One man is glad he cut his links with the company. As Australian Federal Police swooped on the offices of Australian Careers Network on Tuesday morning, as part of a fraud investigation, there was one person who had 21.5 million reasons to be thankful for his short-term association with the company.
ACN was co-founded by Atkinson Prakash Charan, who fortuitously sold the majority of his holding in the $180 million vocational education provider into ACN's   December 2014 IPO. 
After selling 21.5 million shares into the ACN IPO at $1.70 a pop, the float earned Charan $36.6 million. However, he did leave 3,444,445 shares on the table, worth $11.8 million at the time of the collapse. No aspersions have been cast on the long-forgotten ACN co-founder, whose exit was clearly well timed, given the company's woes.
On the other hand, ACN's best-known front man, former Victorian police officer and chief executive Ivan Brown, has not been so lucky.
To say ACN has been beset with troubles is an understatement. Within nine months of listing, reports emerged that brokers acting for ACN's art therapy college Phoenix Institute had been targeting vulnerable people, including the intellectually disabled, to sign up for complicated online courses in exchange for an iPad.
The shocking reports led the Victorian higher education regulator and the federal skills regulator to cancel registration for some of ACN's colleges. ACN's shares were suspended in   October 2015, 10 months after it floated, and would never trade again.
Soon the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission filed action alleging unconscionable conduct by ACN, while the federal government deferred $50 million in funding because of concerns about ACN.
After losing a legal dispute with the federal Department of Education over the government's deferral of the $50 million in funding, Brown put the company into administration.
At the time of the collapse, Brown held almost $80 million worth of ACN's shares. With the AFP pouncing and the ACCC waiting in the wings, Brown's money is probably gone.
He declined to comment this week after the AFP raid.
The Australian Financial Review has not been able to make contact with Charan, although a man with a remarkably similar name who lists the same home address as Charan - Prakash Charan Atkinson - set up new company Global Education Network in   January. It is unclear if the company is operational.
Charan is not alone in managing to get out of a sinking ship at the right time. As they say, timing is everything, and some company founders have better timing than others.
Slater & Gordon former managing partner Peter Gordon is in that camp.
The legal eagle sold his last 2.7 million tranche of shares in the law firm in 2014, when the company's shares were trading between $4.90 and $5.16. That last sale earned the former company director and managing partner more than $13 million.
Combined with his $4.66 million haul from the company's 2007 float and the sale of the bulk of his 10 million shareholding between the second half of 2008 and the first half of 2011, he has raked in about $30 million from selling his Slater & Gordon holding.
After resigning as a director of Slater & Gordon in 2009, Gordon now runs his own firm, Gordon Legal, and operates successful litigation funder CLF.
Others have not been so lucky. Slater & Gordon shares have dwindled from a height of $7.85 on   April 2, 2015, to an anaemic 21.5Â¢ this week. Slater & Gordon's "accounting issues" led to the company booking a swingeing $814.2 million write-down on its acquisition of British law firm Quindell - a firm it acquired in2015 for over $1 billion.
Over the same period, Slater & Gordon chief Andrew Grech has had a much worse run.
Grech, who also made $4.66 million selling his shares into the group's IPO, has watched the value of his 6.75 million shares evaporate from more than $50 million at the time of 2015's capital raising to a meagre $1.45 million now.
Those shares could soon be even more vulnerable, with Slater & Gordon facing a hard   April 30 deadline to appease its bankers before they consider their "options". Any large recapitalisation or restructure of the business could result in Grech's holding being eroded further.
However, the crown for Australia's greatest escape in the past 10 years must surely go to RAMS Home Loans founder John Kinghorn.
Kinghorn netted $650 million from the float of the home loan lender, which went up in flames spectacularly 10 weeks after listing on the ASX.
The collapse was put down to the tightening of short-term credit markets in the heyday of the GFC.
It's unfair to say Kinghorn did not lose out in the crash - he also left $177 million on the table. That sort of loss has got to hurt.
Kinghorn is loath to be drawn on anything these days, especially, AFR Weekend understands, the RAMS float. He did not reply to an attempt to get in contact with him through his media representative.