FuckedCompany.com

» see fuckedcompany.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

in 2000 i was sixteen, on a 56k modem in ankara, reading donanimhaber forums about hardware prices. fuckedcompany was an english-language dead pool for a stock-market bubble happening on a different continent. i did not learn the site existed until much later, in the way you learn about a thing by reading retrospectives ten years after it stopped mattering. this grave is mostly third-party reconstruction.

philip j kaplan launched fuckedcompany.com in may '00 as a parody of fastcompany magazine. the joke ran past the joke pretty fast because the nasdaq peaked in march that year and the dot-com layoffs were about to become a daily news beat. kaplan ran the site as pud and built a wagering system where users picked which company would fail next. anonymous tipsters started sending in screenshots of internal memos. some of those tips broke real stories weeks before the trades caught up. for a stretch in 2000-2001 the site was the fastest channel for finding out which dot-com had just missed payroll.

the business model was a ten-dollar subscription tier called pinkslips that gave you access to the unredacted rumor feed. there was also banner advertising on the free site, and an aggressive page-view economy that depended on people refreshing the front page through their lunch break. peak traffic was reportedly around four million unique visitors a month. yahoo and rolling stone both named it site of the year for 2000, and time magazine put it on its list of best sites. kaplan turned the material into a book in '02 called f'd companies, published by simon spotlight entertainment.

~ the record ~

~ the long tail ~

when the bust played out and the layoffs slowed down, fuckedcompany lost its reason to exist. the dot-com survivors of 2003 were no longer interesting to a dead pool, and the web 2.0 generation of new companies were mostly not failing yet. the tips dried up. kaplan moved on to other projects, including the ad network adbrite, which itself eventually failed in 2013.

new posts on fuckedcompany stopped sometime in august '07. the home page eventually became a single line. fuckedcompany is fucked. r.i.p. 2000-2007. the archive was not preserved in a clean public form. wayback machine has fragments.

~ the legacy ~

the dead-pool format kaplan invented showed up later in cleaner versions. our incredible journey collected acquisition obituaries. killedbygoogle catalogs google's shutdowns with timestamps and category tags. fuckedcompany was the abrasive, libelous, anonymously sourced version of the same instinct, and it could only have existed in the specific window when there were enough dot-coms dying weekly to fill a feed and not yet enough libel lawyers to make the operator stop.

the closest spiritual descendant in 2026 is probably the layoffs.fyi spreadsheet, which is the same data delivered with no jokes and no rumor tier.

credit to Kabe, who remembered logging in every day from the bus.

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