Customer Reviews

Starving to Death on $200 Million

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The tale of the rise and fall of The Industry Standard is an entertaining read, especially if you know somebody affected by the dotcom bubble burst, if you were laid off yourself, or especially if you were an employee of the company in question. I just happen to fit all three categories.

The Standard was of course an editorial operation, and this book focuses on the experiences of the editorial staff of which the author was a member. Since I was a part of the technical infrastructure team, I wasn't privy to many of the intricate details. Ledbetter's insights into the editorial staff's point-of-view are interesting and amusing; the basic happenings are all there (extravagant offsite meetings, reckless overspending, internal power struggles, and so on), but with some added first-person (or second-person) details.

I was hesitant to buy (and read) this book at first. Would I want to relive the days of The Standard? Would there be anything in there I didn't already know? Would it be interesting? For the most part, sure. It's not entirely a rehash of the life and death of one company; there are sprinklings of humorous (and Dilbert-ish) anecdotes that should be appealing to anybody who has dealt with the pressures of startups and shutdowns.

I recommend this book highly. While it stands on its own, it will be especially powerful for those of you -- like me -- who were participants in the tumultuous time that Ledbetter chronicles.

While I faithfully read the Industry Standard during its era, I never stopped to think about it as a business. It was clearly successful, and I had thought of it as a lucky benefactor, a byproduct of a real revolution. But what Ledbetter instead shows you is a business that had frankly more real success than almost all the startups it reported on -- the Healtheons, WebMd, Epinions, etc of the era were lucky to do a few million in revenue, and yet in the span of 18 months this magazine went from nothing to over $200 million in revenues, was profitable, had 450 employees, and was actually the highest earning magazine in America. It was almost the opposite of the dotcoms which had millions of readers/users but no revenue -- The Standard has millions of revenue on just a couple hundred thousand readers.

How do you create not just the most successful new magazine in history but actually become the number one earner -- equivalent to winning Rookie of the Year and MVP in the same year -- and then screw it up so badly and get unlucky enough that the business is dead 12 months later? Read this book to find out!

Nowadays, saying a book read more like fiction than non-fiction is a common thing to say about a book, but I have to say the way Ledbetter captures your attention and keeps you flipping pages is astonishing me because I don't read that many non-fiction books. I breezed thorough the first half in what seemed like only a few minutes, and the ending left me wanting to know more about "The Standard" as he refers to it in the book.

It's not uncommon for me to read a good mystery or thriller in 1 or 2 sittings, but I've never had any desire to keep reading a non-fiction book(even a good non-fiction book) for an extended period of time, and in a funny way the epilogue did seem more like the end of a mystery, filling us in on what's happened to the characters since the Standard folded. I read the book (cover to cover) in a couple of hours. I've never read anything by James Ledbetter before, but I've got to figure he's a pretty good reporter, because he managed to capture my attention, and hold it till he was done with me, and in the end I wanted a lot more. Or course, it's possible I simply had nothing better to do.

It's not a 5 star book. It's not going to change my life, and I won't pass this around to all my friends saying "You must read this book!" But as someone who had never heard of the Industry Standard till I opened the book, I came away from it saying, "I want to know more..."

Also, from my point of view, the book was not about the magazine. It was about Ledbetter's journey through the magazine, often shifting from the magazine's rise and fall to humorous stories about his run ins with PR agents, details about stories they published, and tales of a party or event, that he may or may not have attended.

If you do have a chance to pick up this book, you might enjoy the result, not because of the lessons learned, but because the story is just too good to be fiction.

So read this book and loved it. I was a avid reader of Grok and Industry Standard. I was only in highschool and college at the time. I really wanted to understand how could such a great magazine die such a quick death. This book explained a lot of it, but not all of the story. It is a quick read, I finished it very quickly. The problem with this book is: if you were not a fan of the magazine he was involved with, their is no point in reading it...because it does not necessarily give you insight that is relevant outside of that magazine.

Ledbetter was the editor for the European edition of the Industry Standard, so while not an outsider, he spent his time in NYC or London, far away from the San Fran offices,this is not exactly an inside view either.

The result reads like an in depth business journal article (which figures, based on the authors background) by someone with really good connections. There are some interesting stories, some tidbits about what went on in the "fat year" (but not enough) and some amusing insights.

The book falls flat because Ledbetter fails to really explain what went on from the inside. He barely scratches the surface, constantly back tracking, covering himself (no surprise based on the seeming constant threats of libel suits during his tenure) and generally trying to play both sides. He wants to dig up the dirt, but he also wants to continue working in the publishing business. The result is like the version of events an adult would tell a child, the story is the same, the details just get glossed over.

Not the dot.com expose we have been waiting for.

While mildly amusing, there was little in the way of meat in this book. The author was located at either the New York or London office for almost the entire life of the magazine and only met with senior management on a few occasions.

For him to have written a book about the Industry Standard is like me writing a book about [a store] because I shop here.

If you can pick it up used, it might be worth a quick read but you will find yourself skipping pages because the details have little to do with the company and more to do with James explaining his job while there.

Documenting the rise and fall of the Industry Standard makes for an amusing tale. I was hoping for more "inside" stories about the companies that were at the heart of the craziness but this is really a gossip book for those who knew the companies involved. As an avid reader of the Industry Standard, one great piece of information to come out of it is that thestandard.com web site is still in business. It's great source for archival material on the Internet revolution as well as current news and features on those who survived the shakeout or emerged from it.

At one point in this readable, frank book about the rise and fall of the dot-com business newsweekly The Industry Standard, author James Ledbetter cites a definition of "reporting" as something you do when you don't already know what to say. In this case, Ledbetter should have known that he didn't have enough to say and done more reporting. He worked for the magazine through what he describes as The Fat Year and until its demise just a year later. But he worked in New York and London while the headquarters of the publication was in San Francisco. So what we learn about the Industry Standard is what he could see from across the Atlantic or across the continent. The result is that the reader is starved for a lot more inside information. Luckily for the reader, Ledbetter experienced a lot in London that we can imagine duplicated what was going on in San Francisco. The book rings true but a bit hollow.

The rise and fall of the Standard was an amazing, scary, perversely funny story, and I'm glad Ledbetter wrote a book about it. But:

--His role as a NYC- and then London-based editor skews things in a way that hurts the story--he was rarely at the center of things. A book by a San Francisco-based editor would have likely had more of a "You are there" feel to it. The Standard ended up with many dozens of editors, but few are mentioned by name.

--The book is fully of errors, albeit mostly minor ones. Titles are messed up, facts about the Standard's parent company are garbled, etc. Most of these don't have a material effect on the tale, but they don't inspire a lot of faith in Ledbetter's attention to detail.

--I would have liked more detail on the Standard's numerous competitors, such as the Red Herring, Business 2.0, Upside, Line56, and others. These guys get mentioned fleetingly if at all. More context would have helped.

That said, Ledbetter's a reasonably lively writer, and there are times when his distance from the center of things probably gives him perspective.