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Burn Rate : How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet
The founder and CEO of Wolff New Media wryly recounts his struggle to finance his fledgling Internet business in the sink-or-swim environment of the Web world and describes the movers and shakers of the medium. 50,000 first printing. Tour.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
About the author
Michael Wolff
31 books492 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Michael Wolff is an American author, essayist, and journalist, and a regular columnist and contributor to USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and the UK edition of GQ. He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate (1998) about his own dot-com company, and The Man Who Owns the News (2008), a biography of Rupert Murdoch. He co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek.
In January 2018, Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published, containing unflattering descriptions of behavior by U.S. President Donald Trump, chaotic interactions among the White House senior staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.
Michael Wolff is an American author, essayist, and journalist, and a regular columnist and contributor to USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and the UK edition of GQ. He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate (1998) about his own dot-com company, and The Man Who Owns the News (2008), a biography of Rupert Murdoch. He co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek.
In January 2018, Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published, containing unflattering descriptions of behavior by U.S. President Donald Trump, chaotic interactions among the White House senior staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 15, 2008
This is a hilarious and wonderfully enlightening book on the crazy internet "bubble", when everyone said the classic rules of business didn't apply any more. The author takes us behind the scenes to surreal and bizarre (and terribly amusing) meetings with the whack jobs that were running the show. Perfect "fly on the wall" experience and lessons for today's financial meltdown. Lesson: humans don't learn.
June 3, 2013
Less snark and more insight than Wolff's usual material.
January 13, 2022
Before he became one of America’s main Trump chroniclers, Michael Wolff was a failed entrepreneur in the first dot-com boom, and he wrote this memoir of his experience. I was obviously predisposed like a book by a writer-turned-founder. This book isn’t anything too special, but it’s a fun look at what the startup world was like in the 90s, a million years ago.
April 29, 2018
I love Michael Wolff!
May 2, 2020
This book is quite different from "Startup", the other book of this sort that I had read. First, Michael Wolff is a writer and not a technologist, so his point of view on many things is different. Second, Wolff scathingly condemns (by name, even!) many of the people that he interacted with while building his company: VC's, executives at other companies, investors, partners, and even some of his own employees. This lends a very different air to the proceedings, compared to Startup's straightforward narrative. It makes for very interesting reading, however, and Wolff does manage to make the tale funny and gripping.
Another important difference is that Wolff was fucked by his investors (at least, that's how he tells it), while Jerry Kaplan (who wrote "Startup") failed mostly because of the market (and somewhat because of his partners). Gideon Ben-Zvi once told me that starting a company in the US is very tough, because the investors will eat you alive and spit you out for the slightest gain. Michael Wolff's experience seems to support this point of view. For example, during once tough point in the life of his company, when he absolutely had to have some money to meet the next payroll, his investor offers him a paltry sum in return for giving up all control of the company. Read the book to see how this works out.
Another important difference is that Wolff was fucked by his investors (at least, that's how he tells it), while Jerry Kaplan (who wrote "Startup") failed mostly because of the market (and somewhat because of his partners). Gideon Ben-Zvi once told me that starting a company in the US is very tough, because the investors will eat you alive and spit you out for the slightest gain. Michael Wolff's experience seems to support this point of view. For example, during once tough point in the life of his company, when he absolutely had to have some money to meet the next payroll, his investor offers him a paltry sum in return for giving up all control of the company. Read the book to see how this works out.
June 18, 2020
A View from the Trenches...
This book is about Wolff's short-lived foray into Internet entrepreneurship in the mid-90s. In addition to recounting his own company's fortunes, he seems to have been tuned in to just about everything that was going on with the net industry, so it's a great overview of the whole cyber-landscape too. Mainly, it's a chronicle of the moment when the Internet shifted from being a marginalized geekfest to being Big Business.
He has great chapters on Wired magazine, on AOL, on Microsoft, and on his own attempts to secure venture capital for his company. The third chapter, "The Art of the Deal," was hysterically funny and thoroughly horrifying at the same time. At first I thought, reminiscing, that I was at perfectly the right age to have taken advantage of the Internet boom, if I'd had the presence of mind. But then, as I read further, I became more and more relieved that I'd never done so.
This book was published before most of the recent upheavals in the Internet world: The ascendancy and hegemony of IE in the browser wars (after Netscape effectively abdicated); AOL's ill-fated acquisition of Time Warner; and, of course, the "dot-bomb" to which many of us owe our current unemployed status. The book, therefore, lacks the scope and perspective of a historical document, but is very much a "view from the trenches" look at the way it seemed to a smart and thoughtful (and literary) guy who was there.
One of my primary reactions was of nostalgia. Ah, remember when AOL was Mac-only? Not only that, but it was only one of several available online communities: Delphi, Prodigy, CompuServe, Sierra... Remember when it seemed like there were only five of us who knew that AOL and the Internet were not the same thing? Remember when there was no Web? Remember when there was no Amazon? Remember Micropayments? Remember Push? Ah, thems wuz the days.
Most of all, Wolff does a pretty good job of stopping every now and then to take stock, to wonder philosophically what it's all about: Is the Internet media, or just a big telephone? He doesn't figure out the answer, of course, but that's not what philosophy is about. Taking the long view, I think it's books like this that are going to help our society, 25 or 50 or 100 years down the line, figure out what the Internet boom/bust, and the 1990s, were about.
This book is about Wolff's short-lived foray into Internet entrepreneurship in the mid-90s. In addition to recounting his own company's fortunes, he seems to have been tuned in to just about everything that was going on with the net industry, so it's a great overview of the whole cyber-landscape too. Mainly, it's a chronicle of the moment when the Internet shifted from being a marginalized geekfest to being Big Business.
He has great chapters on Wired magazine, on AOL, on Microsoft, and on his own attempts to secure venture capital for his company. The third chapter, "The Art of the Deal," was hysterically funny and thoroughly horrifying at the same time. At first I thought, reminiscing, that I was at perfectly the right age to have taken advantage of the Internet boom, if I'd had the presence of mind. But then, as I read further, I became more and more relieved that I'd never done so.
This book was published before most of the recent upheavals in the Internet world: The ascendancy and hegemony of IE in the browser wars (after Netscape effectively abdicated); AOL's ill-fated acquisition of Time Warner; and, of course, the "dot-bomb" to which many of us owe our current unemployed status. The book, therefore, lacks the scope and perspective of a historical document, but is very much a "view from the trenches" look at the way it seemed to a smart and thoughtful (and literary) guy who was there.
One of my primary reactions was of nostalgia. Ah, remember when AOL was Mac-only? Not only that, but it was only one of several available online communities: Delphi, Prodigy, CompuServe, Sierra... Remember when it seemed like there were only five of us who knew that AOL and the Internet were not the same thing? Remember when there was no Web? Remember when there was no Amazon? Remember Micropayments? Remember Push? Ah, thems wuz the days.
Most of all, Wolff does a pretty good job of stopping every now and then to take stock, to wonder philosophically what it's all about: Is the Internet media, or just a big telephone? He doesn't figure out the answer, of course, but that's not what philosophy is about. Taking the long view, I think it's books like this that are going to help our society, 25 or 50 or 100 years down the line, figure out what the Internet boom/bust, and the 1990s, were about.
July 10, 2015
3+
I find Michael Wolff to be an almost purposefully despicable guy, and he's at his best when describing other despicable people, or horrendous situations. I have a little bit of personal familiarity with the book's main foil, Bob Machinist -- I don't know that guy well enough to have any sense of whether he's that much of an ass, but this book does a stunning job making a private equity financier into a fairy tale villain character within a book that purports to be non-fiction. Also, the visceral conveyance of the desperation of a start-up with its bank account down to the level of the next payroll is very effective, and isthat much more riveting coming from the perspective of the very first wave of Internet start-ups when there was fresh audacity to this sort of culture confidently rollingg forward despite hardly any product concept or technological advantage.
I find Michael Wolff to be an almost purposefully despicable guy, and he's at his best when describing other despicable people, or horrendous situations. I have a little bit of personal familiarity with the book's main foil, Bob Machinist -- I don't know that guy well enough to have any sense of whether he's that much of an ass, but this book does a stunning job making a private equity financier into a fairy tale villain character within a book that purports to be non-fiction. Also, the visceral conveyance of the desperation of a start-up with its bank account down to the level of the next payroll is very effective, and isthat much more riveting coming from the perspective of the very first wave of Internet start-ups when there was fresh audacity to this sort of culture confidently rollingg forward despite hardly any product concept or technological advantage.
July 2, 2011
A manic, quickly pace tale of obsession and bittersweet success at the onset of the Wild Wild Web. At the end of the book, WebTV is the future, but dated or not, it still a good read of fast times and fast fortunes and walking into success without knowing how to grab it.
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April 27, 2011Funny book about raising money and the internet
March 30, 2013
A should-read book on entrepreneurial success stories for the knowledge worker or aspiring entrepreneur.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews