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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
A memoir by whiz kid turned dot-com refugee Stephan Paternot is as silly as the company he founded.
Aug 22, 2001 | By now there's already been so much snickering at the fallen darlings of dot-com mania that Stephan Paternot's Internet adventure story/mea culpa -- "A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's Story of Business Excess, Success and Reckoning" -- is a rather tardy arrival at the post-meltdown party.
But if you're still game for kicking the dethroned titans of new economy capitalism when they're down for the count, the co-founder of the "community hosting" Web company theglobe.com provides ample fodder in his new memoir. Sharpen your knives, and let the cathartic bloodletting begin.
Stephan Paternot was one of those dot-com 20-something wonder boys that the other 99.99 percent of the population loved to envy during the boom. On the first day of theglobe.com's ludicrous IPO, the Cornell grad with the chiseled good looks was worth $97 million. On the Friday the 13th in November 1998 that the company went public, its stock price recorded a one-day rise higher than any other market debut in history. (VA Linux has since stolen this dubious distinction.)
But you already know the punch line, don't you?
A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's Story of Business Excess, Success and Reckoning
By Stephan Paternot
John Wiley & Sons
256 pages
Theglobe.com, now having closed its doors, has suffered the sorry fate of so many of its Net brethren, and the co-founder's claim to be an Internet whiz kid and entrepreneurial prodigy has sunk out of sight along with the company, as has most of his tens of millions. As Paternot recently told SmartMoney.com: He may make more money on the book and the movie version of his personal story about the company than from the company itself.
While he was once in the amorphous "online community" business -- meaning everything from chat and home pages to gaming and e-commerce -- Stephan Paternot is now in the business of being Stephan Paternot, and this book is his first product. "After theglobe.com, I never want to be in another position where I build an asset only to have it taken away," he writes. "I want to be the asset."
In this case, the problem with being the asset is that the asset displays a sophomoric lack of insight into his own experiences that pencils him in as much younger than even the 27-year-old former dot-com co-CEO that he is. His book is peppered with "whatevers" that try to fliply explain away key decisions, such as whether or not the company should have gone public in the first place, and how things might have been different if it hadn't. While the author frequently expresses annoyance at the condescending venture capitalists and institutional investors who treated him and co-founder Todd Krizelman like kids and their company like a cute college project, he frequently lapses into teeny-bopper-eze when he gives his own version of events. A sample of his prose style: "Public speaking was really our thing." Or, "Even though Jennifer was a model, she was down-to-earth."
But the problem with "A Very Public Offering" isn't the author's lack of depth. In that respect, Paternot is as much the perfect poster boy for the bust as he was for the boom. He's the dot-com business man-child, with enough crazy-making experiences to carry a breezy tale.
The more basic problem with the book is that Paternot still thinks that the question everyone is dying to ask him is: "How does it feel to be worth $97 million?" when the new, meaner question is now "How does it feel to lose it?"
