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 the losses happened to other people. So, first, the record's plainest negative: searches of the trade press and the state's business record for a named Fort Wayne dot-com flameout — a local Pets.com, a local Webvan — return none. Fort Wayne's bust was not a collapse of local startups; there were few enough to collapse. What the era took from the city's story arrived through the produced names themselves.

It took CollegeHumor. The comedy site made its founders' reputations and carried Vimeo into the world, but as a property it faded inside IAC: in January 2020 IAC stopped funding CollegeHumor, the staff was cut to a remnant under new ownership, and the name was retired in 2023. It took, in a longer arc, the bank behind the valley: Gregory W. Becker, who grew up on a Fort Wayne farm, rose to chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank in 2011 and ran the financial house of the entire tech era — until March 2023, when the bank collapsed in the second-largest bank failure in American history, a story told in the Founders record and pointed to here because no account of Fort Wayne and the dot-com world is complete without it. And it took half of Vera Bradley, whose post-2013 slide is printed in its own entry above. Set against Sweetwater's compounding and the produced founders' exits, the denominator is real but proportionate: Fort Wayne's losses in the era were mostly other people's companies, owned at a distance — which is, in the end, the shape of the whole story.

Sources:

1. CollegeHumor, company record — IAC ceased funding in January 2020; the name retired in 2023.
2. the Founders & CEOs section of this history — Gregory W. Becker: raised on a Fort Wayne farm; chief executive of SVB Financial Group, 2011 to the bank's March 2023 collapse.
3. Searches: the negative search for a named Fort Wayne dot-com failure in the trade and state business press.