Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet

Michael Wolff is a professional business writer - a journalist in fact. This fact is important for two reasons:1 - He writes clearly and well.2 - While living in the Internet Gold Rush, he took notes on the details of conversations, instead of the meaning (or so he tells us).So, this book is another interesting view in the ways and means of money. Smart money, dumb money, no money for tomorrow's payroll and all that.It's not written to give glamorous insight into how the author is a brilliant visionary, sharing his ideas with you, or anything that you'd find in a typical business book. It's a detailed narrative about life in the trenches. It certainly seems true enough to me.For that reason, it's worth reading, since most books push an agenda of their own, and this book doesn't really seem to have an agenda or something to prove. From the internal evidence, the author has tried to write a fun, compelling story that might sell, in order to make some money.He succeeded. At least, the writing of a story worth reading. I have no idea about the money.

Revenge of the Words. After reading all of the hype, buzz, and reviews about this book I had to buy it. After all, I have been in Wolff's seat dealing with VCs, preferred stock, and critical market timing. Sadly, I found that the book is a long gossipy account of the early days of the web but very short on humor or advice for the entrepreneur. I normally grade business books by corner foldovers (to locate good advice or a pithy quote) and lol's (laughing out loud - or lots of laughs). This hyped book got 0 foldovers and only 2 lol's. A good business book like "Dilbert Zone" or "Liar's Poker" or "Die Broke" will get a dozen of each. When I finally finished this hyped ho-hum story, I realized that I had been had. But that was the point! Wolff is a writer and now he has now learned how to promote. So what better path to revenge than to hype and ripoff with his mighty pen. Hence the slapdash gossip tome (with several annoying typos) to! prove that he is now a master of timing and positioning.

Next up: How Donald Trump survived his Daddy's money, How Nelson Rockefeller survived the shadow of his family's name, how George Bush survived his years of failing oil companies.The book is reasonably refreshing in its self-assesment of knowing virtually nothing about how the internet would affect publishing and how anybody would make any money off it. Its candor is also refreshing in describing how they had so little to offer but were so willing to sell it at a high price to the even more gullible ("they want how many million for the contents of my palm pilot?")If the author were a disinterested party reporting the actions of others, one would have to rate this book 4/5 for good writing, clarity and candor. As a player who took huge sums of money from investors, suspecting the business was a house of cards, one can only wonder if he shouldn't be in jail. As a book, I have little choice but to recommend it. The description of AOL alone is worth the purchase price.

This book is about Wolff's short-lived foray into Internet entrepreneurship in the mid-90s. In addition to recounting his own company's fortunes, he seems to have been tuned in to just about everything that was going on with the net industry, so it's a great overview of the whole cyber-landscape too. Mainly, it's a chronicle of the moment when the Internet shifted from being a marginalized geekfest to being Big Business.He has great chapters on Wired magazine, on AOL, on Microsoft, and on his own attempts to secure venture capital for his company. The third chapter, "The Art of the Deal," was hysterically funny and thoroughly horrifying at the same time. At first I thought, reminiscing, that I was at perfectly the right age to have taken advantage of the Internet boom, if I'd had the presence of mind. But then, as I read further, I became more and more relieved that I'd never done so.This book was published before most of the recent upheavals in the Internet world: The ascendancy and hegemony of IE in the browser wars (after Netscape effectively abdicated); AOL's ill-fated acquisition of Time Warner; and, of course, the "dot-bomb" to which many of us owe our current unemployed status. The book, therefore, lacks the scope and perspective of a historical document, but is very much a "view from the trenches" look at the way it seemed to a smart and thoughtful (and literary) guy who was there.One of my primary reactions was of nostalgia. Ah, remember when AOL was Mac-only? Not only that, but it was only one of several available online communities: Delphi, Prodigy, CompuServe, Sierra... Remember when it seemed like there were only five of us who knew that AOL and the Internet were not the same thing? Remember when there was no Web? Remember when there was no Amazon.com? Remember Micropayments? Remember Push? Ah, them was the days.Most of all, Wolff does a pretty good job of stopping every now and then to take stock, to wonder philosophically what it's all about: Is the Internet media, or just a big telephone? He doesn't figure out the answer, of course, but that's not what philosophy is about. Taking the long view, I think it's books like this that are going to help our society, 25 or 50 or 100 years down the line, figure out what the Internet boom/bust, and the 90s, were about.

Great read. For someone like me who was too young for the first Tech bubble it provides good insight into what people were thinking at the time.