Craig Winn is an American businessman noted for founding Value America, a tech company that failed in one of the more spectacular crashes of the Dot-com bubble in 2000.
In 1977 Winn joined his father's company, Winn Co., after graduating from the University of Southern California with business degrees in marketing and finance. There he worked as a manufacturer's representative. [1]
In 1986, he founded and built a lighting company called Dynasty which he brought public in 1990, making him his first fortune. [2] The company went bankrupt in 1993. [1]
In 1996, he became a Dot.com entrepreneur when he founded Value America, [3] [4] an early sort of electronic mall that was briefly second only to Amazon.com. The company raised investments from Paul Allen and Frederick W. Smith, among others. By December 1999, Winn had resigned from the board after disagreeing with all but one of the rest of the board regarding restructuring. Value America filed for bankruptcy in August 2000, [5] less than a year after its IPO. [6] It was one of the first large dotcoms to fail. [7] It was one of the "most notorious" crashes of the Dot-com bubble. [8]
Winn's book In the Company of Good and Evil: A True Story of Seduction and Betrayal (original title, In the Company of Good and Evil: From Zero to 3 Billion and Back Again), with co-author Ken Power, is about his experience with Value America. [9] The book proposed remedies for the kind of chicanery that had enabled Winn and Power to earn fortunes and help cause a stock market crash. [10]
After the September 11 attacks, Winn and his colleague at Value America Ken Power to wrote a self-published book called Tea With Terrorists. Following the airing of a segment about Tea with Terrorists on The 700 Club, the Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya (CIPK) likened the book to The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, asserted the Tea with Terrorists was blasphemy, and demanded that it be banned. [11]
The dot-com bubble was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Internet, resulting in a dispensation of available venture capital and the rapid growth of valuations in new dot-com startups. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, investments in the NASDAQ composite stock market index rose by 800%, only to fall to 78% from its peak by October 2002, giving up all its gains during the bubble.
The Forbes 500 was an annual listing of the top 500 American companies produced by Forbes magazine. The list was calculated by combining five factors: sales, profits, assets, market value, and employees. The list was last issued in March 2003 ; it is no longer calculated each year and has been replaced by the Forbes Global 2000, which includes non-U.S. companies but is calculated on a similar basis as the old Forbes 500.
Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc., styled as Winn✓Dixie, is an American supermarket chain headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida. It operates more than 546 stores in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. The company has had its present name since 1955 and can trace its roots back to 1925.
The 2000s United States housing bubble or house price boom or 2000shousing cycle was a sharp run up and subsequent collapse of house asset prices affecting over half of the U.S. states. In many regions a real estate bubble, it was the impetus for the subprime mortgage crisis. Housing prices peaked in early 2006, started to decline in 2006 and 2007, and reached new lows in 2011. On December 30, 2008, the Case–Shiller home price index reported the largest price drop in its history. The credit crisis resulting from the bursting of the housing bubble is an important cause of the Great Recession in the United States.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a 2005 American documentary film based on the best-selling 2003 book of the same name by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who are credited as writers of the film alongside the director, Alex Gibney. It examines the 2001 collapse of the Enron Corporation, which resulted in criminal trials for several of the company's top executives during the ensuing Enron scandal, and contains a section about the involvement of Enron traders in the 2000-01 California electricity crisis. Archival footage is used alongside new interviews with McLean and Elkind, several former Enron executives and employees, stock analysts, reporters, and former Governor of California Gray Davis.
The early 2000s recession was a major decline in economic activity which mainly occurred in developed countries. The recession affected the European Union during 2000 and 2001 and the United States from March to November 2001. The UK, Canada and Australia avoided the recession, while Russia, a nation that did not experience prosperity during the 1990s, began to recover from it. Japan's 1990s recession continued. A combination of the Dot Com Bubble collapse and the September 11th attacks lengthed and worsened the recession.
A financial crisis is any of a broad variety of situations in which some financial assets suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many financial crises were associated with banking panics, and many recessions coincided with these panics. Other situations that are often called financial crises include stock market crashes and the bursting of other financial bubbles, currency crises, and sovereign defaults. Financial crises directly result in a loss of paper wealth but do not necessarily result in significant changes in the real economy.
Warren Van Dyke "Pete" Musser was the chairman of the Musser Group. He was the founder of Safeguard Scientifics, a venture capital firm that invested in technology companies. At the peak of the dot-com bubble, Musser was a billionaire on paper; however, when the bubble burst, he lost almost his entire fortune.
AboveNet was a provider of high bandwidth telecommunication circuits primarily for large corporate enterprises and communications carriers in 17 markets in the United States and 4 markets in Europe. Its private optical network delivered key network and IP services and was used in financial and legal services, media, health care, retail, and government.
John David Kuo was an American author and an evangelical Christian. Kuo served as Special Assistant to President George W. Bush and Deputy Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
The Nasdaq Composite is a stock market index that includes almost all stocks listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Along with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500, it is one of the three most-followed stock market indices in the United States. The composition of the NASDAQ Composite is heavily weighted towards companies in the information technology sector. The Nasdaq-100, which includes 100 of the largest non-financial companies in the Nasdaq Composite, accounts for about 80% of the index weighting of the Nasdaq Composite.
The Panic of 1796–1797 was a series of downturns in credit markets in both Great Britain and the newly established United States in 1796 that led to broader commercial downturns. In the United States, problems first emerged when a land speculation bubble burst in 1796. The crisis deepened when the Bank of England suspended specie payments on February 25, 1797 under the Bank Restriction Act of 1797. The Bank's directors feared insolvency when English account holders, who were nervous about a possible French invasion, began withdrawing their deposits in sterling rather than bank notes. In combination with the unfolding collapse of the U.S. real estate market's speculative bubble, the Bank of England's action had deflationary repercussions in the financial and commercial markets of the coastal United States and the Caribbean at the start of the 19th century.
The Telecoms crash, also known as the Telecommunications Bubble was a stock market crash that occurred in 2001, after the bursting of the dot-com bubble.
Value America or VA was a dot-com company founded in Nevada in 1996 by Craig Winn and Rex Scatena, and relocated to Charlottesville, Virginia in February 1998. Its business model involved connecting customers on the Web directly to manufacturers, with the intent of providing better pricing and faster shipping. Customers could order a wide range of products from VA's website, then VA would transmit the orders directly to the manufacturers, and the manufacturers would then package the products and ship them directly to the customer. Winn referred to this concept as "convergence commerce". Value America was backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures and FedEx co-founder Frederick W. Smith.
SURETRADE was a stockbroker firm with an electronic trading platform created in 1997. It was headquartered in Lincoln, Rhode Island. It was acquired by FleetBoston Financial's Quick & Reilly in 2001, at which time the firm had over 350,000 customers and nearly $2 billion in assets.
A period of financial distress occurs when the price of a company or an asset or an index of a set of assets in a market is declining with the danger of a sudden crash of value occurring, either because the company is experiencing increasing problems of cash flow or a deteriorating credit balance or because the price had become too high as a result of a speculative bubble that has now peaked.
Gadzoox Networks, Inc. produced hardware and software for the entry-level storage area network market. In 2000, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, the company was valued at $2 billion; however, after filing bankruptcy in 2002, its assets were acquired by Broadcom in 2003 for $5.8 million.
USinternetworking, Inc. (USi) was an application service provider. It offered outsourced business applications delivered over the Internet or a private network connection for an installation charge and a flat monthly fee. In October 2006, it was acquired by AT&T.
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