Product Description

The captivating story of the mavericks who emerged from the dot-com rubble to found the multibillion-dollar companies taking the Web into the twenty-first century

Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good is the story of the entrepreneurs who learned their lesson from the Internet bust of 2000 and in recent years have created groundbreaking new Web companies. The second iteration of the dot-coms—dubbed “Web 2.0”—is all about bringing people together. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace unite friends online; YouTube lets anyone post videos for the world to see; Digg.com allows Internet users to vote on the most relevant news of the day; Six Apart sells software that enables bloggers to post their viewpoints online; and Slide helps people customize their virtual selves.

Business reporter Sarah Lacy brings to light the entire Web 2.0 scene: the wide-eyed but wary entrepreneurs, the hated venture capitalists, the bloggers fueling the hype, the programmers coding through the night, the twenty-something millionaires, and the Internet “fan boys” eager for all the promises to come true.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #196733 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-02
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
“No other recent chronicle delivers such intimate, behind- the scenes glimpses into Silicon Valley start-up life.”
—Wired

About the Author
Sarah Lacy has reported on start-ups and venture capital in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade. She is a columnist for BusinessWeek and cohosts “Tech Ticker” on Yahoo! Finance.

Customer Reviews

Just horribly written
The anecdotes in this book are really great, but pretty much everything else is just plain awful. The writing, thesis and "evidence" are all horrible.
I won't even go into the second two, but check out this gem from page 4: "Another contender was Six Apart, founded in 2002 by then twenty-four-year-olds Ben and Mena Trott in 2004." Or this one from page 208 "Peter's two protoges were going to become closer allies or rivals". Allies? Rivals? Maybe both! Include Lacy's obnoxious habits of name dropping people and super exclusive parties she attended, referring to Mark Zuckerburg constantly as "Zuck" and finishing paragraphs with sentence fragments and you end up with a really painful book to read.

nauseating in parts, informative in others
This is a quick and informative read for anyone interested in the new Valley/tech boom. Unfortunately, Sarah comes off as having drunk too much Web 2.0 kool-aid and spends a little too much time gushing about Facebook, which, if she and Zuckerberg are right, will become for the Web what AOL was ten years ago: a walled garden. Also, in the current economic climate, it might sound a little bullish, especially on companies like Slide who seem to have no future. Finally, for a book that only the digerati and other tech-savvy folks will read, it explains some of the new technologies using oversimplified and inapt metaphors.

Could have been more...
It was "okay". It mostly talked about Paypal, Facebook, Digg and alittle about Blogger > Twitter. Some stuff were pretty informative, but it was (insert nice word for fluff here) overall. I already know alot about PP and FB (who doesn't?) but I did not know that the founder of Blogger sold to Google for $10 million in stocks and cashed out for around $50 million. I also did not know that the Blogger Founder started Twitter. Makes sense I suppose. Is it worth reading? Maybe if you're not from Silicon Valley or don't know much about Web 2.0.

Some things were alittle shady - how Zuck, 20, met an important person before he moved to the Valley. How did he meet this tech person who didn't go to Harvard? There are some gaps.

Lacy seems an admirable person, but given her lack of credibility over her article on Kevin Rose in Business Week last year and her disastrous interview w/Zuck at SXSW doesn't make this a sound book based on true facts, but based on assumptions and rumors. Most of this stuff could probably be found on Wikipedia if you look up the companies and founders. Save the money or wait till I donate this book at the local library near you.