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- - - - - - - - - - A L S O__T O D A Y
- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is Apple finally in the clear or does the threat of folding still loom large? Weigh in on the computer maker's fate in Table Talk's Digital Culture area - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Millennium bugging out Site of a thousand dances The software that refused to die Let's Get This Straight Quake-r state - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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________money F O R N O T H I N G
BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | An avalanche of books bearing Michael Wolff's name landed on my desk in 1995. Wolff had created a bestseller titled "Net Guide" -- TV Guide for cyberspace! -- and was now trying to transform it into a hot franchise with titles like "Net Tech," "Net Money," "Net Sports" and so on. These volumes, cranked out at the rate of one every 20 days, breezily described places to go and things to do in the online world; much of their contents was dated before the ink had dried. Wolff, in other words, had found a way to publish books that were even more ephemeral and disposable than Web pages. And people were buying them -- for a little while, anyway. Surveying the pile of "Net Junk" books in my mail bin, I wrote a newspaper column pointing out the futility of publishing paper guides to the Web -- a medium that excels in providing conveniently clickable catalogs of itself. And I figured that, just as soon as the Web audience got familiar enough with the new medium to understand this, Wolff's business would tank. It did -- but not before Wolff took a bumpy and colorful two-year ride across the cratered landscape of the Internet industry, a journey full of desperate fund-raising deals, unlikely partnerships, outrageous schemes and comical scams. Ironically, the book he has now written chronicling this saga -- "Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet" -- has a lasting value that Wolff's "Net Guide" products could never attain. Just as Jerry Kaplan's chronicle of the Go Corporation, "Startup," outlived the pen-computing boom of the early '90s that it described, "Burn Rate" will offer a lively window on the frantic lunacies of the mid-'90s Web market long after the industry has evolved into forms unimaginable today. For one thing, it is a genuine Net-business page-turner -- and anyone who has dipped into the current torrent of books in this genre knows just how rare that is. "Burn Rate" -- the title is industry-speak for the amount of money a start-up company "burns" each month, quarter or year -- follows Wolff's ceaseless hunt for more dollars to throw on the corporate pyre he has built. The stakes are simple and stark: Can the Internet entrepreneur persuade someone -- anyone with spare bucks -- to believe in the value of his business before the cash runs out? Wolff takes us along on this boardroom quest, and it's a journey that any reader even remotely interested in the Internet business will want to follow. The author is an entertainingly cynical guide through the labyrinth of a new industry growing under the pressure of overhyped expectations and underperforming results. At Time Warner, he discovers media execs looking down their noses at technologists ("they were like printers") yet stomping boldly and blindly into the quagmire of its money-hole megasite, Pathfinder. At CMP, the computer trade publisher, he finds clueless suburban squares desperate to purchase "the secret of cyberspace." At Random House, he tries to introduce chairman Alberto Vitale to the Internet -- and uncorks a geyser of sputtering abuse. Holding frustrating meetings with a "dysfunctional" America Online, he figures out that "Every encounter [there] ... is a process of starting over again, because an organization that is growing as fast as AOL is, from month to month, almost a new organization." "Burn Rate" is full of the sort of name-dropping dish that helps sell books today but can make them instantly irrelevant tomorrow. What gives it claim to a more lasting place on the shelf is its first-person descriptions of the process of Internet start-up financing. Wolff's transformation from journalist and editor to would-be Web mogul begins under the tutelage of a svengali-like New York venture capitalist with the absurdly metaphorical name of Robert Machinist. An old school acquaintance of the author, Machinist tells Wolff that he could "get out" with $5 to $10 million easily, but that the real prize was "a capital base for generations to come." Wolff likes the sound of that. The deals begin. N E X T_P A G E .|. "I can't fool around ... I have a payroll to meet next week." |
