Welcome to Invertopedia,

• Compound's Proposal 62 bug $100M+ in COMP leaked by a bugA routine vote changed how rewards were paid, and the new code paid some users for supplying almost nothing.
• BonziBuddy 300M banner ads, many posing as alertsA free talking gorilla paid for itself with ads that looked like Windows warnings, and with data from children.
• Wintermute $160M stolen from one vaultThe firm had emptied the hot wallet but left the same address as admin of its vault.
• THQ $239.9M net loss in fiscal 2012A US publisher with $830.8 million in sales lost more than it earned, then was auctioned off in pieces for $72 million.
• BitGrail $170M in Nano lostAn Italian exchange lost 17 million Nano tokens and kept users locked in while the price fell.
• Windows Me 13 mo from launch to replacementMicrosoft's last DOS-based Windows was a buggy Windows 98 SE and lasted just over a year.
• Midway Games 1999 last profitable yearThe Mortal Kombat publisher lost money for a decade and ended up sold out of bankruptcy for $33 million.
• BitMart $196M taken from two hot walletsOne stolen private key opened the exchange's Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain hot wallets.

All 130 entries…

• … that Knight Capital lost over $460 million in about 45 minutes after a software deploy went wrong? SEC
• … that Silicon Valley Bank saw $42 billion withdrawn in a single day? CNBC
• … that Barings Bank lost £827 million and was sold for £1? City AM
• … that Mt. Gox went under with about 850,000 bitcoin missing? AP
• … that Terra and Luna lost about $40 billion in market value when UST broke its peg? Decrypt
• … that WeWork went from a $47 billion valuation to Chapter 11? CNBC

Each fact links to the record it comes from. Names in blue have a full entry.

“I've run a coffee shop, worked brand activations from state fairs to SXSW and the Indy 500, worked hospitality for Cadillac's racing team, flew drones commercially, led experiential marketing at CyberKongz, and built companies of my own. Some of it worked. I learned more from the rest.”

2010–12	Owner, a coffee shop
2012–17	Field and tour manager, brand activations for Microsoft, Nissan, PepsiCo, GEICO and NASCAR
2015–20	Owner, an event talent management company
2016–20	Drone pilot; FAA remote pilot certificate and an aerial services company in 2017
2017–19	Cadillac racing team hospitality
2021–22	Experiential marketing lead, CyberKongz (Council of Kongz)
2023–26	Founder, Inverted Experiences, immersive events
2026–	Founder, a software company for the trades

Invertopedia is the place to put the rest: what was bet, what killed it, what it cost, and the one rule worth keeping. My own entries are being written now, real numbers included.

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Every entry has the same seven parts, so failures can be compared.

1. The bet. What they thought would happen, in their own words.
2. What happened. The timeline, from first dollar to last day.
3. The kill shot. The real reason it died. Not the polite version.
4. Red flags ignored. The warning signs that were there all along.
5. The cost. Money, time, relationships, ego. The real number.
6. The inversion. The one rule they follow now.
7. What survived. The skills, people, code or next idea that came out of it.

Each entry is also tagged by category, cause of death, money lost and stage. Over time the archive becomes data: the top causes of death for NFT projects, for events, for first startups.

One email when a new entry is published. Nothing else.

Website Get new entries

Got a failure worth reading? Tell us what you bet on, what killed it and what it cost. Anonymous entries are welcome. The one rule: name the real number and the real cause.

Submit a failure

Takes about ten minutes. Inverted reads every one, and you approve the entry before anything is published.