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J. David Kuo.
dot.bomb: inside an Internet Goliath - from lunatic optimism to panic and crash.
Little. Brown. 2001

ValueAmerica.com was supposed to do for e-commerce what Wal-Mart did for retail: blow the competition out of the water. Theoretically an innovative way of piling ’em high and selling ’em cheap, the site was supposed to be the ultimate one-stop shop on the Web. Led by Craig Winn, a marketing dynamo of rare vision and creativity, the company also had serious backing from power players like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and FedEx chairman Fred Smith.

Yet within a year of its launch the company had haemorrhaged over $200 million. What went wrong? Was this just another story of dot-com doom and gloom or a spectacularly conspicuous case of corporate overreaching?

J. David Kuo is a former political adviser and CIA operative who worked as Senior VP of Communications for ValueAmerica.com. As such, he was in the thick of it as fateful decisions were being made, sharing the excitement, the greed, the sense that the future was theirs for the taking. He shoulders his share of the blame, too, and writes about it all in a brilliantly accessible, pacy and entertaining way. Dot.Bomb is the hair-raising, hilarious and humbling story of Value America's fall from grace, and is destined to become the first classic Internet business book – a Liar’s Poker for the online generation.