Everyone loves to read other people's success stories. It gives us ample evidence that amazing things happen to ordinary people. By learning what they have done to succeed, we are approaching one step to success, ourselves. That's the way it is with 10 Entrepreneurs Only - 10 Entrepreneurs Tell the Story of Their Success by Gregory K. Erickson and Ernst & Young.
Erickson interviewed ten of the most successful entrepreneurs at the beginning of the century and presented their stories on the unique but effective use of long quotes from entrepreneurs. Quotes leave you feeling as if you were actually interviewing a businessman yourself rather than reading a story about them. Each story is 20 pages long, but read as much as 10 pages due to the large print and free flow speed.
The 10 businessmen listed in the book are Jay S. Walker (priceline.com), Mike McNulty and Mike pagan (Vertically), Christina Jones (Porter), William Porter and Christos Cottages (E * Trade), Gregory K. Jones (Bid), Russell Horowitz (Go2Net), Ken Pasternak (Knight / Trim ark), William Schrader (Usenet), Pierre Midyear (eBay), and Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner (broadcast.com).
Each entrepreneur has a unique story of how and why they saw the internet as a viable place to start a business, and each had a different way of getting there, but after reading all ten stories, you can see the common threads between these most successful nets. Entrepreneurs. Although this book was written at a time when the success of online business was very simple (the book was published in 2000), many of the key skills of those entrepreneurs can be applied at any time in any industry.
Each one is so passionate about what they do that they inspire others around them to have the same love. Everyone is not afraid to take risks, whether other people agree or not. In line with that, everyone knows that failure is inevitable when you risk it and understands that future success depends on the ability to learn from failure and move on.
Another interesting feature mentioned in three of the ten stories is the fear of closing the eyes of an opponent who does not see it coming. They all talk about a child of the proverb in his basement or in the garage that comes up with technology that gets them out of business. Commenting on Mark Cuban, Todd Wagner stated:
"I know that Mark is concerned, among other things, about the 12-year-old proverb in the garage [with technological success] and that we have closed our eyes."
This habit is particularly interesting, and I suspect it stems from the fact that most of these entrepreneurs WERE A CHILD and were afraid of their second return more than anything else. They are probably afraid that this "child" will have the same love and determination they had, and that, more than anything else, that scares them.
If I had read this book at the time of its writing, I would have recommended it to any young businessman. Years later, though, I highly recommend it. I think it should be read to anyone who wants to get into business or who is in business right now.
The only thing you can do now that you could not do at the time of writing is to find out what happened to these entrepreneurs and their companies in the past when this book was published. Another great pleasure of reading this book is trying to guess whether these companies still exist and whether the same entrepreneur is still running them or not.
Knowing that there was a dot-com boom and a crash that followed at the time, I thought there was less than a 50/50 chance that these businesses still existed. I will not spoil the wonder of the individual, but there have been a lot of directions that these companies and entrepreneurs have gone through after the dot-com crash.
Some of the entrepreneurs we've heard of (Mark Cuban), and some of the companies we know are still there and very successful (eBay), but many ordinary readers will never know. Doing research to find out where they are today adds an extra dimension to the book that the reader would not have had if he had read it when it came out.
Net Entrepreneurs Only - 10 Entrepreneurs Told Their Success Stories Gregory K. Erickson and Ernst & Young are extremely entertaining to anyone who enjoys a great success story. However, it is really encouraging if you are an entrepreneur striving to come up with the next development that puts one of these ten entrepreneurs in the business.
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