Under the Radar: Starting Your Internet Business Without Venture Capital

by Arnold Kling

Book Overview

Forget everything you've ever read about starting an Internet business. Forget the moon-shot IPO's. Forget Silicon Valley and venture capital. The start-ups featured in Forbes, Fortune, and The... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0738204684
• ISBN13: 9780738204680
• Release Date: September 2001
• Publisher: Perseus Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Gentlemen, start your businesses!

As a business owner, I am quite pleased with the information I was able to extract from this book.It will not make you rich overnight, but it will explain patiently the unique challenges of starting and operating an Internet-based business.Not all ideas are VC-worthy and this book describes the basic VC premises.The case studies are quite in-depth and definitely will help you avoid same mistakes. The author does not shy away from early failures and fatal choices of wrong business partners.In short, you'll enjoy the book and learn many things. I highly recommend it to any enterpreneur.

Mandatory startup business reading

Arnold Kling is right on. The examples and suggestions provide business guideposts to starting and growing an innovative company on the Internet. Under the radar is that vast space of million and multi-million dollar niches that don't qualify for the VC or IPO. This is the space where we can do well for others, make money, and not get trampled by the elephants. The area that Arnold Kling describes is even riper since the dot com bubble broke.Buy this book for the chapter about the economics of VC financing alone. It is a clear short demonstration of why VC financing is unsuitable for the majority of startups (and perhaps is a quick way ruin a good thing).Get some experience without having to live through it all.

I'm biased, but...

I am one of the featured case studies in "Under the Radar," so you could say I'm biased. That said, I *really* wish this book had been available when I started my first Internet company. It has lots of great "from the trenches" advice, from developing your strategy to recruiting the right people to courting investors to designing your web site to... you get the picture.The only quibble I have is at the very end, when the author suggests that technology and statistics may open up the investment pool to "Under the Radar" companies by allowing investors to better manage risk (i.e. make investment decision on more than just "gut feel"). That may be so, but his examples -- a computer that can beat the world's best Othello player, automated underwriting of consumer loans -- are less than persuasive because they deal with relatively simple problem sets (winning a game based on probability, making a loan based on a few easily defined credit characteristics). The profile of a successful startup contains many, many hard-to-quantify attributes (including luck) and they are often mutually exclusive. For example, as an investor do you look for a charismatic CEO like Steve Jobs or a reclusive techno-genius like Seymour Cray? The answer is both. I suspect we're a long way away from a reasonably reliable system for predicting startup success. (Witness the stock market, where the majority of professional fund managers fail to outperform the averages even though they have a wealth of data and modeling technologies at their disposal.)But this is just a quibble, and an irrelevant one at that. The focus of this book is how to start a successful business, not picking winners and losers. Whether you're already on your third Internet business or just thinking about making the leap for the first time, this book is a must read.

A business book worth reading

The best thing about this book is that it's written by someone who has succeeded at the internet and yet kept his success in perspective. This is very refreshing given that the typical business/internet book is written by someone who has not succeeded on the net but thinks they know exactly how to do it. The book is very accessible to the casual reader yet substantive enough that serious practioners of the internet and business in general will find it highly instructive. The author has lots of interesting stories that help to chronicle the development of the net and how businesses have struggled to harness it. The book is somewhat textbook like in its explanation of key concepts but is never boring. It's very funny at times and always makes you think. It's like having a class with a good teacher. You enjoy yourself and learn at the same time. I highly recommend it.

Straight example-laden talk on starting a business

This is a great book for the aspiring internet entrepreneur. There is very little hand-waving here as it's loaded with real-world experiences including an in-depth look at the author's idea-to-exit experience and 25 synopses on other netpreneurs. Some of the worst dot-com manuals provide vague obvious advice like "know your customer" together with rehashed business plan templates, inadequate & technically misguided software primers, extensive discussions on acquiring funding through VCs, and advice on how to extract your fistful of dollars. Consider this book the antithesis to such "get rich quick" manuals. It focuses on real issues that should be handled while building a profitable internet business. The chapter "Planning Your Business" was particularly helpful with its twelve steps in starting a business. The book also provides refreshing contrarian (by dot-com mania standards) advice on eschewing VC funds and not necessarily avoiding markets where you don't have domain expertise. I'll definitely be referring back to "Under the Radar" as I build my internet-based venture.