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 Fort Wayne was, again, chiefly people and one compounding incumbent. The incumbent is Sweetwater itself, whose growth runs unbroken from the web's first decade into the 1.7-billion-dollar present printed above — the aftermath's largest Fort Wayne internet fact is that the first wave's winner never stopped. The people: David Corcoran, after the VeriSign exit, co-founded Censys in Ann Arbor in 2017 — an internet-scanning security company that grew into a substantial venture-backed firm — and was a founding investor in PearDeck, sold to GoGuardian in 2020, while keeping a principal's seat at a Fort Wayne venture firm; the tie is a founder's, and the company is Michigan's, and both are printed. The produced founders' stories closed their arcs in this period too: Vimeo's five-billion-dollar valuation, public spin-off and 1.38-billion-dollar sale; Angi's spin back out of IAC in 2025; Cloudera's 5.3-billion-dollar take-private — each told in its own entry above.

Which returns the section to its question, answered whole. Fort Wayne's dot-com winners were one great homegrown retailer that treated the web as its main street from 1995, one security startup that sold to VeriSign, one fashion house that timed its public offering to the web-retail crest — and a diaspora: a data scientist, a video founder, a networking founder, a discount-retail founder and the woman whose first name became a brand, all raised or born within the city limits and all cashed out somewhere else. The record holds no Fort Wayne unicorn herd, no local Sand Hill Road, and no folklore is admitted to make it seem otherwise. What it holds is documented, and it is enough: when the internet was being divided up, this mid-sized Indiana city was, measurably, in the room.

Sources:

1. The entries above and their sources — Sweetwater's Corporate 100 figures; the Vimeo, Angi and Cloudera closings; the TrustBearer exit and Censys founding.