F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts [Hardcover]

Philip J. Kaplan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2002

A 'Darwin Awards' for the digital age, a hilarious chronicle of dot-com mania and disaster from the Internet folk hero and fuckedupcompany.com creator, Phil Kaplan. Not long ago, the world was awash with venture capital in search of the next Yahoo! or Amazon.com. No product, no experience, no technology, no business plan - no problem. You could still get 40 million dollars from investors to start up your dot-com. And you could get people to work around the clock for stock options and the promise of millions. Then, around April 2000, it all came crashing down. Phil Kaplan was a dot-com everyman, a programmer, with a bird's-eye view of the erupting bubble. In early 2000 he started fuckedcompany.com, a caustic and sceptical site which follows the layoffs and bankruptcies of hundreds of dot-coms. The site was an instant success. It was named site of the year by Rolling Stone, Time and Yahoo!, and received more than four million unique visitors a month. F'D COMPANIES captures the waste, greed and human stupidity of over 200 dot-com failures. Written in Kaplan's popular and cynical style, the company profiles in the book form a gleeful encyclopeadia of how not to run a business. They also capture a remarkable period of history.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The graveyard of dot-com disasters is overflowing with grandiose ideas gone spectacularly bad, and Philip J. Kaplan's F'd Companies offers an unapologetically acerbic opinion on dozens of the most outrageous. Kaplan, a programmer turned consultant whose own online dreams began when he launched a bulletin board system for pirated game software back in 1989, pulls no punches as he bluntly dissects Web failures that remain dazzling for their pretentious plans and audacious executions. There are big names like Webvan ("a classic example of PAYING more for products than they were SELLING them for") and Go.com (a "portal to nowhere"), but most here are less well known despite similarly burning through cash like a cyber-brushfire. In language far more explicit than his softened-for-the-bookstore title, Kaplan skewers the likes of Iam.com (which lost $48 million trying to convince models and actors to post their portfolios on the Net), OnlineChoice.com (which spent $20 million to learn consumers weren't interested in group buys of electricity and other utilities), HeavenlyDoor.com (which sunk $26 million into a site peddling caskets and burial plots), and Eppraisals.com (which dropped $15 million on an effort to sell online evaluations of antiques). The result is consistently profane, frequently hilarious, and usually right on target. --Howard Rothman

From Publishers Weekly

"I'm a computer programmer," Kaplan writes. "I'm that dude at your office in the dark cubicle who nobody listens or pays attention to (especially the hotties in marketing)." Kaplan's claim to fame is FuckedCompany.com, a Web site he built over Memorial Day weekend in 2000 to serve as a forum for bad news about Internet companies. His timing a few months after the Internet bubble began to deflate was perfect, and FuckedCompany became an immediate hit. Thousands of fired or about-to-be-fired dot-commers were more than willing to share their horror stories about the collapse of one Internet company after another. He has translated the material posted on the site into a book, offering brief vignettes of the demise of more than 150 Internet ventures. His basic formula includes a description of what the company purported to do (Mercata.com "customers would use the site to band together and purchase merchandise at wholesale prices"), how much money it blew through before going bankrupt and how many people were fired ("$89 million and 100 employees were burned"). Kaplan, 25, attempts to enliven each story with humor, which is often more crude than clever. That many of the stories sound the same is not Kaplan's fault, as most really are: someone comes up with an idea, finds a venture capitalist willing to pour funding into the company despite the flimsiest of business plans, and then goes broke when the money dries up. Although he tries, Kaplan delivers little more than an elegy for the Industry Standard, Pets.com, Contentville.com, Flooz.com, Bid.com and Kozmo.com, not to mention Zing.com, ProcessTree.com and MetalSpectrum.com.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (April 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743228626
• ISBN-13: 978-0743228626
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (106 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #622,598 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Perfect for its intended use...., April 30, 2002

By 

John Kosh Jr. (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts (Hardcover)

First, this book is not to be taken too seriously. It is a tongue and cheek look at some of the more infamous dot.com flameouts in the last few years. If you love the website, then you will enjoy this book, as I did. However, if you are looking for an in depth examination of the tragic woes that hit the dot.com world, this is not your book. It is the often funny musings and rantings of man who saw the coming demise of the Internet Bubble while the New York brokerages were still puffing away about a never-ending new economy in their attempt to peddled extremely over priced stocks. A harbinger of doom, perhaps?

Second, this book is a quick and easy read, perfect for commuters or those who enjoy reading during television commercials. Segments of the book, concerning a particular company, tend to be no longer than a few paragraphs each.

Finally, this book does contain vast amounts of toilet humor, but again, any regular visitor to the website would expect nothing less from Pud, the author. Taken with a grain of salt, F'd Companies makes a nice afternoon appetizer.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dot.funny, August 3, 2003

By 

Darrell Edward Ehrlick - See all my reviews

This review is from: F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts (Hardcover)

F'd is a catalogue of all the dot.com flameouts and foibles. It is also laced with Philip Kaplan's cutting, biting, ascerbic, scalding, acidic, vitriolic commentary that tends to sum up the disgust that so many people have at the lavish and stupid business practices of the dot.coms.

While this isn't necessarily a history of the crash, the book is organized into theme sections. These sections point out broad trends in the dot.com industry and help create a picture of why so many failed. Kaplan's expertise as a guide in this murky, sometimes corrupt world of dot.coms is helpful, and is done in a way in which the lay reader can actually understand how these dot.coms actually worked.

This book doesn't take the internet or the digital world too seriously, and, above all, Kaplan has a self-deprecating manner of story telling that is charming. For awhile. At times, the reader is left to wonder whether or not he is telling you about these ridiculous companies to make a point, or just to make fun. He is a bright guy, and very, very funny. However, sometimes his R-rated commentary detracted from his really commendable insight into why these companies flamed and why such high hopes were pinned on them. It seems to me that the editor (or publisher) could have shown a little more restraint and had a much cleaner, tighter book.

However, even at its worst, this book is still highly enjoyable and entertaining. No one interested in the dot.com bust of the late 1990s should be without this book. Besides, maybe this review is just the vitriolic rambling of some ... (a Kaplan original) that still is bitter because I have some Flooz that I could never use.

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Absolute Garbage, April 21, 2002

By 

Automatt (California, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts (Hardcover)

This is basically a text dump of a bunch of stuff you can get on the website anyway... it is not a particularly good read, either. Stay away.