Summary: Dot.Bomb E-Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Herausgeber: Business Book Summaries
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 45

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The must-read summary of J. David Kuo's book: "Dot.Bomb: Inside an Internet Goliath - from Lunatic Optimism to Panic and Crash".

This complete summary of the ideas from J. David Kuo's book "Dot.Bomb" shows how Craig Winn, a retail business founder, predicted how retail would one day be run by technology. To stay ahead of the curve, he founded ValueAmerica.com, which became a pioneer after the spread of the internet. However, success did not last long. This summary tells the story of how ValueAmerica.com went from a frontrunner, backed by companies like Microsoft, to a failed company that crashed and lost hundreds of millions.

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To learn more, read "Dot.Bomb" and learn from the mistakes of one of the biggest company crashes.

Leseprobe

Book Presentation: Dot.Bomb by J. David Kuo

Summary of Dot.Bomb (J. David Kuo)

Book Presentation: Dot.Bomb by J. David Kuo

About the Author

J. DAVID KUO worked as senior vice-president of communications for ValueAmerica.com. He joined the company in May 1999 just after its IPO, and left Value America in February 2000, about six months before the company declared bankruptcy. Prior to that, J. David Kuo was a political adviser and CIA operative.

Important Note About This Ebook

This is a summary and not a critique or a review of the book. It does not offer judgment or opinion on the content of the book. This summary may not be organized chapter-wise but is an overview of the main ideas, viewpoints and arguments from the book as a whole. This means that the organization of this summary is not a representation of the book.

Summary of Dot.Bomb (J. David Kuo)

Part 1

“The mid-90s were an age that no one really knew, but many were beginning to suspect, would be an Age. The Internet and the World Wide Web were without definition but full of wild expectations. While few Yahoo’s, America Online was just a dorky company in a bland Virginia suburb, and the expression ‘dot.com’ sounded odd in conversation, there was an expectant sense that those were just temporary realities – that the Internet was going to change the world, and the retail conducted over it would be the engine. What that really meant wasn’t exactly clear. Only the visionaries could describe the future for everyone else”

– J. David Kuo

In late-1995, Craig Winn, the founder of a couple of retail businesses, had a vision that retail would be dominated by technology, making the traditional retail stores and warehouses redundant. The spread of the Internet seemed to mark the point of arrival for that vision, and Winn decided it was time to launch the next retail revolution. He even had a name for his new company – Value America.

Winn’s original business model for Value America was stunningly simple:

Value America would be a one stop shopping center – where people could furnish a house, buy a car, purchase groceries, do their Christmas shopping, equip an office, etc.Value America would have unparalleled selection – because all the products available would be described in multimedia product demonstrations.Value America would be “state-of-the-art” – with animated personal shopping assistants, voice recognition capabilities and other cutting edge enhancements.

Value America would carry no stock – but manufacturers would ship directly to the consumers.

The challenge, Craig Winn realized, was to get there before anyone else. He put together a 250-page business plan and started speaking with the people he wanted to get involved in the business. Due to the fact Winn had been successful in building two retail businesses in the 1980s (The Winn Company with a turnover of $40 million a year and Dynasty Lighting Classics which went public in the early 1990s once annual sales reached $65 million) he already knew the right people to talk to.

Very quickly, Craig Winn brought on board Rex Scatena, a lawyer living in San Francisco, as founding partner and president. Two other friends, Ken Power and Joe Page, were hired to handle creative design and technology. Winn and Scatena put up $150,000 each to get the company started, with the stock of the company being split 70-percent to Craig Winn, 25-percent to Rex Scatena and 5-percent split between Ken Power and Joe Page. They set up base in Charlottesville, Virginia and by Labor Day 1996, the Value America team was hard at work writing code for their new online business.

“Writing code didn’t mean just deciding what the store was going to look like. First it meant writing the software they would eventually program to create the store. Then it meant writing the technological support structure to make the store run. They had to do it all. The upside was that they could use a commercial Microsoft program as a foundation for some of the work, but for the inventory-less system to succeed, they had to program everything consumers needed to complete an order: take credit-card information, provide digital receipts, route orders to the appropriate brand manufacturers, arrange for shipping – everything. In addition, the technology had to handle everything that could possibly go wrong: partial orders, back orders, mismatched orders, shipping delays. The list of problems, it seemed, were almost limitless. Programming consumed their lives for the rest of 1996 and early 1997.”

– J. David Kuo

While the coding was happening, Winn was out visiting manufacturers trying to get them to pay $15,000 to $50,000 to develop multimedia presentations for an online store that did not yet exist. Needless to say, very few took up the offer. He needed a big brand to come onboard to get the ball rolling. So Winn approached Hewlett-Packard. By April 1997, he had met with HP managers more than 30-times, when suddenly, HP’s general manager made the connection and understood what the Value America business concept would offer.