Dot.Bomb

In 1999, at the pinnacle of dot.com fever, David Kuo was invited to walk through the magic portal. It was a huge Internet start-up called Value America, and in his new job as communications SVP, Kuo would spread their gospel: a new kind of retailing, linking customers directly to distributors or other middlemen. Ahead for Kuo lay the chance to be part of a new business paradigm. Not to mention the riches when his stock options bore fruit.

Dot.Bomb is the amazing story of the Internet gold rush as it could only be told by an insider. David Kuo saw it all: the sky's-the-limit optimism, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent in a giddy grab for eyeballs and market share, the investors slavering to be on the inside, the belief that there really were new rules. He also saw what happened when gravity reasserted itself, Wall Street demanded results, and flaws and failures that had been glossed over suddenly loomed huge. In the blink of an eye, Value America crashed back to earth, filed for bankruptcy, and was gone.

David Kuo's account of his days and nights at Value America captures with the intensity of a great novel the people who made this such a powerful experience with their incredibly hard work, their genuine belief, and their humor. Just as vividly it portrays their unbridled greed, wretched excesses, ego-driven blunders, and unmitigated power grabbing.