[tt] NYTBR: Sarah Lacy: Once Youre Lucky, Twice Youre Good

[Premise Checker]

Sarah Lacy: Once Youre Lucky, Twice Youre Good
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/review/Hafner-t.html

The Young Turks of Cyberspace
By KATIE HAFNER

ONCE YOURE LUCKY, TWICE YOURE GOOD
The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0.
By Sarah Lacy.
Illustrated. 294 pp. Gotham Books. $26.

The drumroll leading up to the publication of Sarah Lacy's book
about the 20-something entrepreneurs who brought us such familiar
Web sites as Facebook was certainly impressive. For months, Lacy
demurred when asked to reveal the title yet talked up her project at
every opportunity, causing the prepublication buzz in Silicon Valley
to build. By golly, it was as if the author herself had created the
next YouTube.

With the stance of an insider given unparalleled access to her
subjects, the starry-eyed Lacy tells the stories of a half-dozen or
so young entrepreneurs who started Web sites like Facebook and
YouTube, all driven by user-generated content. Together, those sites
created a post-Google version of the "participatory" Web known as
Web 2.0.

Lacy has chosen to include, among others, Mark Zuckerberg, the
24-year-old founder of Facebook, the wildly popular
social-networking site; and Max Levchin, 33, a co-founder of PayPal,
the online payment system that eBay bought in 2002.

This disjointed grab bag of gossip has its elucidating moments, but
as the definitive tale of the rise of Web 2.0, "Once You're Lucky,
Twice You're Good" serves as a reminder that the latter-day
equivalent of Tracy Kidder's 1981 book, "The Soul of a New Machine,"
the gold standard for technology nonfiction, has yet to be written.

The title promises an incisive, illuminating examination of just
what it is that engenders serial success. Indeed, Lacy delivers on
that promise with her profile of Marc Andreessen, who helped build
one of the first Web browsers and made millions with Netscape, the
browser company. He then started a software company, which
Hewlett-Packard bought last year for $1.6 billion. Now 37, he has
Ning, a social-networking company for which he has high hopes. Lacy
draws a fascinating portrait of Andreessen and his need not just to
best himself but to equal the successes of his mentor, Jim Clark,
the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who financed Netscape.

Otherwise, the title seems to bear little relevance to the book. For
Lacy's other subjects, repeated success has yet to be determined.
For example, it is unclear whether Levchin's new company, Slide,
which makes "widgets" -- small, single-purpose applications for Web
sites like Facebook and MySpace -- will end up making him more
millions. And Mark Zuckerberg is still firmly entrenched in his
first company. Yet Lacy seems hesitant to dwell on these points.

The writing is, at best, informal. For instance, the last time I
checked the American Heritage Dictionary, in spite of how computer
trade journalists might choose to use the word, "architect" was not
recognized as a verb, to say nothing of "rearchitect." And Lacy's
fifth-grade teacher would no doubt wince at the profusion of
incomplete sentences. ("Probably a good thing few women work there."
And "The time Jay and Marc were chatting when Sumner Redstone
sauntered up.") Then again, everything happens so quickly in Silicon
Valley that perhaps there is no time to write a proper sentence.

Some of the reporting is impressive in its sheer detail. Lacy
obviously spent a great deal of time with these celebrated
entrepreneurs. Her descriptions of their business meetings come
complete with snatches of you-are-there dialogue, à la Bob Woodward.
The reader also learns who wears boxers, who cuts his hair in a hip
style and who shucked his nerd-wear in favor of jeans and Pumas.

But the details don't add up to much. The reader hears a great deal
about Levchin's fear of swimming but surprisingly little about what
has driven Levchin, who is from the former Soviet Union, to start
companies. And rather than following a straight narrative arc, Lacy
jumps from one story to another, then doubles back again -- to
confusing effect.

Paradoxically, it is when Lacy gets impersonal, and dispenses with
her name-dropping tone (she refers to Zuckerberg throughout as
merely "Zuck"), that she is at her best. Her explanation of how
venture capital works is instructive and clear, perhaps one of the
best yet written for a general readership.

And she skillfully describes a tension intrinsic to the Web 2.0
world: thanks to low start-up costs, the newest entrepreneurs don't
need venture capitalists, and even view them with disdain for the
role they play in diluting individual wealth. Yet Lacy offers vivid
descriptions of meetings between entrepreneurs who eventually wind
up strapped for cash and of the venture capitalists with the means
to help.

A columnist for BusinessWeek.com and a co-host of "Tech Ticker" on
Yahoo Finance, Lacy has a tendency to throw out numbers in too
cavalier a fashion. For instance, she describes "the mighty $195
billion Google juggernaut" that bought YouTube in 2006. But at the
time of the deal, Google's market value was far less than that.

Lacy's book is an outgrowth of an article she wrote for BusinessWeek
in 2006. The unfortunate headline on the cover -- "How This Kid Made
$60 Million in 18 Months" -- proved an embarrassment to the
magazine. The cover photograph was of a young man sporting
headphones, a T-shirt and a 5 o'clock shadow, smiling broadly and
giving two thumbs up to the camera. It was Kevin Rose, who would
become one of Lacy's principal subjects in this book. Rose, 31, is a
co-founder of Digg, a Web site that allows its users to collectively
decide which news accounts on the Internet deserve top billing.

As it turns out, the $60 million referred to the estimated value of
Rose's stake in the company. He didn't make 60 million of anything,
and until the company is sold or goes public, the $60 million in
question is as good as Monopoly money.

One of these days, perhaps by the time Kevin Rose does indeed become
wealthy, someone will write a richly textured book that chronicles
with insight and acumen the rise of the most recent crop of
entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Sarah Lacy's "Once You're Lucky,
Twice You're Good" is not that book.

Katie Hafner, a former technology reporter for The Times, is the
author of A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Goulds Obsessive Quest for
the Perfect Piano.