01
Record
Named companies, named dates, the documents they filed — the startup form as a sequence of events that actually happened.
7 entries in this section
- 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.