dot com heroes?

This page looks at some of the 'dot-com heroes' such as Amazon.com.

Robert Reid's Architects of the Web - 1,000 Days That Built The Future of Business (New York, Wiley 97) offers intelligent - if on occasion indulgent - profiles of Netscape's Marc Andreessen, Java developer Kim Polese, VRML pioneer Mark Pesce, Yahoo! billionaire Jerry Yang and Halsey Minor of CNET among others. 

Bob Davis, founder of Lycos, appears in Speed Is Life: Street Smart Lessons from the Front Lines of Business (New York, Doubleday 01) by fallen star Bob Davis.

Heroes.com (London, Hodder & Stoughton 00) by Louise Proddow is an excursion into designer coffee table territory: glossy paper, sparse and breathless print, lots of colour photos of beautiful young e-ntrepreneurs in artful poses. Fast forward to something more substantial. 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.

Road Warriors - Dreams & Nightmares Along the Information Highway (New York, Dutton 95) by Daniel Bursten & David Kline provides a picture of business and technological developments - the US debate about high definition television, the failure of 3DO, the Exon Bill to free the Web from digital nastiness - and interviews with cable czar John Malone, regulator Reed Hundt and telco executive Ray Smith. The profiles of individual companies and projects are looking very dated - five years is a long time online - but the overall description is holding up well.

     the financiers 

There's a more in-depth study of financing in our e-Capital guide.

The much-hyped The New New Thing by Michael Lewis (London, Hodder & Stoughton 99) offers an entertaining perspective on financing silicon valley.

Venture capitalist Ann Winblad, of Hummer Winblad, was memorialized in issue 4.09 of Wired. 

Her rival, the ubiquitous John Doerr, another of the 'Sand Hill Road' mafiosi, featured two years later.  

Randall Stross' EBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists At Work (New York, 00) is 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. Stross supersedes James Wilson's The New Venturers: Inside the High-Stakes World of Venture Capital (Reading, Addison-Wesley 85).  

Ruthann Quindlen's Confessions of a Venture Capitalist: Inside the High Stakes World of Startup Financing (New York, Warner 00) relentlessly looks on the bright side. We recommend that you read it in conjunction with some of the studies highlighted in our e-Capital guide, for example The Venture Capital Cycle (Cambridge, MIT Press 00) by Paul Gompers & Josh Lerner.   

A local view is provided by Bill Ferris' Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained (St Leonards, Allen & Unwin 00), an anecdotal account by one of Australia's leading vc's.

     amazon

We're due for an adulatory biography of Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos. There was an intelligent profile in the March 1999 Wired and one in the May 2001 First Monday.  Lenny Riggio and Barnes & Noble featured two months later.

Amazon is described - superficially and without sparkle - in Rebecca Saunders' Business the Amazon.Com Way: Secrets of the World's Most Astonishing Web Business (Oxford, Capstone 99).  For us, spray-paining 'dot com' and 'etail' onto every page is not a substitute for analysis or hard information.  We recommend instead Robert Spector's more insightful Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (New York, Harper 00).

     other czars

Charles Schwab, the monster online broker, Bob Metcalfe (3Com czar), Cisco (the router giant without whose boxes much of the Web would dissolve) and Rob Glaser (RealAudio king) also got Wired profiles.

Jason Olim and his brother Matthew, founders of online record store CDNow (now an ailing outpost of the AOL Time Warner empire) described their experiences in the relentlessly upbeat The CDNow Story: Rags to Riches on the Internet (Lakewood, Top Floor 98).

The Monk & the Riddle (Boston, Harvard Business School Press 00) by Randy Komisar is a dot com Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; if like us you weren't wowed by Pirsig's book we'd advise you to skip the recipe for sensitive new age Silicon Alley millionaires.  Tom Ashbrook's The Leap: A Memoir of Love & Madness in the Internet Gold Rush (Boston, Houghton Mifflin 00) has a bit more substance.

     the fat cats in silicon alley

The inimitable Robert X Cringely in Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition & Still Can't Get A Date (New York, Harper 93) kicked off the NetNerd watch. A version of his Nerds 2.0 television series - an Internet history that's better than the title suggests - is online.

He's been joined by Po Bronson - notably in the ever-so-clever Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other Truer Tales of Silicon Valley (New York, Random 99) - and David Kaplan, author of the more substantial The Silicon Boys & Their Valley of Dreams (New York, Morrow 99).

There are brief - and of course slavishly adoring - profiles of the new rich on the Forbes 400 site, aka the business-person's Who Weekly.

     old and new media

David Stauffer's Business the AOL Way: Secrets of the World's #1 Webmaster (Oxford, Capstone 00). 


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