Product Description

For much of the 1990s, starting up a business on the Internet offered young go-getters with a taste for risk the fastest route to glittering prosperity. Our light-speed economy has made possible a new American dream, to take an idea overnight from the kitchen table to hundreds of millions of dollars in market value. But the desperate Internet entrepreneur knows every day, every night -- that the chances of success and survival dwindle at the same rate as the cash evaporates. Make the right deals, announce the right products at the right time, and the investors will beat down your doors with money. Falter, and the venture capitalists will eat you alive.

Michael Wolff was one of the first to see the potential of the Internet and one of the pioneers of new media. As he labored to build his own company, Wolff, a former journalist, knew he had stumbled on the seminal business story of the 1990s. Burn Rate is about the heart-in-your-throat struggles of being an entrepreneur. It is about witnessing an industry being born: the founding of Wired magazine, the launch of Time Warner's much-touted Pathfinder, the conflict between content centered on the East Coast and technology on the West Coast, the rise of the search engines, the dominance and dysfunctionality of America Online, and the thud of Microsoft stumbling and falling down on the Net.

In the precarious world of the Internet, where income is a rosy projection and profit little more than a hope and a prayer, a company is no better than the confidence it radiates to its potential partners. After the freewheeling early years of the World Wide Web, the financial prospects of fledgling Web businesses collectively dropped in one stunning month when Wired, the most famous Internet company, failed to launch its stock. Wolff found himself at the head of a rapidly expanding company with seven weeks of capital remaining, trapped between the insatiable needs of his business and the chilling machinations of his investors. With the clock ticking, his only hope was to strike a winning deal.

With mordant wit, Burn Rate portrays life on the bleeding edge of capitalism -- a realm where your savior, the venture capitalist, may also be your undoing. A Faustian figure, the venture capitalist reveals to Michael Wolff the secret workings of business, as well as the human dimensions of how companies are made, bought, and sold. But the price he asks in return is steep. He never risks too much of his own money but makes sure that he will profit best and first from the entrepreneur's work.

As Wolff builds his business, you'll get to know the geeks, billionaires, weasels, and, of course, visionaries he meets along the way. Louis Rossetto, the unemployed expat who creates Wired. Walter Isaacson, the prince of Time Warner, who throws the resources of America's largest media company behind the Web. The boy investor, the "dumb money" who backs Wolff's company. Halsey Minor, the executive recruiter who founds a publishing empire on the Net. The CMP boys, the computer magazine publishers who are desperate to get into the Internet game. Robert Maxwell's children, whose high-flying company is one of the first bubbles to burst on the Internet. Even Barry Biller, who advises Wolff that getting in on the ground floor is good only if you're still standing in the end.

Wolff discovers, much to his own consternation, that his work, inspiration, and imagination entitle him to no more than a minor share of his own company's potential wealth. And, in the end, he may only be along for the ride.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #295981 in Books
• Published on: 1998-06-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Amazon.com Review
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

From Publishers Weekly
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.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating book about rise and fall of early net co.
I can see why people were so scathing about it. He doesn't pull punches. He got in bed with financial types he didn't like from the start, and hated by the end. He didn't stay entirely clean himself, and he's surprisingly candid about it. At the end, he is shriven (sort of), leaves the field, walks away from a big pile of money, and returns to writing.

If you read some of the pissy and not so pissy backstory pieces that came out after his book, you're told that he abandoned his employees for his own needs (true, but after many months of pretty much shredding cash, and without any short-term or long-term hope of success). You're also told that he manufactured people, incidents, dialog. Hard to say without having been there. But I've met many people like the people Wolff describes, and I don't doubt that they would act precisely as they are acting in reaction to the book, including denying everything whether true or false.

Brill's Content ran an extremely fatuous piece back in October 1998 that moves me to profanity when I read it; it's attack journalism without balance. The piece quoted many parties' gripes with the book without confirmation except from other parties with gripes. Wolff wrote a pretty funny story about getting the pin stuck in him as Brill tried to maneuver him into the formaldehyde.

It's still unclear to me why people don't want to believe his account of events. I don't know if it's true, but my descent into the Internet maelstrom, during which I met or worked with many interesting content and ecommerce types, confirms the tenor of what he describes. I'm inclined to think that a little dramatic license and a lot of fact inform the book.

A number of reviewers (and Amazon.com customers) describe Wolff's ego as enormous. I don't see it. This book is a bunch of beech branches beating him in the back. He doesn't let anybody off easy - okay the Hoover's folks are nicely presented, as counter example - but he presents himself as the money hungry nut he was during those crazy days. But he walked away from a big pile of cash (as I did, somewhat around the same time, but in substantially different circumstances), and lived to tell the tale. And write a successful book about it, in much the same style and mode of interest as Jerry Kaplan's Startup.

Secret Ceremonies of Internet Financing Revealed!
Believe it or not, not every Internet entreprenuer gets out with a successful IPO. Wolff, a true New Media pioneer, gives us a marvelous insider's view that a winner simply could not provide, and the book is such a great, insightful read, I'm glad he failed so that we can get this peek. So much more than sour grapes, Wolff burns bridges and shows all the players with their masks off, himself included.

A book like this will always receive negative reviews from types who can't trust the motives of anyone who didn't come out a winner, but these same people readily accept as gospel any puff piece that states Steve Case's visionary genius built AOL rather than the marketing side kick with the simple idea sneak into American homes and fill the sock drawers with start up disks. Not every story is pretty, not every success is the inevitable result of brilliance and elbow grease. Do not write off this work because Wolff's business didn't work out. Rather, enjoy his sadder but wiser perspective. Enjoy a glimpse of everything that happens to successes, also, but somehow never makes it into the Business Week cover story.

this is the real thing
I think I've read everything about this business--Po Bronson and Michael Lewis books most recently--and nothing anywhere compares to Burn Rate. First of all, Wolff, either fearless or crazy, doesn't suck up to anybody. Second, this is not just good writing, this is amazing; you start to read the sentences outloud they're so good all kinds of memorable lines stay with you. Third, Wolff's book is about character, the real stuff that makes people do what they do; you recognize the people here, you understand them, they're real--they aren't some model people who inhabit Silicon Valley and the Internet Industry (Lewis's book the New New Thing is all about inventing that sort of model). Burn Rate is brilliant. It makes you sweat it's so good.