dot.bomb

"This is, I think, the quintessential insider look at what happened in the internet meltdown of the first part of this century. The internet business got an extremely bad reputation which it is only now shaking off, as something that combined management incompetence with grotesque corporate excess and total failure for shareholders. For me, this book, which describes an American internet company called Value America, says it all. There is a British equivalent about the decline and fall of boo.com, but with this one the failure was on a much bigger scale. It’s a very amusingly written book and it tells how this company wanted to change the face of American retailing, to go head to head with Amazon but do it better. They made every conceivable mistake that a dot.com could make. They had a site that completely failed to deliver, didn’t work very well; they had no proper delivery and order system; they grew much too quickly, built a huge office complex in Virginia at a very early stage; and the CEO, who has the delightful name of Craig Winn, got too big for his boots. He was so taken with his huge success that he thought he would take a run at the presidency, because his own self-belief was such that he thought he could take this business talent and use it to good effect in the White House. So, to me, this is an insider look at everything that was wrong with the initial internet era. It is! It’s an extremely funny book, but there is a lot in there of value to entrepreneurs today of what really not to do. Don’t even think about it! Running a dot.com company is a seven-day-a-week job and there is no time for anything else. That’s mistake number one."