A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's Story of Business Excess, Success and Reckoning - Hardcover

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Stephan Paternot cofounded theglobe.com in the fall of 1994 at Cornell University. He completed six rounds of both private and public financing for theglobe.com, totaling nearly $200 million, and successfully led his company through an initial public offering at the age of twenty-four. In his six years of business as CEO, he assembled a management team including industry veterans from CBS, Saatchi & Saatchi, Dow Jones & Co., and Simon & Schuster. Theglobe.com was frequently ranked a top fifty site in the world with revenues reaching $30 million in 2000. Paternot founded theglobe.com while in the middle of completing his computer science and business degree at Cornell University. Upon graduating in 1996, he relocated from Ithaca to New York City. Paternot is originally from the U.K. and Switzerland where he lived for the first eighteen years of his life.

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a very public offering

"Stephan Paternot has incredible drive, the kind of drive you see in people once in a lifetime. He′s a young Richard Branson. He has this ′positive irreverence′ that allows him to tackle incredible things against all odds and the establishment, and lift people with his vision and enthusiasm. What he did with theglobe.com is purely phenomenal. He made business history." ––Laurent Massa, Co–founder and Former CEO of Xoom.com

"Even for one who was there, Stephan′s recounting of the entrepreneurial journey of theglobe.com is a great read. It brings back the thrills and spills of this Internet saga. Those reading it afresh are in for a real treat." ––David H. Horowitz, ′Angel′ investor and (until 2000) a director of theglobe.Com and former CEO of MTV Networks

Aus dem Klappentext

Co-founder and Vice Chairman of theglobe.com, Stephan Paternot was the poster child for the Internet mania of the late '90s--as well as one of the first whipping boys when the market began its spectacular collapse.

Now, Paternot takes us behind the scenes and to the front lines in a Silicon Alley memoir of the Internet craze, recording all the ludicrous hype, the wild valuations, and the record-breaking IPOs with a true insider's perspective. Paternot, now twenty-seven, pulls no punches as he lets us in on his wild ride through IPO fantasy to the market's nightmarish downturn.

A Very Public Offering is part adventure story, part romance, and part documentary of an era that business will never experience again. This account of the modern-day American dream chronicles how Paternot became an overnight hero for a generation, and is at once a riveting narrative and a crash course in entrepreneurship by the archetypal business maverick of the '90s. The adventure begins at Cornell in 1992 when Paternot and co-founder Todd Krizelman meet as introverted freshmen absorbed with computer games and an untapped resource people were calling the Internet.

Quickly they began to build theglobe.com, an online community that seeks to bring like-minded people together. While still at Cornell, they raised millions in investment capital. And in what seemed like a nanosecond, Paternot and Krizelman managed to graduate from college and relocate theglobe.com to New York City, where the company's revenues (and employee count) exploded. Internet mania gripped Manhattan's Silicon Alley, and over drinks at Spy or Coffee Shop, bleary-eyed CEOs in their twenties ran themselves ragged to build their dreams as the economy fell in love with dot-coms.

Then, on Friday the 13th, November 1998, theglobe.com went public. The record-setting IPO rose to $97, and for a brief moment, Stephan Paternot was worth $97 million. Things would never be the same.s