03
Losses
The documented failures — filings, indictments, withdrawals and the numbers as they appear in the public record.
6 entries in this section
- 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.