A great book about tech entrepreneurs
This is the third book I read about tech entrepreneurs. In fact it is the fourth if I include Inside Steve's Brain (but this one is about a single entrepreneur). The two previous ones were interviews of many, i.e. Betting it all and Founders at Work. The beauty (and at same time weakness) of Once you're lucky, Twice you're good is that is is about web2.0. Is this new step in the Internet development a speculative bubble or a speculative revolution. It is probably too early to say even if author Tracy Lacy (appearing in another post) is quite convinced it is a revolution.
It is a beautiful book because it shows once again the richness of individual connections. I have my own illustration of it in a blog, [...]. Paypal and its founders appear to be at the center of this network. Fairchild had such a similar situation at the beginning of Silicon Valley in the sixties, Apple, Sun, Cisco thereafter.
Another interesting element is about investors. There has been a popular idea that web2.0 was not funded by venture capitalists anymore because the web2.0 business angels who were web1.0 entrepreneurs had learnt their lesson. The situation is more complex as the web2.0 financing shows. Greylock, CRV, Accel but also Benchmark and Sequoia are vey active. Finally, it shows again and again what entrepreneurs are, i.e. passionate, driven individuals and I can only advise reading the epilogue about Levchin's childhood. Quite fascinating...
Great read for tech lovers
I'm emotionally tied to the dot.com bust of a few years back since I work in high-tech and lost my job at a start-up company during the downturn. I saw Sarah Lacy being interviewed about Web 2.0 (the social networking groundswell) and of course she mentioned her book. I ordered it the next day based on a piqued interest in the magnitude and details of the social networking revolution.
I enjoyed the book for several reasons...
1) It's a great source of info on the movers and shakers of Web 2.0. Details of the most widely-used social networking sites and tools are described, along with why they've become popular.
2) The book is also gives great insight into Silicon Valley business patterns and the way a company goes from a good idea through getting financing in various ways to creating millionaires.
3) The book is based on personal interviews with Valley multi-millionaires and presumably-millionaires-to-be. The book acquaints the reader with the emotions resulting from the post-2000 bust where jobs and fortunes were lost. A driving theme throughout is how many of the current revolutionaries fought through their personal tragedies and were slowly able to believe again, nurture a dream and sustain another long upward struggle. I think this would be engrossing even for a non-techie.
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.
Too much Zuck and Ning, got boring after a while
My Twitter review: Zuck is Steve Jobs 2.0, Ning sucks, Slide is boring, Digg missed the boat, and the book was a "meh".
I wanted to like this book, I really did.
Having lived in Silicon Valley from 1999-2003, I identified with the sense of what was old would be new, and that true innovation trumps luck any day.
The book was a somewhat okay account of some of the newer darling dandies of the web (Digg, Facebook) but then droned on about Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark getting lucky with Netscape, then trying (trying!) to reproduce that same magic again with limited success.
This book is okay...I felt it got boring midway through, and then rehashed a bit too much.
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.
(34 reviews)
