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A 'Darwin Awards' for the digital age, a hilarious chronicle of dot-com mania and disaster from the Internet folk hero and fuckedupcompany.com creator, Phil Kaplan. Not long ago, the world was awash with venture capital in search of the next Yahoo! or Amazon.com. No product, no experience, no technology, no business plan - no problem. You could still get 40 million dollars from investors to start up your dot-com. And you could get people to work around the clock for stock options and the promise of millions. Then, around April 2000, it all came crashing down. Phil Kaplan was a dot-com everyman, a programmer, with a bird's-eye view of the erupting bubble. In early 2000 he started fuckedcompany.com, a caustic and sceptical site which follows the layoffs and bankruptcies of hundreds of dot-coms. The site was an instant success. It was named site of the year by Rolling Stone, Time and Yahoo!, and received more than four million unique visitors a month. F'D COMPANIES captures the waste, greed and human stupidity of over 200 dot-com failures. Written in Kaplan's popular and cynical style, the company profiles in the book form a gleeful encyclopeadia of how not to run a business. They also capture a remarkable period of history.
- Sales Rank: #1466644 in Books
- Published on: 2002-04-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.52" h x .80" w x 5.30" l, 1.10 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 208 pages
Amazon.com Review
The graveyard of dot-com disasters is overflowing with grandiose ideas gone spectacularly bad, and Philip J. Kaplan's F'd Companies offers an unapologetically acerbic opinion on dozens of the most outrageous. Kaplan, a programmer turned consultant whose own online dreams began when he launched a bulletin board system for pirated game software back in 1989, pulls no punches as he bluntly dissects Web failures that remain dazzling for their pretentious plans and audacious executions. There are big names like Webvan ("a classic example of PAYING more for products than they were SELLING them for") and Go.com (a "portal to nowhere"), but most here are less well known despite similarly burning through cash like a cyber-brushfire. In language far more explicit than his softened-for-the-bookstore title, Kaplan skewers the likes of Iam.com (which lost $48 million trying to convince models and actors to post their portfolios on the Net), OnlineChoice.com (which spent $20 million to learn consumers weren't interested in group buys of electricity and other utilities), HeavenlyDoor.com (which sunk $26 million into a site peddling caskets and burial plots), and Eppraisals.com (which dropped $15 million on an effort to sell online evaluations of antiques). The result is consistently profane, frequently hilarious, and usually right on target. --Howard Rothman
From Publishers Weekly
"I'm a computer programmer," Kaplan writes. "I'm that dude at your office in the dark cubicle who nobody listens or pays attention to (especially the hotties in marketing)." Kaplan's claim to fame is FuckedCompany.com, a Web site he built over Memorial Day weekend in 2000 to serve as a forum for bad news about Internet companies. His timing a few months after the Internet bubble began to deflate was perfect, and FuckedCompany became an immediate hit. Thousands of fired or about-to-be-fired dot-commers were more than willing to share their horror stories about the collapse of one Internet company after another. He has translated the material posted on the site into a book, offering brief vignettes of the demise of more than 150 Internet ventures. His basic formula includes a description of what the company purported to do (Mercata.com "customers would use the site to band together and purchase merchandise at wholesale prices"), how much money it blew through before going bankrupt and how many people were fired ("$89 million and 100 employees were burned"). Kaplan, 25, attempts to enliven each story with humor, which is often more crude than clever. That many of the stories sound the same is not Kaplan's fault, as most really are: someone comes up with an idea, finds a venture capitalist willing to pour funding into the company despite the flimsiest of business plans, and then goes broke when the money dries up. Although he tries, Kaplan delivers little more than an elegy for the Industry Standard, Pets.com, Contentville.com, Flooz.com, Bid.com and Kozmo.com, not to mention Zing.com, ProcessTree.com and MetalSpectrum.com.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
As the dot-com boom ended, Kaplan established a web site, fuckedcompanies.com, to help keep track of the bankruptcies, massive layoffs, and sometimes ill-conceived ideas that failed. The site began as a joke but was chosen as "Site of the Year" by Yahoo! Internet Life in 2000 and as one of the year's best by Time. Kaplan, now the president of an e-commerce solutions firm, here chronicles the rise and rapid fall of numerous dot-coms. Written in an informal style and sprinkled with salty language, his book explains why each company was formed and why it was doomed to failure. At Pets.Com, for instance, pet owners could order food and supplies; "then I'll watch the dog starve and the cat shit all over the house while I wait for it to be delivered!" Several other dot-coms were fined because they failed to deliver items by the holidays as promised. Included in the sources section are web sites that the author consulted; future editions would do well to include a bibliography of articles and books for further reading. Both fascinating and instructive, this book is recommended for public and academic library collections. Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., NY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A fun, quick read, but hardly a business book
By Benny Choi
...I work for an established and successful software company which happens to be located in a San Francisco district where there used to be dozens of dotcoms around (they're ALL gone now)...the CEO of my employer brings his lunch plate over and asks if he could sit with me for lunch...the first thing he asks, "What are you reading?" Great. Instead of having a Jack Welch or Peter Lynch or even a Tom Peters book in my hand, I had to tell my employer's CEO, who I know reads many serious business books, and, of course, has to run a real technology company with real customers, real products, real profits, real shareholders, real competitors, and real business issues, that I'm spending my precious time and mental capacity reading about dotcom flameouts chronicled with sarcasm and dirty words. Fortunately, he had heard of the website before and I was able to recite off the top of my head a few quick stories of some of the more extreme situations mentioned in the book, such as the dotcom which raised $26M in venture capital just after they toured the investors in front of accountants and engineers who were faking themselves as customer service reps on dead phone lines with non-existent customers. Needless to say, we ended up changing the subject to more relevant business matters. Phew! Thanks, Pud!
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
If You've Read The Web Site, Don't Bother
By John Mac
If you have been to the web site that spawned this book, you've had access to all this book has to offer. There is no new insight, no new research, no significant details about any of the companies listed, and apparently nobody felt the need to clean up any of the prose. If you are expecting any sort of analysis of any of the companies, you won't find it here. This book is purely anecdotal.
Still, that said, bits of this book can be humorous. I couldn't read it straight through, but you can pick it up at any page and find yet another story of somebody who thought banner ads would fund their silly idea.
15 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
An Irreverent, Profane, and Addicting Read
By Gary Griffiths
OK, I'll admit it: I'm a f'd company.com junkie, so buying Pud's book was a no-brainer. If you're looking for learned musings and profound business thought, look elsewhere. "F'd Companies" is written in the style of an Internet bulletin board - reading more like graffiti than The Wall Street Journal. But that's not a bad thing. Kaplan's crudely cynical critiques of ill-conceived businesses are outlandish and darkly humorous. In rapid-fire case after case, he recounts the foibles of 20-somethings as they burn through tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that venture capitalists and corporations are all to willing to throw at them.
A few excerpts:
On Digiscents, which spend $20M on a device to plug into your computer to produce "smells" relevant to the content viewed:
"Besides, potential customers weren't too keen on having a bunch of nasty-smelling chemicals pumped up their noses."
Or "Flooz", the infamous Internet "alternate currency", which flushed over $50M in a couple of years, but also attracted thieves in Russia and the Philippines who used stolen credit cards to rack up over $300K in Flooz dollars.
And eHobbies, the failed online Hobby Shop, which claimed bird-watching a $34B industry - four-times larger than movie-going. When these figures were challenged in a story by The Wall Street Journal, a spokesperson explained the figures included things like "binoculars, hats, sunglasses, cameras, and bird-houses, and expenses incurred on bird watching trips, such as gas, hotels, the cost of renting a tent ... sales of log cabins, boats and trunks."
I would have liked to have seen a bit more of the tales told by employees of the "F'd Companies", which make up such an important part of the website. And after a while, Pud's rants and profanity become tiresome - better taken in smaller, daily website-sized bites than in an entire book. Yet I still found the book amusing and addictive, and Kaplan's self-modesty a refreshing contrast to the arrogant and elitist attitudes of the executives and investors of whom he writes. Above all else, Kaplan captures the silliness and self-importance of the dot.com hype in a style that is unique to the Internet counter-culture. While certainly not a literary triumph, "F'd Companies" is an important reflection on this bizarre period of US business, and as such will outlast most of the dot.coms that were founded during these years.
See all 111 customer reviews...
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