5 ms·

Back in the first dotcom bubble, we had FuckedCompany.com. It tracked these sorts of things on a daily basis.

prawn 10y ago
The creator of said site posts on HN from time to time, under pud. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud
- rnugent 10y ago
  Pud is Phil Kaplan. He made a few bucks on AdBright, got married and still hacks up wild ideas that mostly whiff. Plays the drums.
  - prawn 10y ago
    Can only assume this is sarcasm or some definition of "whiff" I don't know. He's had FC, AdBright, TinyLetter and DistroKid - wish I had a track record that strong with my projects!
malbs 10y ago
Ahh FuckedCompany.com I remember when I sat in an interview for a position at marchFIRST in Melbourne, Australia. And when it came time in the interview for them to ask "Have you got any questions for us?" "Yeah, look this is kind of awkward, but I've seen marchFIRST mentioned quite a number of times on this website called fuckedcompany.com... Is that indicative of any issues I should be aware about?" "Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company" "Oh great" So I accepted the offer, worked off-site for 3 months, and then marchFIRST went chapter 11. Should have paid more attention to that damned website.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  marchFIRST -- it even has a Wikipedia entry [0]! marchFIRST was a Nasdaq traded public company whose peak stock price reached $52. By the time the company filed for bankruptcy, it traded for pennies ($0.16 on March 28, 2001). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarchFirst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarchFirst
- nwenzel 10y ago
  I worked at marchFirst back in the day. Even had the chance to meet Bob Bernard. That experience shaped how I run the company I co-founded 3 years ago. M1's number one problem was a culture of spending money without any thought of a return. Which was probably really odd for folks on the Whitman Hart side of the merger. It really was a merger of two opposite cultures.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - feverishaaron 10y ago
    This extended back to USWeb/CKS. I might still have a shirt bragging about a $300M quarter (Though if you looked at the financials,we had something like a $50M loss). It was like the Tres Comma club, but tackier.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  > "Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company" Translation: "don't worry about that, that's just the company you are applying for"
  - malbs 10y ago
    I was young and really wanted the job! It was easy to overlook the obvious
    - bbcbasic 10y ago
      I'm making fun of their gall more than anything else. I'd probably have overlooked that too when I was young.
    - willismichael 10y ago
      It's possible that you made the right decision - you were young, you got the job, you got experience on your resume.
ryandrake 10y ago
One of my favorite sites back in the day! I remember checking it daily to make sure my employer wasn't there. Fun times! We seem to be missing that edge--that deep cynicism and unashamed negativity--this time around.
- jdale27 10y ago
  Well, as they say: "This time it's different!"
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    This time is different. Back in the dot com days the companies were public and so the day of reckoning came quickly. Today everyone is running on VC/PE/SWF money and so problems can be hidden for a long time. Having said this until US interest rates rise or unless a white swan event occurs (I am Australian so all swans are black here) the music will keep playing and the everyone will keep dancing.
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      No doubt part of it is how these companies are funded. There's so much private money, and nobody knows what to do with it so it gets tossed at these hobby projects, and by some miracle one of them turns into a unicorn. But there are other differences now too. You can't simply ridicule anything anymore. Back in 2000 we could point to a company trying to sell designer kitty litter on the Internet and laugh at how stupid it was and how greedy and full of hubris the founders were. Now, everyone's trying to "change the world" and empower everyone and "enable the sharing economy" and, well you can't criticize that without sounding like a big meanie. There are a lot of web sites out there that are simply never going to be businesses. They have their runway to burn through, and once it's done, they'll be blogging about Their Amazing Journey as they get acqui-hired. But when you point this out, you're just being negative--you're a jealous wantrepreneur. Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous.
gspetr 10y ago
I wonder why there isn't a new incarnation of it. Are people afraid of lawsuits?
- eropple 10y ago
  I registered unicorngrill.com on a lark for exactly this, but I'm allergic to lawyers.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    We need to see someone follow sci-hub.cc lead and put the server and public face in Russia.
    - gspetr 10y ago
      As luck would have it I'm Russian. Do you think it would take off if I would do it for real? Should we poll the community in an "Ask HN" thread to see if people want this?
      - tluyben2 10y ago
        I would like it and wouldn't mind hosting it, but yeah FuckedCompany does have a better ring to it than the other names I see here. That might be nostalgia though.
      - danieltillett 10y ago
        I suspect there would be quite a lot of interest especially if you did not worry about upsetting lawyers.
Animats 10y ago
I had Downside's Deathwatch, a simple automated cash flow analysis.[1] It's still up, frozen in time. All those "Chart is not available for this symbol" entries are dead. In the first dot-com boom, many companies went public before profitability. So anyone could see how much cash they had and how fast they were burning through it. I just calculated how much time they had left until cash went to zero. That's the "death date" listed. It was embarrassingly accurate. [1] http://www.downside.com/deathwatch.html http://www.downside.com/deathwatch.html
- unixhero 10y ago
  ?
- NicoJuicy 10y ago
  This is awesome ( i mean, there is beauty in the simplicity of it) Any thoughts to share the code which you used to analyse edgar? :)
  - Animats 10y ago
    It's no longer useful. The SEC used to require an EX-27 schedule in SGML with useful data. They discontinued that around 2001. Years later, they started requiring that data in XBRL format, which is more detailed. You could do this today with XBRL tools, which are available. Downside was written in Perl, in 1999. There's a system in there to parse financial statements written in HTML for humans, but it's for HTML 3.1 and was never updated. I used to get hate mail from CFOs over this.
    - NicoJuicy 10y ago
      Well, if you have the code and an example file it would still be usefull ( as reference ). Thanks for the information!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
MichaelMoser123 10y ago
> Back in the first dotcom bubble, we had FuckedCompany.com today there is https://www.thelayoff.com/ https://www.thelayoff.com/ ; well, it is similar but not quite the same... is useful if you are working for a company with a rich history of layoffs, it allows to check for recent rumors on the subject.
FuNe 10y ago
There is also glassdoor.com but it's not specially geared towards layoffs. But you can get a decent idea of how well a company does.
- imglorp 10y ago
  I love glassdoor. Sometime you see high level management on there giving frank plus and minus assessments of the business, often critical of higher levels. It's not just disgruntled departures but often current employees.
- johnschrom 10y ago
  Glassdoor can be (and is) easily tainted by submitting fake positive reviews. They have a policy of not letting employers remove negative reviews, but that doesn't stop the company from flooding with "it's a fast-paced work environment, so some people clearly can't handle the heat in the kitchen" style "positive reviews" to reframe the legitimate negative ones. So, it can sometimes be difficult to get a proper read on signal. However, it seems to be among the best data source out there.
  - thrwwy315341 10y ago
    I've seen this happen. Some of my colleagues had written bad reviews for a company I had worked at. My employer found out eventually. They ended up flooding glassdoor with fake positive reviews, down to changing tone and typing style between posts to throw people off. I would take glassdoor with a grain of salt.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - driverdan 10y ago
    You have to appropriately weight the reviews. Some types of reviews tend to be heavy on negative, some positive. Glassdoor is the type of site you have to focus more on the negative reviews than the positive.
ud0 10y ago
is there a second bubble?

prawn 10y ago

The creator of said site posts on HN from time to time, under pud. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud

rnugent 10y ago
Pud is Phil Kaplan. He made a few bucks on AdBright, got married and still hacks up wild ideas that mostly whiff. Plays the drums.
- prawn 10y ago
  Can only assume this is sarcasm or some definition of "whiff" I don't know. He's had FC, AdBright, TinyLetter and DistroKid - wish I had a track record that strong with my projects!

malbs 10y ago

Ahh FuckedCompany.com I remember when I sat in an interview for a position at marchFIRST in Melbourne, Australia. And when it came time in the interview for them to ask "Have you got any questions for us?" "Yeah, look this is kind of awkward, but I've seen marchFIRST mentioned quite a number of times on this website called fuckedcompany.com... Is that indicative of any issues I should be aware about?" "Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company" "Oh great" So I accepted the offer, worked off-site for 3 months, and then marchFIRST went chapter 11. Should have paid more attention to that damned website.

0xmohit 10y ago
marchFIRST -- it even has a Wikipedia entry [0]! marchFIRST was a Nasdaq traded public company whose peak stock price reached $52. By the time the company filed for bankruptcy, it traded for pennies ($0.16 on March 28, 2001). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarchFirst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarchFirst
nwenzel 10y ago
I worked at marchFirst back in the day. Even had the chance to meet Bob Bernard. That experience shaped how I run the company I co-founded 3 years ago. M1's number one problem was a culture of spending money without any thought of a return. Which was probably really odd for folks on the Whitman Hart side of the merger. It really was a merger of two opposite cultures.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- feverishaaron 10y ago
  This extended back to USWeb/CKS. I might still have a shirt bragging about a $300M quarter (Though if you looked at the financials,we had something like a $50M loss). It was like the Tres Comma club, but tackier.
bbcbasic 10y ago
> "Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company" Translation: "don't worry about that, that's just the company you are applying for"
- malbs 10y ago
  I was young and really wanted the job! It was easy to overlook the obvious
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    I'm making fun of their gall more than anything else. I'd probably have overlooked that too when I was young.
  - willismichael 10y ago
    It's possible that you made the right decision - you were young, you got the job, you got experience on your resume.

ryandrake 10y ago

One of my favorite sites back in the day! I remember checking it daily to make sure my employer wasn't there. Fun times! We seem to be missing that edge--that deep cynicism and unashamed negativity--this time around.

jdale27 10y ago
Well, as they say: "This time it's different!"
- danieltillett 10y ago
  This time is different. Back in the dot com days the companies were public and so the day of reckoning came quickly. Today everyone is running on VC/PE/SWF money and so problems can be hidden for a long time. Having said this until US interest rates rise or unless a white swan event occurs (I am Australian so all swans are black here) the music will keep playing and the everyone will keep dancing.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    No doubt part of it is how these companies are funded. There's so much private money, and nobody knows what to do with it so it gets tossed at these hobby projects, and by some miracle one of them turns into a unicorn. But there are other differences now too. You can't simply ridicule anything anymore. Back in 2000 we could point to a company trying to sell designer kitty litter on the Internet and laugh at how stupid it was and how greedy and full of hubris the founders were. Now, everyone's trying to "change the world" and empower everyone and "enable the sharing economy" and, well you can't criticize that without sounding like a big meanie. There are a lot of web sites out there that are simply never going to be businesses. They have their runway to burn through, and once it's done, they'll be blogging about Their Amazing Journey as they get acqui-hired. But when you point this out, you're just being negative--you're a jealous wantrepreneur. Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous.

gspetr 10y ago

I wonder why there isn't a new incarnation of it. Are people afraid of lawsuits?

eropple 10y ago
I registered unicorngrill.com on a lark for exactly this, but I'm allergic to lawyers.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  We need to see someone follow sci-hub.cc lead and put the server and public face in Russia.
  - gspetr 10y ago
    As luck would have it I'm Russian. Do you think it would take off if I would do it for real? Should we poll the community in an "Ask HN" thread to see if people want this?
    - tluyben2 10y ago
      I would like it and wouldn't mind hosting it, but yeah FuckedCompany does have a better ring to it than the other names I see here. That might be nostalgia though.
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      I suspect there would be quite a lot of interest especially if you did not worry about upsetting lawyers.

Animats 10y ago

I had Downside's Deathwatch, a simple automated cash flow analysis.[1] It's still up, frozen in time. All those "Chart is not available for this symbol" entries are dead. In the first dot-com boom, many companies went public before profitability. So anyone could see how much cash they had and how fast they were burning through it. I just calculated how much time they had left until cash went to zero. That's the "death date" listed. It was embarrassingly accurate. [1] http://www.downside.com/deathwatch.html http://www.downside.com/deathwatch.html

unixhero 10y ago
?
NicoJuicy 10y ago
This is awesome ( i mean, there is beauty in the simplicity of it) Any thoughts to share the code which you used to analyse edgar? :)
- Animats 10y ago
  It's no longer useful. The SEC used to require an EX-27 schedule in SGML with useful data. They discontinued that around 2001. Years later, they started requiring that data in XBRL format, which is more detailed. You could do this today with XBRL tools, which are available. Downside was written in Perl, in 1999. There's a system in there to parse financial statements written in HTML for humans, but it's for HTML 3.1 and was never updated. I used to get hate mail from CFOs over this.
  - NicoJuicy 10y ago
    Well, if you have the code and an example file it would still be usefull ( as reference ). Thanks for the information!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

MichaelMoser123 10y ago

> Back in the first dotcom bubble, we had FuckedCompany.com today there is https://www.thelayoff.com/ https://www.thelayoff.com/ ; well, it is similar but not quite the same... is useful if you are working for a company with a rich history of layoffs, it allows to check for recent rumors on the subject.

FuNe 10y ago

There is also glassdoor.com but it's not specially geared towards layoffs. But you can get a decent idea of how well a company does.

imglorp 10y ago
I love glassdoor. Sometime you see high level management on there giving frank plus and minus assessments of the business, often critical of higher levels. It's not just disgruntled departures but often current employees.
johnschrom 10y ago
Glassdoor can be (and is) easily tainted by submitting fake positive reviews. They have a policy of not letting employers remove negative reviews, but that doesn't stop the company from flooding with "it's a fast-paced work environment, so some people clearly can't handle the heat in the kitchen" style "positive reviews" to reframe the legitimate negative ones. So, it can sometimes be difficult to get a proper read on signal. However, it seems to be among the best data source out there.
- thrwwy315341 10y ago
  I've seen this happen. Some of my colleagues had written bad reviews for a company I had worked at. My employer found out eventually. They ended up flooding glassdoor with fake positive reviews, down to changing tone and typing style between posts to throw people off. I would take glassdoor with a grain of salt.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- driverdan 10y ago
  You have to appropriately weight the reviews. Some types of reviews tend to be heavy on negative, some positive. Glassdoor is the type of site you have to focus more on the negative reviews than the positive.

ud0 10y ago

is there a second bubble?