Insider's Tale of Business on the Web

Fortunes made and fortunes lost, on the Internet. I'm Fred Fishkin with Bootcamp, a report on computers and technology. It was a web site, a magazine and a series of thirty books about everything in cyberspace. NetGuide was at the heart of Wolff New Media. Today Michael Wolff is the author of a new book about the Internet business world...called Burn Rate...

"Burn Rate is the amount of money a start-up company like mine spends in excess of the money it makes. So when you're running a start-up company what you're mostly doing is trying to run ahead or run away from your burn rate. Because
eventually, that burn rate, unless you figure it out, figure out how to make money on the Internet, is going to come and is going to singe you really badly."

Wolff says when it comes to the web, looks are very deceiving. Sites that are attracting millions of people and seem to be successful can vanish overnight...

"Virtually there is no
company in this business,in the Internet business, which is making money. Quite the opposite, everybody is losing not just a little bit of money, but losing a fortune."

Often the hope is to be bought by a bigger company before being consumed by the burn rate. Wolff names the names in his tale of one company's meteoric flash in cyberspace. You can find more information at burnrate.com