sneakers-up

adj.

Of or relating to the demise of a dot-com company.

Example Citation:

The dot.com part of the picture has become clear to me only recently. While I used to find the child emperors repugnant, I now find them irrelevant. I admit, I used to feel righteous when a dot.com went sneakers-up, but now I feel empathy for the hardworking folks who have lost their jobs.

—James Tennermann, "Put an end to dot.com envy," InTech, August 1, 2001

Earliest Citation:

There is little hope for the vast majority of the dot-com companies that were funded over the last four to five years.

More than 200 dot-coms have already gone sneakers-up. My guess is that it will be a small multiple of that this year.

—Roger McNamee, quoted in "Technology Wreckage: Yes, More To Come," The New York Times, February 11, 2001

Notes:

Sneakers-up is a play on the idiom belly-up, "of or relating to a failed or bankrupt company." Replacing "belly" with "sneakers" is a reference to the relative youth of the entreprenerds who launched many of the newly-dead dot-coms.

This phrase also affords me the opportunity to unload all the words and phrases related to the ongoing dot-com slaughter that I've gathered over the past few months:

dot bomb

dot-carnage

dot-com Darwinism

dot-coma

dot-commode

dot-compost

dotcom-uppance (or dotcomuppance)

dot-dead

dot-gone

dot-goner

Not com

Thanks to subscribers Julie Felner and Mark Worden for passing along a couple of these words.

Related Words:

dot bomb

dot com

dot-com deathwatch

dot-com rage

MTBU

sneakerization

Category:

E-commerce