The Venture Cafe

Victor Cruz writes "If there is one thing I can't stand, it's watching a bunch of rich, fat, overpaid, overhyped dot-con executives blathering on and on about some "business lessons" they supposedly learned while they were out wasting millions of dollars of venture capitalists' money. When I came across Teresa Esser's new book, "The Venture Cafe: Secrets, Strategies, and Stories from America's High-Tech Entrepreneurs," I thought it was going to be that same thing all over again." Read on for the dramatic conclusion! The Venture Cafe: Secrets, Strategies, and Stories from America's High-Tech Entrepreneurs author Teresa Esser pages 280 publisher Warner Books rating 9 - reads like a novel reviewer Victor Cruz ISBN 0-446-52783-1 summary Non-fictional accounts of entrepreneurs' struggles and triumphs

Oh, no, I thought. Not another one of these rags-to-riches, I've-got-mine and-so-now-I'm-going-to-rub-your-face-in-it type books.

Thanks, but I've had enough. And then I took a moment to actually read this thing.

Turns out that this Teresa Esser isn't even an entrepreneur -- she's the wife of an entrepreneur. So what business does she have trying to tell me how to start a company?

Esser watched her husband start an Ethernet telephone firm that was eventually sold to 3Com for $90 million. After the company was sold, she spent three years interviewing 150 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and high-tech headhunters about how a person can start their own high-tech company.

She interviewed members of the MIT blackjack team, asking them what it was like to gamble with other people's money. That's what the high-tech entrepreneurs were doing, you know, when they were financing their businesses with venture capital.

A lot of these new companies wound up going out of business. But some of them did not. Some of the new companies ACTUALLY SUCCEEDED at creating wealth for their investors -- including their venture capitalists, which more often than not happen to be pension funds.

So, when these high-tech entrepreneurs succeed at solving a problem and creating a solution and getting the product to market, and achieving a liquidity event, they make money for their investors.

There are a lot of business authors who spend half of the book thanking their wives for putting up with their obnoxious behavior and the other half bragging about how great they are.

Teresa Esser doesn't brag, really. I have to say, I admired how candid Esser was when she was talking about serious problems, like the time her husband got burned out and had to leave his company.

This was obviously a very painful experience, but she lays it all on the line. Esser didn't have to go back and dredge up those repressed memories about what it was like when her husband was on the verge of losing control of the technical direction his company was taking, and freaked out and asked Esser to turn off the electricity so that they would have to prematurely end an annoying board meeting.

She didn't have to fly to White Plains, New York and convince the God of high-tech headhunting, Chuck Ramsey, to spill the beans on how exactly you convince an top-ranked executive to leave his job and join a high-tech startup.

But she did.

She could have spent the past three years lying on the beach in the Bahamas, drinking pina coladas and putting on sunscreen. Instead, she schlepped around Boston's financial district, asking jaded venture capitalists how an unknown entrepreneur could increase her chances of obtaining venture capital financing.

You know, most of these dot-com brag books make me sick. But I have to say, this one made me laugh.

I liked the story about the rat. These two kids started a company out of a disgusting apartment in Philadelphia and they tried to have a formal business meeting with a director of new business development from a Wall Street financial firm, but it was hard because they had these twelve-inch rats.

When the director of new business development came to visit, they didn't even have any clean cups to serve him tap water in. That story was funny. They gave the director of new business development a dirty dinosaur cup that they had gotten free from Burger King. And then he left. And the guys tried to figure out what had gone wrong with the meeting.

I mean, okay, okay. It's hard to start a new company. But with a book like this, at least you know that you're not the only one going through hard times.

To go through your own hard times, you can from The Venture Cafe from bn.com Also, check out The Venture Cafe web site. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit yours, read the book review guidelines, then hit the submission page.

Comments

it's watching a bunch of rich, fat, overpaid,

[Chacham]

it's watching a bunch of rich, fat, overpaid, overhyped

Until here I thought you were talking about union workers.

dot-con executives

Well, they are usually a waste, but you should calm down before you post something. I almost thought you were CmdrTaco.

Re: it's watching a bunch of rich, fat, overpaid,

[Chacham]

If it wasn't for unions, we wouldn't have the 40-hour work week, paid sick time, or probably any other benifits.

Possibly. Workers sticking together for their own rights is a good thing. Being forced too, as in a union, is not. But to each their own.

Oh wait...I'm on Slashdot, talking to a bunch of young single males with no familes or social lives who are either independant contractors or H1B workers....

I agree with you on the young single male part. I believe most slashdotters are of that class, and thus support free software as they support Socialism. A few more years, and they'll make a real choice. Whether they change or not is irrelevant, but at least they'll understand more about their decisions.

Your comment itself, however, I believe is contradictory. The young crowd *wants* unions. How else are they to get high paying jobs without working for a few years? From reading /. comments in the past, I'd guess most slashdotters want unions.

Read on for the dramatic conclusion? Sheesh!

[dmccarty]

Read on for the dramatic conclusion!

Kind of reminds me of those cheesy kung fu movies you see at the video store with a description like:

• Don't miss the exciting last half hour, in which it is revealed that the brotherhood of Purple Shaolins was actually founded by Tsao Houxi!
• Make sure to watch the dramatic martial arts conclusion as Red Daggers Li at the last second defeats Black Dragon Xu!

Or my personal chrisd favorite:

• Hey folks, "she" is actually a he!!!

I mean, okay, okay. It's hard to start a new company. But with a book like this, at least you know that you're not the only one going through hard times.

And this "dramatic conclusion" ends with a Joe Pesci line--okay okay okay--that I would've recognized as terrible writing when I was nine. Hey Slashdot, since you're posting book review stories by the uneducated, can my little brother write one?

Re:Read on for the dramatic conclusion? Sheesh!

[L. VeGas]

Oh, man. That is funny. What drama! What suspense! At first I actually thought he wasn't going to like the book. Fortunately, he "took a moment to actually read this thing". It's that kind of research that makes the difference between a good and great review.

VC's usually made out like bandits

[Anonymous Coward]

The VC firms usually made out pretty well on the dot-com's. When the dot-com went public at $410 per share, the VC cashed out. VC's, broker's, and investment banks made tons of money while the personal investor totally fleeced.

Of course, one might have suspected that something untoward was happening. If a company goes public at $14 a share and closes at $400, the company has been done a tremendous disservice by the VC and investment bank. The money is supposed to be going to capital for the company. The company shares should have been priced at $400. The company looses, and the investor looses. The VC, broker, and investment banker win! The VC wins by offloading a loser company at tremendous gains, the broker wins with commisions on a grossly overvalued stock, and the investment bank wins by taking a stock public and retaining lots of options at $14.

What is the message/point of this book?

[GuyMannDude]

I had a difficult time understanding what this book "does" for the reader from this review. Is it simply a collection of stories of people who succeeded and those who didn't. Or does she provide some kind of analysis and state what she thinks were the important reasons for success?

I would be very interested if this book postulates some reasons (even though it must always be remembered that they are her opinions and not facts) but if it's just a collection of stories, then why should I buy this book? I can read all about the rediculous wastes that went on during the dot-com years in the newspaper. Or see that one documentary movie whose name I forget now (you know, it was that one where the filmakers planned on following the success story of a startup only to end up capturing the true story of a dream gone bad).

Hey, if anyone has some theories about what seperated the winners from the losers, please post a reply to this message. I'd be interested in hearing them. I was never involved in the dot-com bust (except via the stock market) so I really "missed out" on an important lesson here. And I'm not convienced that this book would help me out.

GMD

Re:What is the message/point of this book?

[mfujie]

The movie (documentary) was called Startup.com

Re:What is the message/point of this book?

[Target Drone]

There is a sample chapter of the book that you might want to read to see if it interests you. The FAQ also has lots of interesting advise.

I was never involved in the dot-com bust (except via the stock market) so I really "missed out" on an important lesson here. And I'm not convienced that this book would help me out.

You should probably buy the book then. Personally I've gone through 6 jobs in the last 3 years. All of them .coms and all of them have gone bankrupt while I've been working for them. I've learned an awful lot about what not to do when starting a business. I know I could get a job working for a more stable company but I like working for small startups. You just have to keep a few things in mind.

• Don't accept a reduced salary in exchange for more stock options. You need to be able to pay your bills and you don't want to end up in the hole if/when the company goes under.
• When the shit hits the fan don't get stressed out. It's not your fault that the company is going down the tubes.
• Don't rock the boat too much. I've worked for a few companies that have a really bad idea for a product. Like the company that had a toolkit so you could easily create WAP enabled web sites. Problem was the sample "hello world" included with the kit was over 1000 lines of code. I tried numerous times to point out to management that a toolkit is supposed to make things simpler not more complex but they just didn't get it. Anyway, when you see management making a mistake a good employee will bring it to their attention but ultimately management has the right to screw things up.

You haven't lived until you've worked for a dot com. I'd also highly recommend reading How to Crash and Burn your Java Project. I didn't write the article but I was on the Java project that inspired it so I know that it's based on a true story.

Re:What is the message/point of this book?

[Asprin]

Hey, if anyone has some theories about what seperated the winners from the losers, please post a reply to this message. I'd be interested in hearing them.

I have a theory - no, it's actually a conjecture. You see, I have no evidence, no experience and no real business training, and I may even be painfully restating the entirely obvious.

However,

there's a lot of world to be seen driving from the back seat of the "Monday-Morning-Quarterback Express", so here's my thought:

IMHO, the ones that survived (Yahoo, Amazon, etc. - even /.!) didn't try create markets by throwing money around. They started small with a useful idea (sometimes as a hobby, not even intending to end up 'in bidness') and grew from there, pulling in resources like IPOs and VC when the price of doing so made sense to accomplish a specific bidness goal. The companies that exploded were speculating heavily on being 'first' over being 'good'.

The key is 'sustainable growth'. If you look at a company as a bucket with a faucet dumping money in the the top and a hole letting money out the bottom, few .coms even tried to make the whole in the bottom smaller before adding more money in the top - and many didn't *have* a bottom to begin with. In short, they were too busy making money to fix the problem with their bidnesses.

I remember a famous Wall St. investor (don't remember which one - Warren Buffett, maybe?) said that when investing, you make the money when you BUY the stock, not when you sell it. Same goes for running a company - it's the EXPENSES that decide whether startups live or die, not the income. How much are Aeron chairs on Ebay this week?

I really don't think the .com bubble was any different than any other mad-lemming-kung-fu bidness debacle, except for *scale* -- it was about computers and technology, so more people than usual were ignorant enough to pony up the dough to spin the wheel on 'the future' without understanding what they were buying.

Hmm, she's not bad looking either

[dolphinuser]

Now, we all know what Slashdot readers want to see ...

Grrrr

;-)

So you can ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Is it simply a collection of stories of people who succeeded and those who didn't. Or does she provide some kind of analysis and state what she thinks were the important reasons for success?

... if it's just a collection of stories, then why should I buy this book?

So you can get a few raw facts and draw your OWN conclusions about what works and what doesn't?

Re:So you can ...

[GuyMannDude]

So you can get a few raw facts and draw your OWN conclusions about what works and what doesn't?

There's certainly something to be said about that point of view. Indeed, almost immediately after my original post I realized someone was going to say this. However, it's the "few raw facts" part that bothers me. The review says that the author spent 3 years and interviewed 150 people involved in the dot-com story. I guarantee that she didn't commit each of those 150 stories to paper. I suspect that she just took the most shocking (e.g., the rat story) and wrote about them. And I sure as hell am not going to spend 3 years myself to figure out the facts. The bottom line is that when I read something, I expect the author to give me their "expert opinion." Now I want to emphasize that I am not going to mindlessly accept and assimilate that opinion. I do want to see some good supplementary logic and some case histories. But in my case (someone who was not involved in the dot-com crash) I have NO experience and really do have to rely heavily on someone elses. This is actually the purpose behind my post. Remember I asked for slashdotters to submit their opinions, knowing full well that there is going to be a lot of disagreement. I reserve the right to accept any or none of what I see.

I like to read other people's opinions (provided that I respect them as intelligent and have some knowledge of what they are talking about). That's why I come to slashdot: we've got ample amounts of people from both camps here (and for those of you who think I'm karma-whoring by praising slashdot, I've nearly got my 50).

Bottom line: I agree that you have a point but I am skeptical that this book (or any book) which is simply a collection of "a few raw facts" is going to provide me with a statisically significant amount of data from which to formulate a theory.

GMD

Re:So you can ...

[sabinm]

I have'nt read the book. But I do know some things about Dot Coms. And I'll tell you something important. It's not a big deal to go out of business. Most ventures fail. Most enteprise businessmen have a business failure twice in their career. The most damning fault of all dot comm companies is that after failure, they all gave up. And we (yes, I too) spent time making fun of them instead of realizing that business failure is a fact of life.

If I had a chance to grab my boss, I'd tell him a couple of things: DO NOT separate the techs from the non techs. Techs are not gods or even the trump card. Techs will not one day rule the world. The world will be ruled as it has always been ruled , by the three Ps: Politicians, Priests and Poets.

Concentrate on your SALES FORCE. A lot of programmers, sys admins, some execs who got their job the easy way, don't think a sales force is nessecary, as if their product would sell itself. NO PRODUCT EVER SELLS ITSELF. Get able, hard-working people staffed in your sales force, and get a good sales manager. Make sure the sales force uses the product. They don't have to be technical. Most sales are not to technical entities, but to non-technical businesses.

Pay/train your customer service/tech support well. Don't skimp on tech support. You don't want your coders having to solve tech's problems, and you don't want your tech support handling angry clients. Use the right tool for the right jobs. Don't hire techs for customer support. Don't promote people to tech support who do not have good problem solving skills. If they are good customer service reps, give them a promotion, or a raise, but don't put customer service reps in your tech support division. Keep your programmers programming and not answering tech-support questions.

Reward consistently, expect more. Don't give 10,000 bonuses unless the people deserve it. If everyone owns Porches, how can you tell who's your hardest worker? Reward excellence with excellence, reward laziness with the boot. When someone screws up but works hard, help them, don't punish them, but don't give them financial incentive if they havent generated revenue. When they generate revenue, then reward financially.

Make do with less than high tech. Companies went out and bought cisco 8500 switches and 7200 routers. The bought service contracts for thousands for each. They had a total of fifty employees and no high bandwidth utilization. Spend what you have and make do otherwise. Don't buy your equipment outright. Go to a holding company and lease if from them. It's cheaper in the long run if you plan to expand within five years. Remember fixed costs are zero in the long run. Spend as little as possible and get as much as possible.

I'm not saying that the DOT COM period would have been as great as we thought, all I'm saying is that a lot of good companies went down with the bad because of poor planing or people like me on the side lines saying: "I knew they'd fail". It's okay to fail and even to be an inexperienced company. But for what it's worth, get experienced financial and legal advice at least and manage your company like a BUSINESS and not like a chess club.

Re:So you can ...

[budgenator]

You forgot having an actual product or service that is not only sellable, but not given away for free. Seems to me that a lot of the dotGones had business plans that was only Blue Smoke and mirrors and we know how far BS will get you.

Re:So you can ...

[ahde]

Despite the quickly passed buck, most of the dotcoms were conceived, build, and run by that blesses sales force of yours, not the techies. Sure, the techies got $50,000 salaries, $700 chairs, and free tshirts, which probably impressed alot of dudes who theretofore had only worked at 7-11 and hacked in their mothers' basements, but the reason they were able to surf for pr0n all day and buy cool routers they didn't need was because their ignorant bosses were all fresh out of school MBAs with family connections who changed a few words on their senior projects and got millions in VC funding.

Re:So you can ...

[moosesocks]

While I agree with you on every aspect here, I find it necessary to add another point:

While some of the dot-coms had a great sales force, they lacked an actual useful product. Just look at all the dot-coms which advertised at the super bowl.

Look at AOL. Do they have a good product? Sure, we see their ads everywhere (tv, radio, mail, billboards, milk cartons, and the list goes on), but how many AOL users are even aware that alternatives exist? Those who do usually end up switching ISPs. Does Dell really make computers which are superior to the ones made by my local OEM - are they actually easier to use?

On the flipside, look at TiVo. They have a revolutionary product which wasn't marketed as good as it could have (I was skeptical about it until I actually used one, and then got one for myself). Definitely a marketing failure.

Same thing with AMD processors, which are in many ways (but not all) superior to Pentium chips - AMD only made ONE television ad, which I believe did caused a sales increase. Until last year, most people had never even heard of an athlon, or simply dismissed it as worthless crap (god, I hate people who make judgments such as that so quickly without thought). Intel runs ads for their chips (which advertise features of their CPUS which either don't exist, or have existed for over 4 years (processor that enhances the internet.... plllleeaaase)

A good example of a company which has successfully intergrated their marketing department and programmers is apple. They run a healthy amount of advertising, create an appealing product, as well as creating a good, useful, quality product. Look how apple has been working its way back into the mainstream since Jobs took over - when apple stopped advertising, they hit a slump.

Of course, there is a true art to advertising in which the viewer is kept entertained and interested while discovering the true value of the product. How fun is an infomercial to watch? How informative were those mLife ads at the Super Bowl? How enjoyable are the yahoo ads to watch? Yahoo lets the viewer know about their services, while providing humor (Which ties into the product). Even the E-Trade *wasting a million bucks monkey* ad was successful in this respect. Apple's 1984 ad is another good example.

Of course, a start-up shouldn't be advertising at the super-bowl. They don't need to waste money.

And then there's BetaMax...

Re:The Rich and You.

[Tyler Durden]

"It's not a difficult thing to make a lot of money if all one wants out of life is to make a lot of money." -Citizen Kane

...book review stories by the uneducated?

[Anonymous Coward]

...book review stories by the uneducated?

Mmmm, this smells like a person with a pipi complex. Dude, grow up! This is not a technical review, just a general one about a novel like investment-related book. He took the time to read the book and then give us for free his take on it. Short and to the point, what else do you want for this type of book. Hey, Evert has been making a bundle of money for years doing much less reviewing movies and I don't see anyone calling him uneducated. I mean how do you know this guy doesn't have a PhD and/or a ton of working experience. I personally couldn't care less about his background, but it seems that a few folks with a big complex do. Okay, so from now on everyone has to state their educational background (as if it really matters here?!) starting with me...okay, I have a BSEE and an MS in Comp Sci + 10+ years of technical experience. Jee, maybe I don't make the grade to be writing this??! I'll try to complete my PhD next time...

Re:The Rich and You.

[SirSlud]

AMEN brother. This is why those who want to make the mad cash piss me off so much - many of them spend so much time making money that they rarely have the opportunity or curtousey to learn skills and knowledge that is useful to an individual. They end up knowing things and working hard, I'm not arguing that - but they are working hard to make money, and end up only knowing the game of financial gain.

Money makers at the end of the sales pipeline have a 0% chance of making money if their service is not done, or their product is not produced. Service folks and engineers and producers at the start of the pipeline (and the furthest away from the customers' cheque) etc may not be the best at selling, but at least its conceivable that they could do so since they are the only ones who can create the thing you're selling.

Anyhow, I dont think she wrote the book to make the proverbial phat cash - from what I understand about the publishing industry, she would have had opportunities for dozens of better paying safer bets.

Re:dot.com bust?

[eyegor]

Timing is a big factor too.

I went to a .com back in '97 with the hopes of making mega bucks. The companies stock had just split and I had a TON of options as a signing bonus. The stock went up another 25% in the months just after I started. Now it's a tenth of its value.

It was frustrating working with all of the 25 year old tecchie millionaires and the "new-rich" asshole managers. It is almost a caste system now. The "old-timers" who have been there for 5 or more years, and the feeble-minded newcomers who are sweating their lives away chasing the dream they can never have.

I've since left the company. While I was there, I learned a great deal about the realities of the .com experience. Those still left are working longer hours with a higher stress levels and watching their precious options continuing to wither. Sucks to be them. hehheh

REAL reason for dot.com bust

[happyclam]

i think the whole dot.com bust was basically a self-fullfilling profecy.

The real reason for the dot-com bust was revealed in yesterday's article:

"What we found is a disturbing behavioral trend that violates copyright laws and costs billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs every year," BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said in a statement.

No, the "disturbing behavioral trend" was not bad management or wasteful practices... but software piracy!

Re:REAL reason for dot.com bust

[happyclam]

humor, ark ark
nanu nanu

I worked for a union in New Jersey

[DuckDodgers]

Where the janitors earned $15.00 an hour to push a broom. I know intelligent people with college degrees who work longer hours at tough jobs for less money. Nurses, teachers, human resources, data entry... a big chunk of people employed in those sectors don't make that much money.

I worked for a union in rural Pennsylvania, and the low seniority guys were earning $9.50 an hour to not push a broom. The high seniority fellows that earned $13+/hour drove the equipment, while six or seven of the newer guys took turns using two shovels.

I'm not saying unions are all bad, and I'm definitely not saying this country would be better off without them. But believe it or not, some unions abuse employers just as badly as some employers used to abuse their workers.

Re:I worked for a union in New Jersey

[DerekTheRed]

Sounds like those "intelligent people with college degrees" are not intelligent enough to know that they need a union.

But you didn't tell us....

[dmorin]

...did the kids with the rats and the Burger King cup get $5 million in VC money?? :) See, THAT would be a funny story. Granted, funny in sort of a "shoot me in the head now" type of way, but still funny.

Re:But you didn't tell us....

[ahde]

check out atstake.com

They used to be a bunch of kids who posted links to web defacements on attrition.org and freekevin banners.

Reminds me of myself a few years ago

[PeterMiller]

In the early stages of planning an ISP biz about 7 years ago, my partner and I had organized a meeting at his place with our potential bank manager. He lived with 3 other people in a "soon to be condemned" building. We looked somewhat presentable, and the room was semi clean (roaches took a vacation) but I think we were a little concerned when one of his roommates arrived with an underage teenage girl under each arm, and noisily disappeared into his bedroom.

Needless to say we did'nt get that bank all fired up about our business plan.

Re:Reminds me of myself a few years ago

[grytpype]

It involved the underaged girls and a webcam.

Sound like a good book

[serutan]

Thanks for the review. This sounds like a book I definitely want to read. One small nitpick ... "achieving a liquidity event"??? Jeeez.

Re:Sound like a good book

[Eccles]

One small nitpick ... "achieving a liquidity event"???

Perhaps the dot com was a porn site?

Read the sample chapter - didn't like it

[MSBob]

I read the sample chapter on the website and I will not be reading the rest of the book. Bold statements such as this:

"The ideal entrepreneur is not the kind of person that you'd want as a personal friend," Gill tells me. "The phrase we use in England is throwing Teddy out of the pram.' If they don't get their way, they get very upset. Without realizing it, they tend to be manipulative.

"Entrepreneurs have to be completely driven by vision, such that they only see what they want to see. Sometimes businesses go off the rails because they have a CEO who can't see some of the warning signs, but that's why there needs to be a team of at least two. You need the Genghis Khan' CEO and the safe pair of hands' CFO."

prove that those guys are the same dotcom crowd that ruined the tech industry by implementing their silly 'visions'. The very last thing I want is to work for another frigging 'visionary' at my company. All those 'visionary' CEOs were basically pipe dreamers whose ideas were either unimplementable or impractical to the point of being absurd. We all remember the 'visionaries' behind Petsmart, Dr Koop, Boo, March 1st, Viant and so on. They were so blinded by their own ideas that they wouldn't listen to their own (and others') common sense.

Stupid CEOs who think up those 'grand' ideas are the ones to blame for the dotcom crash. Take the example from this book. The paperless train ticket system... Nifty idea with a lot of ridiculous barriers that make it impractical. Most trains tickets are purchased at the station with no security gates (yet) no baggage check in and the whole hoopla that goes with air travel. For that purpose the paper ticket is the natural obvious and efficient solution. But the enterpreneur in the book obviously doesn't see it that way. He's already obsessing about his vision without giving it some clear headed thought.

Re:Don't go too far in the other direction

[MSBob]

I have to say that Ellison and McNealy are visionaries to some extent. They are however very practical 'visionaries' who simply improve upon existing systems instead of venturing into new areas they have no knowledge of. Bill Gates is the master of the 'copy and improve' business model. It's difficult to actually brand him a 'visionary' but his pragmatic approach to computing certainly paid off.

Ellison and McNealy tend to free-wheel a bit more than your average CEO but then again their companies have experienced relatively more up and down cycles. Obviously in case of Ellison it paid off handsomely.

I guess we're saying the same thing. It's ok to have a goal that you strive towards. At the same time it's even more important to be flexible and realise that sometimes you must adjust your ideas for the real world and often dramatically revise your initial plans. Obviously you might go extreme in this direction and catch a corporate attention deficit disorder (vide. Michael Cowpland).

I'm thinking about starting my own company (and a high tech one at that) and been thinking a lot about all these issues. But I just don't think this particular book has the answers I'm looking for or even enough quality content to justify spending my time reading it. And this conclusion I drew from reading the entire sample chapter.

overpaid, underworked, union officials?

[digitalunity]

No. Many union dues are excessively high and really give back very little. I once was in a union. The guilty shall remain nameless.

I had a grievance with the company and I couldn't get the union to give me 5 minutes. They were useless. Not only did they not help me, they weren't helping anyone. We were all underpaid, under-benefitted, workhorses in a respectable job. I'm working 40 hours at $10.50 and I didn't get any benefits, and to top it off my union dues were $46 monthly!

Oh yeah, and the union wasn't an option. Don't want the union? You must not want the job.

The existence of the union was merely a ploy to make new workers think they were being well taken care of. If someone sued, they could just say, "Hey, we have a union. Everyone's in it, and they haven't said anything.". It sucked because of the top union mediators were upper level management. How much freaking sense does that make?

On a scale of 1 to 10, this is a 3

[Animats]

This is one of the lesser business books. There are far better commentaries on the dot-com mess. The new edition of "The Internet Bubble" contains more insight. Especially since the first edition was published before the collapse.

I'd like to see a good "where are they now" book covering the CEOs of disasterous startups.

How to be a HiTech Entrepenuer

[mestreBimba]

I don't need a book for this... I know the secret recipe!

"Go to Menlo Park. Shake a tree. A venture capitalist will fall out.

Wave your hands and say these high-tech buz words.

"Online comerce. B2B. Wireless Internet!"

The VC will give you $4Million dollars.

Hire 20 people, publish lots of hype, stir for six months, and go public.

Your IPO stock will inflate rapidly, and you'll become Mozillionaires.

Your share is $30M dollars. Go to Menlo Park. Climb a tree.

Uma cabaca, um arame, um pedaco de pau!

You are clueless

[Understudy]

Let's get some facts straight.
1. Janitors do not just push brooms.
2. 15.00 an hour is not enough for me to have to unclogged a public toilet.
3. Having to empty the garbage cans that end up getting filled with needles and other dangerous crap. Just to get it to the dumpster 15.00 isn't even close.
4. Having to paint the outside wall in the sun all day because you kid decided to show his spelling skills with a spray can. $15.00 doesn't begin to start to cover.

I have never been a janitor but I certainly appreciate what they have to put up with. And listening to people berate them and what they do shows how clueless people are.

Let me give you a clue here is a plunger. And if you think it is just like home unclogging a public toilet, why don't you volunteer.

Nurses and teachers may be the only ones on your list that deserve the high pay.