Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the ... (ISBN 0684856212)

Amazon.com Review:
Michael Wolff, the author of NetGuide, one of the first major guides to the Net, gives you a tour of this medium that could best be described as "Alice's Adventures Through the Monitor." Burn Rate is the story of Wolff's transition from journalist to entrepreneur in the Internet business--a business in which the investment elite beat down doors to invest vast sums of money in companies whose chief product seemed to be red ink. Wolff reports that what was being bought and sold was not technology, content, or even concepts. It was the potential to be in on something very cool that may one day be sold to somebody else--despite even more red ink. Wolff's story could easily have been bitter but is instead both fascinating and hilarious. Wolff's money-losing company's negotiations with Magellan--a search-engine company that Wolff eventually discovers is also financially unstable--are comical. The scene where key big shots from a major publisher fall all over Wolff in their eagerness to buy an all-but-worthless name and database are a complete farce. Wolff is by no means above showing his own foibles. Some of the book's best parts are where he shows himself swept up in the intoxicating flow of a deal and calls home to report developments to his wife. She promptly translates the nonsense into sobering reality. Wolff takes plenty of time off from his personal journey to explore significant events in the development of cyberculture, such as the transition of Louis Rosetto from a least-likely-to-succeed publisher into the creator of the revolutionary Wired magazine. He chronicles the emergence of America Online from dark horse to dominance, while the efforts of companies expected to be major contenders fade into the background. His candid view shows it all--the oddball characters in expensive shirts and T-shirts, the crazy dealing, the exhilaration, the heartbreak, and the fear. This would be a wonderful work of satirical fiction if it weren't actually true. --Elizabeth Lewis

How to survive having a few megabucks thrown to you:
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.

Interesting story of the very early internet years:
I really liked this book and got to learn about the hardships entrepreneurs go through in a startup.I was also not much aware about the differences in thought between West Coast and East Coast IT companies.Finally, kudos to Michael Wolff for potraying an honest,funny and nerve wrecking real life story and am happy he is doing what he likes to do!!

Can't Put this Book Down !:
If you are into the Internet Gold Rush, or just like a hard-hitting, true story about business, personalities, and playing hardball, you MUST read this book.

A little dippy:
While I don't know the whole story, Wolff seems to have a lot of experience, and little business smarts. Heck, from the few descriptions of his wife, SHE seems to have more business smarts. This is certainly an interesting, well-written book (he's a writer after all,) but the fact that he drove himself to near insanity as well as bankruptcy all in the name of pure greed leaves me feeling this book has no real point other than "How I wanted to get rich, or die tryin!" He described endless begging for money, which seems to be the central point of the book. You will find an interesting set of stories here, but the message is a rather shallow one if there is one at all. But then I guess that was the point of most of the internet bubble as a whole.

Why I rate Burn Rate 4:
It's about that time about ten years ago - those thrilling days of yesteryear - when the Web was new, that's the time well captured in Burn Rate by Michael Wolff. Aptly cover the 24 weeks or so when 'content was king.' Like many others, Wolff could not resist the opportunity to be a part of a medium in its infant days. His delivery is generally well paced, often witty. It is old news now of course, and says nothing of Google or AOL since its merger with Time. The time capsule effect is for the better. What is your business model? When Netscape met advertising. The conundrum of the CPM (Cost per Thousand) trade press advertising model. And the larger more targeted more economical online version. Can software tell you what music you may like better than a skilled critic? In those days the folks with the money had not been on the Internet anymore than they have used Del.icio.us these days. Would the Internet level magazines? Minimal entry cost, but then what? Users taking control of news delivery systems. Pathfinder. Burning venture capital faster than achieving revenue. If you build it... It's all there.