Dot.bomb: My Days and Night at an Internet Goliath

Boo.com and Pets.com weren't the first to Dot.Bomb. Before them all came ValueAmerica.com, a US-based online retailer of everything from office products to jewellery. The company's investors included Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express. Thanks to its blue-chip backers and dot-com glamour, thecompany's share price soared 90% to $45 on its first day of trading. Just 18 months later, Value America filed for bankruptcy, its shares valued at less than one cent. J David Kuo was an investor in Value America, then an employee. Like many investors the world over, he believed investing in a dotcom was a short-cut to riches, but was rudely awakened by the dotcom crash of April 2000.

We were supposed to do the Internet shuffle--get in, changethe world, get rich and get out. But we discovered that the prevailing wisdom was incomplete. The Internet is a tremendous force for change, but the industry chews up more folks than it blesses. Despite the hype, headlines and hysteria, this was just a gold rush we were in, not a gold mine. We might look like hip, chic, cutting-edge new-economy Internet workers, but really a lot of us were akin to those poor, freezing fools in Alaska.

Dot.Bomb covers much the same ground as the classic new economy text Burn Rate. From the financial wheeling and dealing to the office politics and boardroom battles, it's all here. Even better than Burn Rate though, this is not a good business destroyed by themoney men--it's a mediocre business that made devastating mistakes and rightly failed. In this respect, it's a far more honest and representative account of what happened to the majority of e-commerce businesses in the dark months of 2000. --Sally Whittle