dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath [Hardcover]

J. David Kuo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2001

J. David Kuo had a ringside seat at one of the biggest busts of the Internet age. Value America (NASDAQ:VUSA) was supposed to revolutionize retailing by using the Internetno more retailers or distributors needed. Fred Smith, legendary founder of Federal Express, called it the best business model hed ever seen and invested millions of dollars. In a few short years, the company raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars before a spectacular crash.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Anyone who stumbled through the Web's earliest days--as either a starry-eyed entrepreneur, investor, or employee--will find plenty to recognize in J. David Kuo's insightful and entertaining dot.bomb. Wrapped in the tale of Value America, Craig Winn's wildly unsuccessful bid to hop aboard the Internet revolution in 1997 and totally remake retailing, the book paints a clear picture of the way optimism and wishful thinking became fatally intermingled in the rush to mine the gold supposedly buried deep within this glowing, new electronic medium. And Kuo, formerly the company's senior vice president of communications, knows the story intimately and shows here that he also knows how to tell it.

"The single goal was to build scale, build the brand, and become the Internet behemoth... overnight," he writes in describing how Winn, a traditional businessman with traditional ideas about building a traditional company, was sucked into the day's unbridled cyber-fervor as he tried to assemble his vision of a one-stop electronic shop that took advantage of all the Net's imagined bells and whistles. "[But] Winn had more competitors than he imagined," Kuo continues. "In Silicon Valleys, alleys, and corridors, retailers, technologists, and bankers were creating dot.com companies that would sell pet food, lingerie, books, electronics, discount items, luxury items, home-improvement items, furniture, and everything else imaginable. All those companies were already operating on new Internet math. Winn had to catch up."

In the pages that follow, Kuo vividly chronicles the heady years that came just after Michael Wolff's pioneering Burn Rate era, and he does so with just as juicy an insider's perspective (although without the rancor and animosity that such an experience often engenders). There also are plenty of practical lessons here. One strongly suspects, however, that much like those brought back from gold rushes to Sutter's Mill, these also will go largely unheeded when the fever spreads again. --Howard Rothman

From Publishers Weekly

The publishing industry's newest genre the dot-com memoir sees its latest offering in Kuo's account of his tenure at "e-tailer" Value America. Kuo joined the company as senior v-p of communications in the spring of 2001, shortly after the company's IPO made prospective millionaires of its shareholders. But the company couldn't live up to its hype: despite claims of an "inventoryless" retail revolution (shipping directly from manufacturers to consumers), Value America was chronically unable to track orders, slow in delivering shipments and wracked by internal dissent. Still, this was the dot-manic golden moment, when the prospect of making "gold simply by peddling sand" was too alluring (even "somehow erotic"). Eventually, of course, Value America declared bankruptcy, in August 2000. Kuo expertly grafts a dramatic sensibility onto this familiar boom-and-bust story, drafting exchanges between Value America's major players like scenes in a novel. Craig Winn, the company's charismatic, ambitious, fatally flawed hero-founder, seems worthy of a Greek tragedy. This entertaining, novelistic approach does much to hide the book's single disappointment: Kuo apparently wasn't very important to Value America's fortunes. He worked there for less than a year; aside from a brief prologue, he doesn't personally appear for almost 90 pages, three years after the company's founding. His imaginative reconstruction (quotations, eyewitness accounts, near-omniscient observations) may bother readers concerned with historical accuracy. But those vicariously seeking the thrill of the 20th century's most dynamic business period will find Kuo a good storyteller and an engaging guide.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown; 1st edition (October 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316507490
• ISBN-13: 978-0316507493
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,769,309 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Employees Perspective, November 17, 2001

By 

Thomas J. Starnes - See all my reviews

This review is from: dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath (Hardcover)

I signed on as an executive with Value America at the IPO and stayed until I was laid off on the day the company declared bankruptcy. After more than a year, the memories of that experience are still quite vivid.

I thoroughly enjoyed David Kuo's writing style and think he has done a terrific job of capturing what truly was a ".Bomb". While a couple things might not be exactly correct, I don't recall a single material inaccuracy. Particularly accurate are his portrayals of Craig Winn and Glenda Dorchak. ".Bomb" is both entertaining and insightful. I highly recommend it.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent first-person lesson of Value America, October 29, 2001

By 

Peter Lorenzi (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath (Hardcover)

A wonderful book, written with humor and sadness. Humor stems from the author's style and the now-apparent, foolish ambition of Craig Winn and his Value America colleagues. Winn wasn't alone, and maybe 'ambition' is too kind. "Arrogance" might be a better term, shared by a lot of egomaniacs posing as entrepreneurs, launching dot.coms in the late 1990s. Sadness, because it would have been such a nice story if the tulip mania bubble didn't burst, and all of us were today equally drunk with wealth from these new economy firms.

Strangely, some of this reads like ancient history. Value America came and went so fast, determined to be the marketplace for the new millenium, the web site for everybody, satisfying shoppers' seven 'needs', doing four important functions perfectly, and never holding any inventory. First hints of the real mess they did have in inventory postponed their original IPO in 1998, only to see Value America rush right back into the IPO market in April 1999, with visions of billions of dollars in stock value at a time when $30 million in quarterly sales (along with millions more in losses) constituted their entire revenue stream. And most of that business was over the phone!

Winn comes across as a man easily impressed by himself. Within months of initial signs of success, he has his gubernatorial campaign laid out and his plans to be president by 2008 are going full steam ahead. From brief conversations with Henry Kissinger and Bill Bennett, Winn thinks he has a campaign advisory team. And all the time Winn ignores the fact that his business model is not working, his basic assumptions are incorrect, and his disbelief as to his naysayers is misplaced.

The concept was simple, elegant and very marketable to the venture capitalists convinced that they only had to be right one in twenty times and they'd still come out rich. Only the seductive pitch lacked details, specifics, and good-old-fashioned business sense. Welcome to "due diligence".

A must read for those who are all-too-quickly forgetting the hard e-commerce lessons learned from 1998 to 2000.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Frighteningly Accurate Tale of a Dot-com Gone Bad, November 14, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath (Hardcover)

I was a "Value American" and thoroughly enjoyed this book (though I had a few panicked flashbacks while reading it!). Kuo accurately depicts the personalities involved in this company--especially Craig Winn's (Upon my second meeting with Winn, I knew something was wrong with him--that he was not to be trusted--I probably should have listened to my instincts, but I stayed, inspired by many other people--such as CEO Tom Morgan. Kuo's depiction of Morgan as a smart, stand-up guy is right on.)

Though the drama that unfolds in Kuo's book may seem unreal, I assure you it wasn't. Kuo captured the eccentricities of senior management, as well as the electricity of the staff--everyone was family there--everyone was excited to work for VA.com and was dedicated to the vision, which makes its failure even more heartbreaking.

Kuo does a great job of explaining the traps that senior management fell into... the supposed "new rules" for dotcoms on reporting financials to the investor community... the risks posed to a company run by an egomaniac with no common sense... and the battles and alliances among senior staff that changed on a daily basis.

Kuo's book is a fun, wild ride--better than fiction. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the "new" economy... as well as any MBA students and profs, who may themselves have big ideas about starting a "new new thing." There are many lessons to be learned here. Enjoy.