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Dot.Bomb
J. David Kuo
Little, Brown, 320 pages, $25.95

Brace yourselves - there will no doubt be a flood of books like this - an "insider's look" at how a promising Internet company rode the money roller coaster and ended the ride flat broke. With all the failures of the past year, there had to be some great, funny, horrific stories to tell.

J. David Kuo's version of the story is about Value America, one of the first e-commerce companies to crash and burn after attaining dizzying heights of financial success. Simply put, "Dot.Bomb" is a tale of greed and excess, from the company's founder all the way down to the author.

By the company's demise, Kuo was senior vice-president of communications, and involved in aspects such as business development. But he was hired well after Value America's founding - he opens the book with his efforts to buy stock in the company the day it went on the market. So he writes about the early days with a somewhat distanced, journalistic voice.

Although the book is written with a breezy, "I was there" journalistic point of view, Kuo covers the early days of the company, complete with quotes, from others' memories. One-fourth of the way into the book, when Kuo is interviewed at Value America for a public relations job, it kicks into first-person recollections. That's when it gets good. I was both repulsed by Kuo's greed and blind naivete, and sympathetic to his plight. Working at an Internet startup can be a crazy, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants experience.

"I'd been on this job… how long? I honestly couldn't remember a time before Value America. I'd been on the job… I squinted my eyes in concentration… almost three months. In that time Value America had faced more crises ad challenges and business decisions that fundamentally affected our future than I would have expected in a year. The dot.com world wasn't so exceptional except in one way - speed. Everything happened all at once and never stopped."

Despite impressive revenues, Kuo recalls a host of excesses that ultimately sank the company. It had ridiculously high advertising costs and thanks to company founder Craig Winn, unnecessary luxuries such as an extravagant campus and a company Lear jet. Winn insisted that the enormous marketing cost was justified to build the brand, and sycophants like Kuo bit hook, line and sinker.

There are subplots. Winn is omnipresent as the flawed visionary driving the company, and his unmasking as a sociopathic liar and micromanager is worth a book in itself. The struggle for the company's fate between the mercurial Winn and his much more sober and steady CEO hired by Winn, Tom Morgan, is the real story behind the company's ups and downs. Kuo in fact ends the book when Morgan is fired in late 1999, and mentions the actual shutdown in August 2000 in an epilogue. A third subplot, some of the managers' religious convictions and the company's concerted effort to court the religious right as a source of customers, is touched upon but ultimately not explained very well.

Kuo mentions the religious overtones at one point but typically segues into a religion of another sort: worshipping money.

"Like a lot of Generation Xers, I wanted a purpose - I wanted to make a difference," he writes. "But in Value America I had found a company on technology's cutting edge that was working with charities and was committed to making America better. It was definitely an idealistic/utopian/pie-in-the-sky feeling, but it was a highly motivated idealistic/utopian/pie-in-the-sky feeling. The fact that I could get rich in the process certainly did not suck."

The Value America story is fascinating - for anyone with a passing interest in business or the Internet, reading the book is like driving by an accident and not being able to turn your head away.

Like last year's "The Leap," a book about the faith and commitment it takes to start an Internet company, "Dot.Bomb" lets us look behind the curtains at how the wizard does his tricks. And having the magic revealed is always worth the effort. We'll see in a year how many other books show us similar view.

This review was published in the Rocky Mountain News, Oct. 2001.