Customer Reviews

Starting Something: An Entrepreneur's Tale of Corporate Culture

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In 1996, when architect/designer/visionary hipster Wayne McVicker and a partner launched the healthcare website, Neoforma.com, he just wanted to live the life of a creative entrepreneur while helping make the world a better place. He soon realized that he'd climbed aboard a careening, billion-dollar roller coaster ride.

This is a story of survival in the Silicon Valley fast lane, told with honesty, warmth and humor. As the Neoforma database of healthcare products and services grew, so did their e-commerce traffic and business potential - but they were tapped out. Thus began a parade of mentors, "angel" investors, and venture capitalists who expected tenfold pay-offs. Still insisting on playing by their own rules, the partners were slow to warm up to Valley start-up culture. McVicker says it took a long time to find making money an acceptable pursuit unto itself. But these were heady times. In 1998, they received a two million-dollar cash infusion, and were being called the "Amazon and Yahoo of healthcare." There was no backing out now.

Trapped in the role of an aggressive, ultra-competent entrepreneur, McVicker weathered every investor, customer and employee crisis as it arose. He struggled to balance his work and family life, while the business grew at breakneck speed. He began to compartmentalize the stress, lost the ability to communicate with his partner and his wife, and luckily, found help before his marriage failed and the company he'd so proudly nurtured was wrenched away from him.

Follow the Neoforma saga with all its growing pains, as they buy up companies, merge with others, and launch their IPO. Watch the stock rise to $72 and see Wayne become a mega-millionaire. Listen to the bubble bursting and the market crashing, dropping the stock to $7 overnight. Through it all, McVicker strives to maintain the idealistic corporate culture of integrity and empowerment the company was founded on. In 2001, he'd "worked his way to the bottom," created a new niche, and left Neoforma to launch a brand new venture.

Don't miss this Internet fairy tale with profound lessons for business cultures of any size.

"I made a few hundred million. I lost a few hundred million."

Those are the opening lines of this fascinating tale of the people and events involved in the IPO of Neoforma, a company that went public in the midst of the Dot Com era.

Those two lines are icons of the Dot Com era, when technology entrepreneurs turned into millionaires overnight. And sometimes the money disappeared just as fast as it came, when the Dot Com market went bust.

"Starting Something" is not what I expected. It was much much more -- and much better.

When I started reading this book I expected another business "how-to" with lots of bullet points and lists of do's and don'ts. I used to read lots of such books. But once you've read several dozen of them, it's hard to get excited over any of them.

That's why I was delighted to find that this book read like a novel, except the events were true. This book is about the emotion and relationships in business, especially the strong emotion that comes from a stressful situation, such as the rapid growth that Neoforma experienced leading up to its IPO, and its demanding investors.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned from this book. The book is set up in short chapters. Each chapter is a vignette, capturing a particular event or bit of drama. The business lessons evolve out of each vignette. They are powerful lessons -- much more powerful than if they'd been delivered as how-to lists.

The great thing about the book's format is that you can set it down for a day or two, and come back and read a few more chapters. It's very digestible and practical for people who have to snatch reading time here and there when they can get it.

The author speaks to the reader like a real, live, genuine human being. Whether talking about his family and the financial pressures of the company's early days, or his frustration when it seems that the company's technology doesn't work well, or his chagrin when he senses that investors and others don't find his resume as impressive as their own -- it's presented in a way that each of us can identify with.

Anyone considering a startup, involved in a startup, formerly in a startup, or close to anyone involved in a startup or small business should read "Starting Something."

I can say without hesitation it is the best business book I have read in the past year, and is #2 on my list of all-time favorite business books. What makes it so awesome? Maybe the subtitle is a hint "An Entrepreneur's Tale of Control, Confrontation, and Corporate Culture." It is great because it is so unlike any other business book I have ever read. Wayne even told me he wasn't even sure it should be classified as a business book. But it should. This book is all about business. It is about the side of business you never see. It's about the side of business that can make you both love and hate being an entrepreneur.

The book tells the story of Neoforma, a company founded by Wayne and his partner Jeff. (Neoforma is somewhat famous in investing circles for it's substantial stock price fall.) The book traces the beginning of the idea through the start-up phase, the venture capital phase, the IPO, and the time when founders leave the company to do other things. And the story is very compelling. I was on vacation in Las Vegas when I began the book, and I spent much more time in my room reading than I did at the casinos. I just could not put this book down. It is a first person account of all the joy and pain that take place during the birth of a new company.

The best part of Starting Something is reading about Wayne's own struggles with what is happening around him. He is at times confident, yet at other times confused. He sometimes believes Neoforma will be a huge success and other times questions whether the company will be around next month. He hits some problems out of the ballpark, and other times he strikes out completely. In other words, he shows that he is human. He has a dream for the company, but he has to make very difficult choices that have both business and personal consequences.

This book should be required reading for anyone pursuing an entrepreneurial path, because it exposes the people side of business that few business books explore. The lessons about employees, investors, and the importance of corporate culture are plentiful.

This books tells it like it is. I was so impressed with the frankness and engaging writing style that I adopted this book for courses at Penn State. I even visited the author and video'ed the key characters to get even more insight. Every budding entrepreneur should read this. -It covers nearly every management issue that a start-up confronts - finding money, mentors, family stresses, bad hires, dealing with VC's and angels, going public, change management, ethics, choosing partners, negotiating with corporations - you name it its here. I have recommended this book to all of my business and academic contacts - without exception they loved it. Tony Warren

I just read "Starting Something" for the second time - this time more closely-- and truly enjoyed it. Wayne did a great job giving the personal feeling of the environment. It meant a lot to me since I was with Neoforma from early 1998 to present (2006)! I lived through many portions of what Wayne and Jeff did, and as I read the book I enjoyed transforming many of the pseudonyms to the real people I had interacted with in those early years.

One important new twist is how NEOF has just recently been bought by the healthcare manufacturer consortium (GHX) which was originally set up to compete/crush it!

I highly recommend Starting Something to all next generation entrepreneurs, as well as former entrepreneurs - all of those who were in the world wind of power, money and control of that era.

Anil Singhal, MD

Wayne does a nice job describing the complicated aspects of funding a business, corporate governance, and office politics; moreover, he tells a great story. Well written and engaging, Starting Something pulled me in like a seasoned angler and cost me more than one restless night. The tension and excitement build as he expertly guides us through the Neoforma history. The marketcap/employee graphs begin each chapter and accentuate the importance of each event and decision.

If you are or have been directly or indirectly involved in a rapidly growing company, this book is a "must have."

I fully admire the guts it took for Wayne to start a business, I fully admire the hard work he and his employees put in, and I fully admire his candor, since there was a lot in his book that deserved to be told, especially on the company-investor relationship side. But I couldn't help noticing that whenever he spoke glowingly of the company's progress and achievements, he measured them in terms of employee growth and fundraising stats, rather than REVENUE or PROFIT.

Here's why:

1999 - $1 million revenue, operating loss of $51 million
2000 - $10 million revenue, operating loss of $219 million
2001 - $3 million revenue, operating loss of $273 million
2002 - $4 million revenue, operating loss of $81 million
2003 - $11 million revenue, operating loss of $65 million
2004 - $13 million revenue, operating loss of $62 million
2005 - revenues finally started growing for real, because they bought some with their own stock, and then were acquired by another company end of 2005/beginning of 2006

Total for the six full years:

Revenue = $42 million
Losses = $751 million

That basically means the company spent $793 million in order to get $42 million of revenue. Think about those numbers for a second. If you're providing a service, and people are paying you 5 cents for every dollar you spend, well, maybe that's not such a great business to be in.

This book's an engaging and well-written chronicle of one of the shining examples of bubble era craziness. I'm not at all downplaying the truth or value in the general lessons, in the growing pains & emotional reversals of fortune Wayne goes through, and I'm not trying to pin the blame on him for all the missteps. I just hope that aspiring entrepreneurs who read this book balance it out with one on a business that worked, because there are a lot of those that make for interesting reading too, and luck isn't the only thing that distinguishes their trajectory from this one.

I am proud to say this is one of my favorite books in a long long time. I read it in one day and found every page and every experience not only realistic but enlightening. I will search for more books like this.

As a would-be entrepreneur, I'm at my local (independent) bookstore, sipping coffee and doing a quick scan of the selections in the Business section.

And just like last time I was here, there's nothing new - the same old "yeah-sure-ok" stuff. But wait, down on the bottom shelf, there's a new one with an interesting title, "Starting Something". Yeah, that's where my entrepreneur head is at. So, while I finish my coffee, I pick it up and sample a chapter or two, and I realize have to read this book.

So I bought it, started reading it and I couldn't put it down. It is really cool to hear this tale told with such honesty and reality. It's sort of like he's sitting across from me, telling me this true story about how he made a few hundred million; how he lost a few hundred million and you can totally relate to the guy (Wayne McVicker).

For ringside seats at the corporate equivalent of building a prize fighter, read "Starting Something". Get honest, direct, clear insights into "the game". Nobody teaches you this stuff in school.