Esther Bergdahl felt invigorated. How could she not? It was 2014, and she had just joined the millennial-centric news site PolicyMic, where something exciting always seemed to be happening. That January, Forbes included the companys co-founders on its annual 30 Under 30 list. A few months later, the site announced it had secured $10 million in a funding round . That June, PolicyMic rebranded simply as Mic after buying the domain for $500,000, according to company sources. The company explained the switch at the time by saying the new name reflected its expanded focus and bold vision.

Sure, the money wasnt great Bergdahl estimated that her pay worked out to roughly $12 per hour. But by the time she joined, Mic had already established itself as an improbable upstart in the crowded digital media marketplace by hiring a cadre of bright, passionate young journalists and zeroing in on the types of stories millennials wanted to share: compact pieces with sharp headlines focused on undercovered issues .

I was really proud to be a part of the mission and super excited about the work that we were doing and the people that we were able to reach and the voices we were able to uplift, she said.

There were perks more reminiscent of a Silicon Valley startup than a traditional journalism shop. Bergdahl and others got Bose speakers in 2014. The next year, the company passed out custom-made Nikes with Mic and the employees initials on them. One of the co-founders hosted parties at the Manhattan apartment he shared with roommates, complete with a pool table and sometimes a DJ and self-serve open bar, Bergdahl said. In an effort to promote transparency, the co-founders allowed employees to anonymously ask questions at meetings.

Backed by millions of dollars in venture capital, Mic developed into one of the more diverse newsrooms in media, shed light on important stories and served as a launching pad for several now-thriving journalists. The Observer , Forbes and Business Insider published glowing profiles of the new company and its leaders.

When it was good, it felt, like, too good to be true, said one former employee. We all felt like we were making a difference. We were all having so much fun. Everybody was so young. We were all laughing. People would stay late just to hang out.

Due in part to its earnestness, Mic also became the target of ridicule. Some stories about the company painted it as the archetypal digital media shop a playground packed with entitled 20-somethings. A 2016 New York Times piece called What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace? described a collection of adult-sized children who rode around the office on hoverboards and inappropriately demanded apologies from their superiors. The story was catnip for millennial-bashers. Chris Altchek, Mics then-28-year-old co-founder and CEO, was still working out how to manage many of the traits associated with his fellow millennials: a sense of entitlement, a tendency to overshare on social media, and frankness verging on insubordination, the Times explained. The pieces central anecdote involved a Mic employee who lied about a funeral to get a week off work, only to go home and build a treehouse.

But ultimately, Mics problems were more economic than generational. The colorful anecdotes, custom Nikes and gorgeous office space on the 82nd floor of the One World Trade Center distracted from one critical fact: Mic never developed into a sustainable business.

The Times had missed the forest for the treehouse. Mic was the archetypal millennial-packed digital media workplace not because it coddled its young employees, but because it left so many of them yearning for stability. Like its cousins BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Vice, Mic at times relied on its young and diverse staff to churn out content, respond nimbly to every change in the Facebook algorithm and sometimes even mine their personal pain for clicks in the pursuit of blistering traffic growth.

Many of the more than three dozen former employees who spoke to HuffPost said they entered the company hungry and hopeful, only to feel twisted around by a publicly woke company that privately left them feeling exhausted, distrustful of leadership and desperate for financial security.

Last November, the company was forced to face the hard truth: Its Facebook-fueled bet on a millennial news site had failed. At an all-hands meeting, Altchek told his newsroom that Facebook had canceled a video deal that had served as the companys final lifeline. Facebooks decision, he said, left Mics founders with no other option but to lay off the editorial staff and sell the company to Bustle Digital Group for a fraction of what it had once been valued at.

Although its end was particularly abrupt, the problems Mic faced were far from unique. The capital that flooded the media industry in the first half of the decade caused unexpected problems at many companies when the market cooled. Facebook and Googles grip on the digital ad market stifled the entire industrys prospects. Too many outlets convinced themselves for too long in the power of Facebook-dependent growth.

Mic may ultimately be held up as a case study on this turbulent era in digital media, said Ellie Krupnick, who worked as a lifestyle editorial director at the site. (Krupnick worked at HuffPost from 2011 to 2014 before leaving to join Mic.) Hindsight is 20/20, but somehow all of the big forces weve seen impact digital newsrooms over the past five or so years, Mic seems to have found themselves swept up in just about all of them.

If Mics downfall is a case study, the lesson is clear, Bergdahl argued.

Journalistic institutions need to be institutions. They need to be able to grow in a healthy and steady way, Bergdahl said. When I think about things that grow that wildly and that successfully, I dont think of a media company I think of cancer.

When Altchek and Jake Horowitz launched a beta version of Mic in 2010, they were 23-year-olds with little work experience, let alone journalism know-how.

What they did have was the kind of story investors could believe in. Altchek and Horowitz met at the elite private school Horace Mann in the Bronx. After high school, the right-leaning Altchek and more liberal Horowitz headed off to Harvard and Stanford, respectively, but continued to enjoy what they later called extremely healthy debates born out of their politically divergent views. These intellectual face-offs served as the inspiration for Mic, which they hoped would help our generation talk about the issues that really matter , Horowitz once told the Observer. In early 2011, they each raised $75,000 with the help of friends and family and decided to go all in. Altchek quit his gig at Goldman Sachs and contributed his bonus to the cause.

Through a spokesperson, Altchek and Horowitz declined an interview request, as well as a request to answer a detailed list of questions sent to them for this story. A person familiar with Mic fielded some fact-checking questions. During the reporting process, which took several months, Bustle Digital Group, through its lawyers, threatened to sue HuffPosts parent company if we published this story.

Altchek and Horowitzs decision to launch Mic could hardly have been better timed. After all, the digital media industry was sizzling. Early in 2011, AOL had purchased HuffPost for $315 million, a number that raised some eyebrows at the time but looked small by 2013, when Vice was valued at more than $1 billion . The financial optimism was propped up by a booming digital ad market and a growing appetite for mobile content that helped bring together two odd bedfellows: journalists and venture capitalists. At the end of 2014, Wired noted that the media sector [was] overflowing with capitalas of September 2014 it was the second-largest VC-funded area of the year, after software.

Horowitz, the former editor of his high school paper, became Mics editor-in-chief. Altchek became CEO.

Like HuffPost and BuzzFeed before it, Mics earliest incarnation relied on unpaid contributing bloggers for much of its content . But the founders soon proved to have a knack for finding and empowering talented journalists who instinctively understood not only the issues young people cared about but also how to present those issues in easily digestible formats.

In a way, it was an incubator for young talent, said Elizabeth Plank, an early employee at the site who rose from intern to senior correspondent and had a video series called Flip The Script. They took in a lot of people like me who probably A, would have never been hired in media, or B, would have been interns somewhere and gotten some old white guy coffee.

Some Mic employees came to view Altchek and Horowitz as a pair of 20-somethings from privileged backgrounds who didnt deserve to run a newsroom. Publicly, though, the co-founders played up their inexperience as an advantage: Where others may have been weighed down by old habits, Mics lack of established processes allowed the staff to adapt quickly and often.

We didnt really know what we were doing, Horowitz said in 2014. So we took a startup, entrepreneurial approach, which was to try a bunch of different things and see what worked and what resonated.

It didnt take long before it became clear that what resonated at Mic was left-leaning social justice clickbait, a former senior editor said. In 2013, Mic launched an Identities vertical , which was dedicated to examining the intersections of sexuality, gender, class and race in politics and culture for the millennial generation. Just writing about a topic of interest to readers wasnt enough, however. Mic posts had to be packaged in tight, engaging manners meant to maximize shares on Facebook. A listing for the Identities section in 2013 said Mic was looking for unpaid writers who would be open to incorporating multimedia (video, GIFs, photos, memes, etc.) in posts.

In meetings, Horowitz was known to ask whos sharing this?; new employees received a 45-minute training focused on Shareability . When a headline construction shared well on Facebook, Mic relentlessly published stories that fit the blueprint. In 2015, the phrase One Tweet (i.e., In One Tweet, This Man Took Down a Group of Incredibly Sexist Internet Trolls) appeared in the headline of stories about sexist internet trolls , Ricky Gervais , the racist hypocrisy of American police violence , Game of Thrones , J.K. Rowling (more than once ), Elizabeth Warren and the racist double standard of the medias shooting coverage . The next year, the phrase brutal truth (i.e., The Brutal Truth Every White Feminist Needs to Hear) made its way into headlines about viral Instagram posts , masculinity , white gay men , white allies and prom .

In September 2014, Bergdahl was named copy chief and converted from freelance to full-time. By then, the company had more than 30 full-time employees and had moved to new offices on Hudson Street in Manhattan. The site had also firmly established itself as a millennial-first news destination. A chart shared with Recode that year showed 60% of its visitors that July were between the ages of 18 and 34 more than Vice, BuzzFeed or Upworthy.

The co-founders portrayed their decision to focus on people their age as a mission-driven choice. We want to be the voice of our generation, Horowitz told Forbes in 2014. But there was also a clear business incentive. Stephen Colvin, then the executive-in-residence at Lerer Ventures, told the Observer in 2014 that Mic provided the perfect platform for marketers to target millennials, the most difficult to reach consumer group in the world.

Altchek proved to be a talented fundraiser. Chris is incredibly smart and an incredibly great salesman, said a longtime member of the brand team. The company raised $60 million over its eight years as an independent company, and The Wall Street Journal once quoted someone saying it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars . In 2014, Twitter reportedly offered to buy the company for approximately $90 million, but Altchek and Horowitz declined. By then, their aspirations had grown larger.

The next $10 billion media company will be the one that wins over millennials, Altchek said soon afterward . We understand them intuitively because we are them.

One former executive at the company explained that the $60 million the company took in necessitated lofty goals and a substantial return. Ideally, venture capitalists search for a 10x return on their investments. In the media business, however, its hard to get there in the time horizon that a venture capital business wants, the former executive said.

But like many startups, Mics aspirations stood in contrast to its early finances. In 2014, the year Twitter offered to buy the company, Mic generated $1 million. The next year, it pulled in $3 million. A former employee familiar with the companys sales deals described the business model as unsustainable. We just never were making enough money, the former employee said.