dot.bomb

"A wildly entertaining romp through the worst of the dot-com era....Kuo describes a passel of characters worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel....You're bound to love it."John A. Byrne, Business WeekBrimming with colorful characters and hilarious incidents — and widely hailed as one of the most enjoyable business books of recent years — DOT.BOMB is the astonishing story of the Internet gold rush as it could only be told by an insider.J. David Kuo saw it all: the sky's-the-limit optimism, the hundreds of millions spent in a giddy grab for market share, the investors slavering to be inside, the belief that there really were new rules. He also saw what happened when wretched excess and ego-driven blunders forced gravity to reassert itself, when flaws that had been glossed over loomed huge, and when, ultimately, Wall Street demanded results.• What happened? Only a few years ago, it seemed like all you had to do to make a quick fortune was start a business that involved the internet and voila!-millions, billions, magazine covers, celebrity, everything. Now look at your 401K and try not to cry. The dot.com bubble was a stretch of madness. • Who was David Kuo? A guy who had never worked in technology in his life. He had been a political advisor and speechwriter. But like so many, he couldn't believe how rich people were getting simply by going digital. He wanted those millions. He wanted in.• What was Value America? Value America was supposed to be an online catalog, selling all sorts of goods, from computer printers to barbeque grills. Value America would take the orders, but the manufacturers would have to ship the products. • Who founded it? A guy named Craig Winn, a law school dropout from California who got his start selling fly swatters. Yep, this was the guy who was going to lead Value America from start up to internet goliath. Winn had more than a bit of confidence: Before Value America had made a dime in profits, Winn had already decided the company would be so huge that it would springboard him to his next job-President of the United States.• What were some of the problems? • They didn't know how to build the Value America website, so it constantly crashed and was redesigned.• Consumers ordered products, but they never arrived. Or the arrived months late. Or the arrived broken. Or the wrong product arrived. Kuo himself once decided to order a Weber grill through Value America. It arrived five months later.• Since the manufacturers were supposed to ship the products, Value America had no way of knowing whether the products actually had gotten to consumers. And when things arrived broken and needed to be returned, nobody was sure whom they should return it to.• Winn was spending more time on his deluded plan to run for president than he was on the business; senior management relied not on budgeting and accounting but regular prayer sessions and