Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I can see why people were so scathing about it. He doesn't pull punches. He got in bed with financial types he didn't like from the start, and hated by the end. He didn't stay entirely clean himself, and he's surprisingly candid about it. At the end, he is shriven (sort of), leaves the field, walks away from a big pile of money, and returns to writing.

If you read some of the pissy and not so pissy backstory pieces that came out after his book, you're told that he abandoned his employees for his own needs (true, but after many months of pretty much shredding cash, and without any short-term or long-term hope of success). You're also told that he manufactured people, incidents, dialog. Hard to say without having been there. But I've met many people like the people Wolff describes, and I don't doubt that they would act precisely as they are acting in reaction to the book, including denying everything whether true or false.

Brill's Content ran an extremely fatuous piece back in October 1998 that moves me to profanity when I read it; it's attack journalism without balance. The piece quoted many parties' gripes with the book without confirmation except from other parties with gripes. Wolff wrote a pretty funny story about getting the pin stuck in him as Brill tried to maneuver him into the formaldehyde.

It's still unclear to me why people don't want to believe his account of events. I don't know if it's true, but my descent into the Internet maelstrom, during which I met or worked with many interesting content and ecommerce types, confirms the tenor of what he describes. I'm inclined to think that a little dramatic license and a lot of fact inform the book.

A number of reviewers (and Amazon.com customers) describe Wolff's ego as enormous. I don't see it. This book is a bunch of beech branches beating him in the back. He doesn't let anybody off easy - okay the Hoover's folks are nicely presented, as counter example - but he presents himself as the money hungry nut he was during those crazy days. But he walked away from a big pile of cash (as I did, somewhat around the same time, but in substantially different circumstances), and lived to tell the tale. And write a successful book about it, in much the same style and mode of interest as Jerry Kaplan's Startup.

Believe it or not, not every Internet entreprenuer gets out with a successful IPO. Wolff, a true New Media pioneer, gives us a marvelous insider's view that a winner simply could not provide, and the book is such a great, insightful read, I'm glad he failed so that we can get this peek. So much more than sour grapes, Wolff burns bridges and shows all the players with their masks off, himself included.

A book like this will always receive negative reviews from types who can't trust the motives of anyone who didn't come out a winner, but these same people readily accept as gospel any puff piece that states Steve Case's visionary genius built AOL rather than the marketing side kick with the simple idea sneak into American homes and fill the sock drawers with start up disks. Not every story is pretty, not every success is the inevitable result of brilliance and elbow grease. Do not write off this work because Wolff's business didn't work out. Rather, enjoy his sadder but wiser perspective. Enjoy a glimpse of everything that happens to successes, also, but somehow never makes it into the Business Week cover story.

I think I've read everything about this business--Po Bronson and Michael Lewis books most recently--and nothing anywhere compares to Burn Rate. First of all, Wolff, either fearless or crazy, doesn't suck up to anybody. Second, this is not just good writing, this is amazing; you start to read the sentences outloud they're so good all kinds of memorable lines stay with you. Third, Wolff's book is about character, the real stuff that makes people do what they do; you recognize the people here, you understand them, they're real--they aren't some model people who inhabit Silicon Valley and the Internet Industry (Lewis's book the New New Thing is all about inventing that sort of model). Burn Rate is brilliant. It makes you sweat it's so good.

Bored with pulp novels but not ready for a serious tome? My book of the year is Michael Wolff's Burn Rate. This is a grunt's view of the early internet battles. Wolff is predatory in his language, honest in his insecurity, writes well but actually knows his stuff. You'll learn & have a belly laugh. Add it to Liar's Poker, Up the Organization & Feargal Quinn's Crowning the Customer as must-reads.

As a former worker in the Internet world, I found this book both a juicy read, and laugh-out-loud (lol) funny. Wolff spares no one in this account, least of all himself.

He perfectly captures the insanity of the "go-go" Internet mania years -- with companies paying huge premiums for, in some cases, as Wolff's wife so insightfully theorizes, just a particular domain name.

Few Internet-era celebrities are spared, as Wolff dishes on several "big names" in business of the day.

A great, entertaining period piece on the dot-com era.

- Julia Wilkinson, author, "My Life at AOL"

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.

This is certainly the best book I've read about the Internet industry and probably one of the best business books I've read ever. You can't put it down and you laugh out loud (truly) many time a chapter. The interesting thing is how much controversy this book his inspired--because in its way it's not controversial at all. It's just an incredibly good story. Even the terrible things Wolff supposedly says about people are really more comic than anything else. My guess is that there is just so little objectivity and self-awaresness and skepticism in the Internet business that one a honest point of view comes along people freak. Anyway this is not a book that anybody who is interestesting in technology, money, business, and the general state of American culture and American writing is going to want to miss. Also, if you just want several hours of cough-up-your-coke laughter, try it. I guarantee: you'll wish you had written it!

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!!

Burn Rate is an occasionally pedestrian personal history of the internet business world that rises above itself because of its special point of view. Uniquely for a business writer, Michael Wolff actually ran his own internet-related publishing venture for years. The bad and the absurd things that happen in this book (and there are many) happened to him, and this gives his account immediacy and a pungent flavor that would be missing in a third-person account.

The book covers the internet business from 1994 to 1997, when Wolff was trying to cut a deal with Magellan or AOL or Ameritech or the Washington Post, while keeping his venture capitalists at arms length. His "burn rate" is high-he's spending half a million bucks a month-and the money is always about to run out in a few weeks. He has no hope of turning a profit in a reasonable length of time and so he needs a deal, fast.

Wolff is always on the verge of that deal, always about to sell out for more money than he thought existed, only to have the whole thing collapse in acrimony or apathy or a shift in the corporate zeitgeist or whatever. Back then, everybody was making internet commerce up as they went along (the term "e-business" was a couple of years off) and huge sums of money always seemed about to be made or lost on hunches or whims or loopy idealism. Wolff has a keen eye for the resulting nonsense, and he can write about it without condescension because he realizes that he was just another asylum inmate. Overall, a good, fun read.

Seriously, this book gotta rank with Wired, Yahoo, Netscape, and, yes, Amazon as one of the things that shaped the net. A) who hasn't read it? and B) who doesn't recongize there own experience in it? I just read it for a second time, wondering if maybe it had aged over the last tumultous net year, but it hadn't. It still is *the* story! This is the experience. This is what it was like. Five stars, three cheers, etc.