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The Dot-Com Winners · Fort Wayne on the Web
Asked plainly — did anybody from Fort Wayne win the dot-com era? — the record answers yes, but in a particular shape. The city produced people more readily than companies. Its biggest winner of the era never took a venture dollar, never rang a bell, and never left: a music retailer on the city's northwest side that put its catalogue on the web in 1995 and quietly became the largest online music retailer in the country. Around that one homegrown giant, the record holds a ring of produced winners — a Fort Wayne-born investor who turned a failing discounter into Overstock.com, a Fort Wayne-raised mathematician who built Facebook's data team and co-founded Cloudera, a Fort Wayne-raised teenager who co-founded Vimeo, a Fort Wayne-born engineer whose networking company Intel bought for some 748 million dollars at the very top of the bubble, and a Fort Wayne-born co-founder whose name became a national brand. It also holds one clean homegrown exit most residents never heard of, a documented bulletin-board scene from before the web, and an honest denominator: the bust, the collapses, and the branches of the search that came back empty.
Jeff Hammerbacher: Facebook's data team, then Cloudera
RAISED HERE · FACEBOOK 2006 · CLOUDERA 2008–2021
The strongest produced win in this record: Jeff Hammerbacher grew up in Fort Wayne, the son of a father who worked at the General Motors plant and a mother who was a nurse. He studied mathematics at Harvard — where he knew Mark…
Patrick Byrne: Overstock, on a birth certificate
BORN HERE, RAISED ELSEWHERE · OVERSTOCK.COM 1999–2019
The loosest tie in this section, printed at its true size: Patrick M. Byrne was born in Fort Wayne on November 29, 1962 — and raised in New England. Fort Wayne's claim on him is the birth certificate and nothing more, and this…
Angie Hicks: the name on Angie's List
BORN AND RAISED HERE · FOUNDED 1995 · IPO 2011 · SOLD TO IAC 2017
An Indianapolis company whose name and co-founder are Fort Wayne's: Angie Hicks was born in Fort Wayne on May 2, 1974, and raised here. In 1995, in Columbus, Ohio, she and William S. Oesterle founded a subscription service that…
Zach Klein: CollegeHumor's side project that became Vimeo
RAISED HERE FROM AGE ELEVEN · VIMEO 2004 · SOLD 2025
Raised here, and claimed by the hometown paper as its own: Zach Klein was born in Rochester, New York, on September 26, 1982, and moved to Fort Wayne at eleven, when his father started a business here. He was in the first…
Dirk Gates: Xircom, sold to Intel at the top of the bubble
BORN HERE · XIRCOM 1988–2001 · XIRRUS 2004–2017
The best-timed exit in this record: Dirk Gates was born in Fort Wayne on June 25, 1961, and educated in California. In November 1988, in Thousand Oaks, California, he and Kirk Mathews co-founded Xircom, which made the…
Sweetwater: the homegrown giant that never left
FOUNDED HERE 1979 · ON THE WEB 1995 · A BILLION DOLLARS 2020
The largest dot-com win in this record was built on the city's own ground: Sweetwater began in 1979 as Chuck Surack's mobile recording studio in a Volkswagen bus — its full company history sits in the Business record — and grew…
Vera Bradley: a 1982 company whose public win landed in the web era
FOUNDED HERE 1982 · IPO 2010 · THE LONG SLIDE AFTER 2013
Not a dot-com startup — printed here because its win belongs to the era: Vera Bradley was founded in Fort Wayne in 1982 by Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and Patricia R. Miller, selling quilted cotton handbags from a city that had no…
TrustBearer: the Fort Wayne security startup VeriSign bought
FOUNDED HERE · SOLD TO VERISIGN 2010 · PRICE UNDISCLOSED
The cleanest homegrown exit almost nobody in Fort Wayne heard about: David Corcoran graduated from Purdue in 2000, at the height of the internet boom, worked in California, Texas and Washington, and came home in 2004 to build a…
The other side of the ledger: the bust, and what it took
2000–2023 · THE DENOMINATOR
A winners list without its denominator is advertising: the dot-com era ended in the crash of 2000–2002, which erased the great mass of the period's celebrated companies, and no honest Fort Wayne account can print the wins as if…
Before the web: the bulletin boards, and the unanswered ISP question
1986–1994 · THE FIRST HOUR
Fort Wayne was online before the web existed — by telephone, at 1,200 baud: the surviving registries of the 219 area code's bulletin-board systems document a local scene that ran for a decade before the first browser. The record…
The second wave, at its true size
2010–2025 · THE AFTERMATH
The app-and-cloud era repeated the first era's pattern, smaller: no second homegrown giant of Sweetwater's scale appears in the record for the years after 2010, and the section says so plainly. What the second wave produced from…