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Summary: Mandatory startup business reading
Review: 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.
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Summary: Gentlemen, start your businesses!
Review: 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.
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Summary: I'm biased, but...
Review: 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.
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Summary: Don't buy this book
Review: This book should be titled - "I got lucky with a web site in the '90s" His title suggests that he has insight into how one could use true bootstrap techniques to get a company started. Yet, in one of his ten or fifeteen bullets about how to start a business successfully, he discusses the topic "when to line up funding". How under the radar is that?! I would have been more impressed to learn that Mr Kling understood and articulated how to start a business using founding customers or how he worked the corporate banking system to gain access to lines of credit. I think Homefair was a great idea, but 99% of most net businesses today can not be started that cheaply. Same goes for the dozens of Web Design Firms he cites as success stories (Most were bought by companies like IXL, USWeb (Which became MarchFirst), Homestore and where all know where these have ended up. I could continue about the lack of flow or organization in the book itself but I feel the description of lack of useful content is plenty for this review. I was truly disappointed with this book.
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Summary: A business book worth reading
Review: 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.
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Summary: Wish I had this when I started my first net business
Review: Twenty-five case studies of businesses that started without venture capital on the Internet, how they grew and what sorts of problems they ran into along the way.(Case no. 19 is about MSEN, the ISP I was involved in in 1991-1995, and I was interviewed for the book.) A well-researched book on lots of issues facing the small internet business, made even more relevant by the drying up of venture capital.
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