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Comment by danesparza | Hacker News Reader

God this brings back memories of fuckedcompany.com

Right after September 11th, that site got very popular among engineers like me -- seeing (on a daily basis) which company bloodbath was next.

It was kind of fun, until it was our company.

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And suck.com! They ran a sad requiem for a company I worked for to the end in '96: Kaleida Labs, a joint venture of Apple and IBM.

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?

A: IBM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs

https://web.archive.org/web/19970617084520/http://www.suck.c...

    For Goldhaber and Braun, we

    recall the line of Guildenstern

    in coming out the losers in a

    game of princes and kings from

    Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and

    Guildenstern Are Dead: "There

    must have been a moment, at the

    beginning, where we could have

    said - no."

PBS did a story on them but couldn't say Fucked Company on their broadcasts so they used the name "The Dot Com Deadpool" instead.

Fucked Company published an excellent documentary on the Digital Entertainment Network.

(It's from "Fucked Company", so obviously it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but who's at work any more these days?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaRTZpJgPA

>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network

>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network

>I rescued this from Web Archive, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.

Yes, THAT guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s

>Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

Oh no :(, the Internet Archive fucked them:

https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/

>Sorry.

>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

Alternative archive of the front page, at least:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20060603194832/http://www...

Then they went from sorta fucked:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20091016001955/http://www...

To fucked:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20130104195206/http://www...

It's a different thing (for acquihires) but https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ has much the same vibe.

Blind is the resource I use now to scratch the same itch

Unless you are in US, it is a very poor one, sorry.

I wonder what Pud is up to now. Didn't he use to post on here?

He started and is running DistroKid, which is probably the most popular way for independent music artists to get their music into digital stores and streaming services.

Ah, yes. I remember now.

He is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pud

I sometimes check https://www.thelayoff.com/ to see which companies are having layoffs, though much of it is rumors of things which never happen.

When Oracle data cloud had 20% layoffs in September (~250 people) that site was the best and worst place. You could see layoff reports in realtime and get info on how to do benefit claims/etc.

Very scary to sit in an office where nobody is working because we are waiting to see who gets let go next.

Kind of, though the main draw for me was all the stories of hubris and ineptitude, and it was largely just the money of the rich being burned up in the process.

What did the site show?

Companies that were fucked, as their name documents.

Got their start in the heyday of the .com crash as domino after domino fell and many companies were exposed for the unviable company’s they were.

The site took great joy in documenting (mocking) companies that were once tall and proud and quickly collapsed.

I always wondered if fuckedcompany.com had back-door access to the Internet Confessional database.

I think they just allowed anonymous posts. Different era where they were actually sort of reliable. I think they got sued a lot which forced them to shut down. In the end Fucked Company was fucked, too.

It allowed employees to leak when their company was laying off employees. There was a sister site called luckedcompany.com which allowed employees to leak when their company got investment (IIRC)

In form, it was a pretty simple discussion site. But it had a lot of insider info and an enormous amount of snark, and it really captured the spirit of the popping of Bubble 1.0 (and the post 9/11 downturn).

I remember one where a CEO made a big deal about the tech staff working through the holidays to finish vital new products. And then the CEO went on vacation to Hawai'i, leaving the nerds to grind it out. The memo and vacaction leaked to Fucked Company, where comments were spirited, and I think it eventually caused a big to-do.

I remember a suggestion to place all startups in a death pool which they were only allowed to leave if they managed not to buy any Aeron chairs (those were all the rage at that time) after one year in business. I loved that idea.

My company was featured in a story on Herman Miller, where we spent more on Chairs then we had in revenue for the entire 24 months of our existence.

The other side of this, is the company I worked for about that time, purchased the entire set of office furniture from a defunct company to setup our office when we moved. Turns out we didn't need it all, and sold a lot of it. At the end of the year, the majority of our profit was the furniture hussle.

At the end of the first dot-com boom, there was a place in San Jose called Consolidated Office Supply which bought the furniture of failed dot-coms. They had a warehouse which covered an entire city block, full of used furniture. Looked like the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I bought furniture there for something I was starting up. Very cheap, and they delivered.

I am currently sitting in an Aeron chair from one of the dot com bust furniture auctions... I had a friend who rescued servers just abandoned in their racks when one company just folded mid-day, the last remaining guy just walked out of the office. Crazy times.

We all got hooked on the forum when waiting for news of the inevitable for our company, which ironically didn't fail, and we actually ended up cashing out in an acquisition.

IIRC, some of Howard Stern's wack pack people were regular posters on the forum as well. It was a pretty awesome message board for that era, until ruined by nazis and other lowlifes.

Which wack-packers were posting? Beetlejuice and Elephant Boy?

It also had the memos or emails sent, which were morbidly interesting to read.

I really remember these the most.

There was a German equivalent called Dotcomtod (dotcomdeath), which had incredible amounts of inside knowledge. I had just started a small software company and for some reason loved reading their stories. One of the key people of Dotcomtod (Don Alphonso) is now a famous blogger with conservative/libertarian views.

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