Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet

by Michael Wolff (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1998

  $3.35

  A first-person Hit & Run for the Internet industry, this is the wickedly funny tale of one man's journey from rags to riches in the Wild West atmosphere of the Internet business -- written with the enthusiasm and candor of Liar's Poker.

  In the bare-knuckles world of Internet start-up companies, only the wiliest entrepreneurs can survive. Since a promising company can go public for hundreds of millions of dollars, the stakes are high -- but the search for capital to keep a new business afloat can tax the ingenuity of even the most resourceful deal-maker.

  As he scrambled to finance his own fledgling company, Michael Wolff, journalist and founder/CEO of Wolff New Media, knew he had gained access to the seminal business story of the 1990s. In Burn Rate, he portrays the most colorful key players in this frenetic industry: Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, founders of Wired, who seem more like cult leaders than entrepreneurs; Steve Case and Bob Pittman, who head AOL, the industry giant and most dysfunctional company in the nation; Walter Isaacson and Norm Pearlstein, the new media tsars at Time Warner; and others ranging from smooth Wall Street bankers to jittery kids with limitless enthusiasm, but precious little experience running a business.

  Wolff wryly observes exploits in the web world that are as celebrated as those of the high-flying Wall Street traders of the 1980s.

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $3.35

  Michael Wolff was a journalist and writer; in 1998 he is a journalist and writer again. But in the first half of the '90s he was an Internet entrepreneur, Chairman and CEO of Wolff New Media. This is Wolff's story. BURN RATE is hugely informative about the world of the net and the web, search engines, closed systems, online pornography; it is also incredibly funny. As readable as a novel, BURN RATE is an all too human story of one man, at first idealistic and naive, then corrupted and increasingly cynical, and eventually burned out and tired, and of a world that bears as much resemblance to the school playground (not least in the age of it's major players) as it does to the world of conventional businesses. If there is one book which tells us about what is going on in the complex and confusing struggle for the future of the Internet it is this one.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1998

  $3.35

  Michael Wolff was a journalist and writer; in 1998 he is a journalist and writer again. But in the first half of the 90's he was an internet entrepreneur, Chairman and CEO of Wolff New Media, a minnow in the pond of internet companies, valued USD 150 million. A story of a strange and surreal world in which companies are valued only in terms of their promise and their hype, because no-oneknows who is going to win the battle for control of the internet, if it can be won at all, and noone has yet worked out any way tomake serious money out of it. Wolff knows far more of internet than we do and is willing to share it, but, unlike almost everyone involved in this brave new world, he is longer trying to sell anyone anything, neither a stake in his business, nor a dream of theelectronic future, nor a dream of vast electronic profits. Burn Rate is hugely informative about world of net,web,search engines, closed systems and online pornography, being incredibly funny, and is as readable as a novel. If there is one book that tells us about what is going on in the complex and confusing struggle for the future of the internet it is this one.

• New

  Paperback
  1999

  $20.55