overview
primers
customisation
case studies
memoirs
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memoirs and biographies
As we suggested in the economy guide, there have been few
book-length portraits or memoirs of major e-business
leaders.
Why? The reason's unclear. Some figures, such as Amazon's
founder Steve Bezos, have indicated that they're too busy
making money (or trying to stop losing it) to stop long
enough to write a memoir. Others have attracted attention
but haven't lasted the course: yesterday's dot com
shooting star is today's crash-&-burn cinder.
In practice, most coverage has appeared in newspapers and
magazines. Much of it has been ill-informed and ephemeral,
switching from adulation to vivisection over the space of
twelve months.
We've highlighted some of the recent books and particular
online portraits or interviews. They include
accounts by insiders - those building digital businesses -
and by academics or journalists invited in to watch the fun. There
are other pointers in our profile
of the web builders.
Tom Ashbrook's The Leap: A
Memoir of Love & Madness in the Internet Gold Rush (Boston,
Houghton Mifflin 00) is a memoir in the style of Michael Wolff's Burnrate
- how I survived the digital gold rush.
Elizabeth Carlassare's Dot Com Divas: E-Business
Insights from the Visionary Women Founders of 20 Net
Ventures (New York, McGraw-Hill 01) is inspirational
but otherwise thin.
James Clark's Netscape Time: The
Making Of The Billion-Dollar Start-Up that Took On Microsoft (New
York, St Martins 99) is an account by the SGI, Healtheon and Netscape founder.
Michael Lewis The New New Thing (London,
Hodder & Stoughton 98) is
thinner than Lewis's journalism - eg Pacific Rift
- and classic Liars
Poker, the insiders view of pizza throwing and other hanky panky
within US merchant banking giants. Useful for a picture of
Jim Clark; poor on dot com business and the digital
economy
Books on Microsoft, for and against, are a minor
publishing genre. Bill Gates' The Road Ahead (New
York, Viking 95) is disappointingly
thin, arguably of most significance as a demonstration that
he just hasn't understood the Web. The road ahead was, it appears,
to be constructed, operated and substantially owned by Redmond.
His Business @ the Speed of
Thought (New York, Viking 99) is
another disappointment in an even more unreadable tome punctuated by Jetsons-style
techno fantasies (all very well if you can afford US$50 million on a
house but a tad unconvincing back here on planet earth). We've provided
an annotated list of books
about Microsoft in our profile on the Web.
Udayan Gupta's Done Deals: Venture
Capitalists Tell Their Stories (Boston, Harvard Business School
Press 00) is a collection of accounts by VCs from 1946 onwards. There
are more detailed pointers to studies of financing in our e-capital
guide.
The Monk & the
Riddle (Boston, Harvard Business School Press 00) is a dot com Zen
& the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by entrepreneur Randy Komisar.
Jason & Matthew Olins put their name to The CD Now
Story (Lakewood, Top Floor 98), a gee
whizz memoir by brothers who built etailer CD Now, currently
haemorrhaging $ for the AOL Time Warner empire. It is of
historical
interest only.
Anthony & Michael Perkins' The
Internet Bubble (New York, HarperCollins 99) is a prescient
analysis of why the bubble was going to burst.
Ruthann Quindlen Confessions of a
Venture Capitalist: Inside the High Stakes World of Startup Financing
(New York, Warner 00) a VC's account, relentlessly on the bright
side. Robert Robinson & Mark Osnabrugge's Angel Investing
(San Francisco, Jossey-Bass 00) is better value.
Randall Stross' EBoys: The
First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists At Work (New York, Times
00) better than the title suggests, although as with his books on
IBM and Microsoft Stross is a tad overawed by the exalted company and
inclined to believe what he's told.
Michael Wolff's Burn Rate (London,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 99) is a picaresque
account by author (no relation to above) of experience dealing with
venture capitalists, heirs of Robert Maxwell and others while trying to
make it big in e-publishing. Like Lewis' The New New Thing
it's likely to last because of its entertainment value.
Digital Rush: Nine Internet Start-ups in the Race for
Dot-com Riches (New York, Amacom 01) is a set of
profiles by Jonathan Aspatore.
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