Boo.com

Boo.com's May 2000 collapse after burning through $135 million in 18 months became the symbol of dot-com hubris. The fashion e-commerce site was technically ambitious—3D product views, virtual shopping assistants, multiple languages and currencies—but so resource-intensive that most users couldn't load the site. Boo.com built infrastructure for an internet that didn't exist yet, optimizing for future bandwidth while users dialed up on 56k modems. The mechanism failure was over-engineering for hypothetical users. Boo.com's founders assumed customers wanted immersive experiences; actual customers wanted pages that loaded. The site's Miss Boo avatar and 3D product rotations were technically impressive but made shopping slow and frustrating. Meanwhile, simpler competitors let users actually buy clothes. This is costly signaling backfiring—complexity that impressed investors but repelled customers. Boo.com also demonstrated burn rate as a failure mode. The company spent $185 million before generating significant revenue, funding offices in six countries and building infrastructure for global scale before proving the concept in one market. When the dot-com crash cut off funding, Boo.com had no path to profitability and no remaining runway. The assets sold for £250,000—less than 0.2% of what investors had put in.