I read a review of this book in Business Week and purchased the book some months back. Over last two weeks I finished this book – Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good by Sarah Lacy. The title made the book appear to be an interesting read on how the web 2.0 businesses have fared compared to the ones that came up and died quickly in the dotcom burst.
On reading the book, it turned out to be a coverage of the story of Jay Adelson (Revision3), Kevin Rose (Digg), Max Levchin (Paypal and Slide) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and passing coverage of Marc Andressen (Netscape), Ben & Mena Trott (Six Apart), Chad Hurley & Steve Chen (YouTube) and of Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn). At the end of the book, I felt I have learned little about the business of these companies than I know before reading the book. The book is more about which restaurant in the valley is frequented by these people and their VCs, their likes and dislikes and so on. Though the author has tried to show the individual/human side of these people, it somehow iconizes them more than ever. If you are living in the Bay Area and want to have topics to discuss (and names to throw in between) in the Tech party circuits this book is a must-read, for rest of us I will rate it average..
The Author (Sarah Lacy) is a reporter on startups and venture capital in Silicon Valley and writes a biweekly column for BusinessWeek and co-hosts Tech Ticker on Yahoo! Finance.