Why does some big successful brands go bust?

Toast is back for a new series, taking a look at the decisions that often left investors burnt.

I'm Sean Farrington, a BBC business journalist. I'll be hearing about the hype.

They're going to do the deal that makes them the most money at that point of time.

And I'm picking what went wrong, talking to owners and employees to ask, what can we learn?

It was being undercut by similar rivals. It just couldn't survive.

Toast. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

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Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

It's not the size of our data set that matters.

It's what we do with it that counts.

I'm Tim Harford.

The World Cup is coming and all eyes are turning to Brazil,

which means that over the next few months you'll be hearing a lot about football, beaches and samba.

You probably won't hear a lot about maths.

Now, of course, at more or less, we're not just going to take that lying down,

sipping a Kaiprina while listening to the greatest hits of Gilberto-Gil.

So we turn to the only person we know who's an expert on both Brazil and mathematics, Alex Bellos,

and we challenged him to find a fantastical tale which combines the two,

...