One More Thought on the New Book

I'm looking for company stories that have essentially not been told yet.  I love the start up stories of Skype, Six Apart, Activewords, ICQ, Mrs.Fields and young Hewlett and Packard in their garage.  But I'm looking for new, great untold stories, ones revealing conflict, disruption, wild success, dramatic failure--all the juicy stuff we writers suck into.

From these stories, I'll need to see useful stuff for entrepreneurs to use. but they need to be great untold stories for this new book.

Help me if you can.  Self-nomination is just fine.

Comments

[John Cass]

Shel,

How about contacting the local venture networking groups in the big vc areas, silicon valley and boston. You might sign up as a speaker on your new book, and ask for input for the new new book. It would promote interest for both books and you'd get some great stories.

john

[shel israel]

John,
That's a great idea. I'm not certain how I would get that process started, however. Would you know?

[Dave Chase]

Veritas -- one of the quieter $0-$1B software stories. Lots of interesting stories from an industry veteran like Mark Leslie (now teaching at Stanford). You can probably count on one or two hands the number of CEOs who were in the CEO seat from $0 to $1B in revenue. You know he has something to say when a guy like Vinod Khosla quotes him (see Khosla's web 2.0 transcript/video). You can get Mark's bio, whitepaper draft, etc. at http://www.altusalliance.com/ceoInfo.html. Veritas is the biggest and best of the bunch but I have others from our venture consulting work depending on the attributes you are looking for. E.g., Onvia was a dot com high flier (b2b e-commerce/exchange play at the time) and then bust and yet has survived after a refocus.