sizes, valuations and company counts that appear throughout startup reporting. The piece documents each database's founding, methodology and the known gaps in their coverage.