Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good

Sarah Lacy’’s Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 hi-jacked my brain for the last week. After her presentation at Gnomedex, I told her how impressed I was with her technique: abandoning the stage to wander confidently through the audience talking and interviewing. (I’ve been too sheepish about this myself). Sarah gave me a copy of her new book.

Once You’re Lucky describes the re-incarnation of the web in Silicon Valley through the inside stories of the entrepreneurs behind PayPal, LinkedIn, Digg, Six Apart, Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, and others. The drama of PayPal founder Max Levchin reads like a novel, and a good novel at that. A former Business Week reporter, Sarah manages to stuff in cautionary tales of venture capital, the start-up cycle, and the rise of friend-tors.

She contrasts the web 2.0 wave to its dot-com predecessor. Today’s successes are social networks built for one’s friends that just happened to prove viable as companies. The users provide the content; there’s no inventory and no staff creating content. Marketing is viral. Often there’s no physical office. This new web is about connecting with people and sharing things with them, things like video, news clips, restaurant reviews, photos, blogs. “Every single one of these sites is about meeting people, staying in touch, or witnessing people’s own personal quirky forms of self-expression.” This is a different deal than web 1.0; in fact, the pall of the dot-com crash still tempers the exuberance of today’s web 2.0 millionaires.

Sarah Lacy

The bursting of the bubble was a psychological disaster. Outsiders thought it had all been a scam. The new economy was hype. Six years later, people’s crap detectors were still too finely tuned to buy into a new vision with abandon.

In the midst of the bubble, I remember hearing a wag on the stage at PARC answer a question with, “Tulips.com.” Sarah brings up Tulipmania, a book that debunks the seventeenth-century tulip trading stories as urban legend. It wasn’t really so bad.

Nor was the dot-com bust the total disaster people remember in hindsight. Half the businesses founded in 1999 were still around five years later. That’s better odds than opening a restaurant.

I agree with Sarah’s take on why the current movement has staying power. In fact, I think this applies to the culture inside and among business organizations as well as among netizens.

Some people believe the more we socialize online, the bigger the rift in the real-world social fabric. That interacting with each other via machines makes us all more antisocial. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Web isn’t a replacement for offline relationships; it’s merely an efficient tool to keep in touch with people more easily, reconnect with friends and family once lost, or discover new friends that you may never meet in the real world. There are no online or offline friends; friends are friends.

Does your telephone separate you from friends or bring you closer? Well, the same holds true for the net.