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

It covers -

• introduction
• the financiers
• amazon and eBay
• other czars
• fat cats in silicon alley
• the financiers
• old and new media

     introduction

Robert Reid's Architects of the Web - 1,000 Days That Built The Future of Business (New York: Wiley 1997) 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. Digital Hustlers: Living Large & Falling Hard in Silicon Alley (New York: Reagan 2001) by Casey Kait & Stephen Weiss is self-consciously 'way cool' but allows the entrepreneurs and their acolytes to speak for themselves, although most offer few insights.

Bob Davis, founder of Lycos, appears in Speed Is Life: Street Smart Lessons from the Front Lines of Business (New York: Doubleday 2001) by fallen star Bob Davis. boo hoo: A Dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe (London: Random 2001) by Ernst Malmsten, Erik Portanger & Charles Drazin is an entertaining account of how the entrepreneurs blew US$135 million and still had time to complain about cramped conditions in Concorde.

Heroes.com (London: Hodder 2001) by Louise Proddow is designer coffee table territory: glossy paper, sparse and breathless print, lots of colour photos of beautiful young e-ntrepreneurs in artful poses. Alas, it had no sooner hit the shelves than several of the companies were in meltdown mode. 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 2001) is inspirational but otherwise thin.

Road Warriors - Dreams & Nightmares Along the Information Highway (New York: Dutton 1995) 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 is 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 1999) 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: Random 2000) 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 1985).  

Ruthann Quindlen's Confessions of a Venture Capitalist: Inside the High Stakes World of Startup Financing (New York: Warner 2000) 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 2000) by Paul Gompers & Josh Lerner.   

A local view is provided by Bill Ferris' Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 2000), an anecdotal account by one of Australia's leading vc's.

     amazon.com and eBay

Amazon is considered in a note elsewhere on this site, along with a discussion of competitors such as Barnes & Noble and Kinokuniya.

We are overdue 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 1999). 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 2000). Sandeep Krishnamurthy has published an Amazon.com case study (PDF), perhaps more insightful than Mikey Daisey's memoir 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com (London: Fourth Edition 2002) or James Marcus' Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut (New York: New Press 2004)

eBay and PayPal are discussed in a note elesewhere on this site.

     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 1998).

The Monk & the Riddle (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 2000) 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 2000) 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 1993) kicked off the NetNerd watch. A version of his Nerds 2.0 television series - an internet history that is better than the title suggests - is online.

He has 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 1999) - and David Kaplan, author of the more substantial The Silicon Boys & Their Valley of Dreams (New York: Morrow 1999).

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. There is somewhat more substance in the equally upbeat Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 (New York: Gotham Books 2008) by Sarah Lacy.

     old and new media

David Stauffer's Business the AOL Way: Secrets of the World's #1 Webmaster (Oxford: Capstone 2000) offers an account of the big ISP.

Bibliographies and analyses of around 600 media groups - the old/new media dichotomy is meaningless - feature in the Ketupa.net site. 

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