Michael Wolff, the author of
NetGuide, one of the first major guides to the Net, gives you a tour of this medium that could best be described as "Alice's Adventures Through the Monitor."
Burn Rate is the story of Wolff's transition from journalist to entrepreneur in the Internet business--a business in which the investment elite beat down doors to invest vast sums of money in companies whose chief product seemed to be red ink. Wolff reports that what was being bought and sold was not technology, content, or even concepts. It was the potential to be in on something very cool that may one day be sold to somebody else--despite even more red ink.
Wolff's story could easily have been bitter but is instead both fascinating and hilarious. Wolff's money-losing company's negotiations with Magellan--a search-engine company that Wolff eventually discovers is also financially unstable--are comical. The scene where key big shots from a major publisher fall all over Wolff in their eagerness to buy an all-but-worthless name and database are a complete farce. Wolff is by no means above showing his own foibles. Some of the book's best parts are where he shows himself swept up in the intoxicating flow of a deal and calls home to report developments to his wife. She promptly translates the nonsense into sobering reality.
Wolff takes plenty of time off from his personal journey to explore significant events in the development of cyberculture, such as the transition of Louis Rosetto from a least-likely-to-succeed publisher into the creator of the revolutionary Wired magazine. He chronicles the emergence of America Online from dark horse to dominance, while the efforts of companies expected to be major contenders fade into the background.
His candid view shows it all--the oddball characters in expensive shirts and T-shirts, the crazy dealing, the exhilaration, the heartbreak, and the fear. This would be a wonderful work of satirical fiction if it weren't actually true. --Elizabeth Lewis
After operating a small media company for a number of years in New York City, the author joined the ranks of Internet entrepreneurs in 1994 when he formed Wolff New Media and found himself operating in an industry with few rules, much venture capital money and lots of companies losing that money at a rapid rate. Wolff's own burn rate (the rate at which his company was losing money) was several hundred thousand dollars per month. In an effort to keep afloat, he and his financial backers met with numerous companies about a variety of business combinations ranging from an outright acquisition of Wolff New Media to a partnership arrangement. Wolff failed to reach agreements with such companies as the Washington Post, Ameritech, Magellan and America Online. He describes his negotiations with these firms in a witty fashion that provides readers a glimpse of the operating style of some of America's best-known companies. Wolff's most entertaining account concerns his dealings with AOL, which he calls the most dysfunctional company in the country. Although Wolff (Where We Stand) was an early believer in the ability of the Internet to deliver powerful content to a mass audience, by the time he resigned from his own company in 1997, he had come to see the Net as more of a transactional medium. Combining humor with his firsthand experiences, Wolff has produced a book that fledgling Internet entrepreneurs would be wise to read.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
A well-known net entrepreneur carefully (and wittily) documents his own rise and fall while offering insight into the strange world of e-commerce, where some lose moreAhave a greater capital "burn rate"Athan others.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
An insider's account of the digital revolution, from its earliest days in the late 1980s to its sudden prominence in the media business. Wolff, a journalist and the founder and former CEO of Wolff New Media (Where We Stand, not reviewed), here chronicles both the day-to-day struggles of an entrepreneur and the heady early burgeoning of the Internet. Neither a polemic about the Information Age and the increasingly dominant role the Internet plays in it nor a business manual, his account is a business story, a first-person narrative about the difficulties for anyone of starting one's own business. His instincts as a journalist serve him well in the books conception and in its writing. Realizing the potential of the Internet, Wolff dove in headfirst, only to find himself playing a role in what is perhaps the business story of the 1990s. Like Hollywood moguls of the past, new-media moguls have a flamboyance and verve that Wolff aptly captures. Of one such character he writes, ``He had achieved an air of fabulousness, with a kind of hollandaise richness, even Robert Maxwell ripeness.'' And while Wolff often veers off into rather purple prose, especially when describing players such as Wired founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, his eye for color and detail keeps this rags-to-riches tale amusing. He is at his best when he provides insights into how the Internet industry began to take shape; his observations about Time Inc. and AOL possess an astuteness that only someone long in the know could possibly have. Moreover, Wolff re-creates the sense of excitement--and the attendant chaos--that helped characterize the Internet as the disparate worlds of venture capitalists, college-kid entrepreneurs, and seasoned executives alternately clashed and came together on its behalf. An intelligent and entertaining account of the business and culture of the Internet that skillfully merges a personal tale with the larger story. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
By the standards of the books we usually review on ERCB,
Burn Rate is nearly content-free. You can pretty much make your way through to the last page without ever figuring out what exactly it was that Michael Wolff and his company invented, marketed, or delivered (if anything). The focus throughout is on building "mind share" with the aid of the "Old Media" who are terrorized and yet fascinated by the "New Media," hoodwinking venture capitalists, selling the company or taking it public, and cashing out.
I didn't like this book much at the outset. Wolff's writing seemed arrogant, pretentious, shallow, even narcissistic. But in the end, I was impressed at how well Wolff described his ride on a business, financial, ethical, and emotional roller-coaster--from flamboyance and invincibility, to cynicism and moral bankruptcy (at one point, Wolff swindles one of his investors out of $150K to meet payroll), and finally to despair and disillusionment.
Today, Wolff is biding his time as a columnist for The Industry Standard. It seems safe to predict that although Wolff flamed out spectacularly once, the venture capitalists will be hearing from him again. Despite the title of his book, the Gold Rush Years on the Internet have barely begun. --Ray Duncan, Dr. Dobb's Journal -- Dr. Dobb's Journal
Importantly, the bottom line of Mr. Wolff's story is how he failed to land the really big money, and so Burn Rate contains many lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs. -- The Wall Street Journal, John E. Keefe
Michael Wolff's Burn Rate conveys a sense of the frenetic energy with which he and his business partners try to make money by rushing their efforts to take his would-be Internet company, Wolff New Media, public. By the end of Burn Rate, Wolff acknowledges that he's probably a writer--rather than an entrepreneur--at heart. As for the writing, the book is a name-dropping, tell-all exposé of Wolff New Media's involvement with Internet luminaries and manipulation of Internet wannabes. Wolff's decision to stick to writing is probably fortunate because Burn Rate's best jokes are built on his burning his corporate bridges behind him. -- Upside
Po Bronson Author of The First Twenty Million Is Always the Hardest My god, what a story! Burn Rate is a great, nail-biting read. It kept me up several nights, shaking my head in amazement. The picture that emerges of how business is done in the Internet industry is hilarious and unnerving. At last, we have a written record of that Ponzi-scheme the Internet. -- Review
Wolff skillfully weaves his tale. He makes the cyber world understandable by explaining the jargon without interfering with the story. -- The Philadelphia Inquirer, Michael E. Waller
Wolff, a nimble writer with a knack for spotting colorful details, moves the story along at movie-of-the-week pace. -- The New York Times Book Review, Katie Hafner
[M]ore than the story of his struggle for survival, Wolff's account is about how the Internet beguiled everyone who failed to understand it.... [an] amusing book... -- The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
About the Author
Michael Wolff is the creator of the bestselling NetGuide, one of the first books to introduce the Internet to the general public, and NetBooks, the 30-title series of Internet guides. The company he founded, Wolff New Media, became one of the Web's leading content companies, producing the Web sites Your Personal Net and NetClock. He has written for numerous magazines and newspapers, and is the author of the books White Kids and (with Peter Rutten and Chip Bayers) Where We Stand, which became a six-part PBS series. He lives in New York City with his wife and three children.
