Riverstone sold routers to the young telecom carriers, and it went public just as those carriers began to fall. The company was spun out of Cabletron Systems, a networking hardware maker, as Cabletron broke itself into smaller units. Riverstone built routers for metropolitan networks, which linked offices and data centers across a city. In early 2001 carriers still planned huge network buildouts. Riverstone's IPO came that February, as the market for new telecom gear started to fall apart.

Office Ethernet, Citywide

Riverstone bet that carriers would use Ethernet, the cheap and familiar technology of office networks, to carry traffic across cities. Its routers combined high speed with controls that let carriers sell different levels of service. The technology was sound. The risk sat with its customers. Its main buyers were the young, competitive carriers of the late 1990s, and many had borrowed heavily to build their networks.

When the Carriers Fell

Riverstone priced its IPO at $12 a share in February 2001 and listed on Nasdaq as RSTN. The shares closed the first day at $13.06. Within months, many of its carrier customers cut spending or went bankrupt. The company later faced an accounting investigation and restated its results. In 2006 Riverstone filed for bankruptcy, and Lucent Technologies bought most of its assets.

Cover: The Rapids, Hudson River, Adirondacks, Winslow Homer. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a river running over stones.