Everyone likes to read other people's success stories. It gives us proof that amazing things happen to normal people. By learning what they did to succeed, we are one step closer to success ourselves. This is the case with the ten stories told in Net Entrepreneurs Only - 10 Entrepreneurs Tell the Stories of their Success by Gregory K. Erick sen and Ernst & Young.
Ericksen interviewed ten of the most successful entrepreneurs of the turn of the century and presents their stories with a unique but effective use of lengthy quotes from entrepreneurs. The quotes leave you feeling like you've actually interviewed the entrepreneur yourself rather than reading a story about them. Each story is about 20 pages long, but reads more like 10 pages because of the large print and free pacing.
The 10 entrepreneurs profiled in the book are Jay S. Walker (priceline.com), Mike McNulty and Mike Hagan (VerticalNet), Christina Jones (pcOrder), William Porter and Christos Cotsakos (E*Trade), Gregory K. Jones (uBid ), Russell Horowitz (Go2Net), Ken Pasterna (Knight/Trimark), William Schrader (PSINet), Pierre Omidyar (eBay), and Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner (broadcast.com).
Each entrepreneur has a unique story about 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 some common threads among these extremely successful networks. businessmen. Although this book was written at a time when Internet business success was much easier (the book was published in 2000), many of the core competencies these entrepreneurs possess can be applied at any time in any industry.
Everyone is extremely passionate about what they do, to the point where they inspire others around them to have the same passion. Everyone is not afraid to take risks, regardless of whether others disagree. Along with this, everyone knows that failure is inevitable when taking risks and understands that future success depends on the ability to learn from failure and move on.
Another interesting thing that was mentioned in three of the ten stories is the fear of being blinded by an opponent they cannot see. Everyone talks about the proverbial kid in the basement or garage who comes up with technology that puts them out of business. Speaking of Mark Cuban, Todd Wagner said:
"I know Mark's concern, among other things, is that the proverbial 12-year-old boy in the garage [is coming up with technological breakthroughs] and we're being blindsided."
This coincidence is particularly interesting and I suspect it stems from the fact that many of these entrepreneurs WERE THE KID and fear the second coming of themselves more than anything else. They are probably afraid that this "child" will have the same passion and determination that they once had, and that scares them more than anything else.
If I had read this book when it was written, I would definitely recommend it to any young entrepreneur. Years later, however, I recommend it EVEN MORE. I think this is a must read for anyone who wants to start a business or is currently running a business.
The thing you can do now that you couldn't do when the book was written is find out what has happened to these entrepreneurs and their companies in the time since the book was published. One of the joys of reading this book was trying to guess whether or not these companies still exist and are still run by the same entrepreneur.
Knowing that at the time there was the dot-com boom and subsequent crash, I figured the odds of these businesses still being around were less than 50/50. I won't spoil individual surprises, but there was a fairly wide variety of directions these companies and entrepreneurs took after the dot-com bust.
Some of the entrepreneurs we've all heard of (Mark Cuban) and some companies we know still exist and are very successful (eBay), but many of which the average reader won't be familiar with. Doing research to find out where they are today adds another dimension to the book that the reader would not have experienced if they had read it when it was published.
Pure Entrepreneurs Only - 10 Entrepreneurs Tell Their Success Stories by Gregory K. Ericksen and Ernst & Young is of great interest to anyone with a good success story. However, it is truly inspiring if you are an entrepreneur trying to come up with the next innovative breakthrough that will put one of these ten entrepreneurs out of business.
You must be logged in to post a comment.