eBoys

Stross was given access to Benchmark Capital during 1997 to 1999 and sat in on partner meetings, board meetings and negotiations. The result is a documented account of venture capital decision-making during the internet boom.

The firm's central investment was eBay, where Benchmark invested six and a half million dollars and the position became worth billions, one of the best returns in venture history. Stross covers the diligence, the decision, the recruitment of Meg Whitman as chief executive, and the initial public offering. He also covers investments that went badly, including Webvan, where Benchmark participated in one of the period's largest failures, and several others.

The value of the book is the process detail. Stross records the partner meetings where deals are argued, the way partners defer to whoever will take the board seat, the negotiation of terms, the pressure to move fast when a deal is competitive, the handling of a portfolio company that is failing, and the internal disagreements about whether valuations had detached from reality. He shows the partners knowing that prices were unsustainable and continuing to invest at them, which is the most useful observation in the book.

Benchmark's partners cooperated and the account is not adversarial, though Stross records enough of the failures that it is not promotional either. It stops in 1999, before the collapse, so the reader knows what the participants did not. The specific market conditions are entirely of that period.

Business historian and journalist, longtime professor at San Jose State University; wrote reported histories of Edison, Microsoft, Google and Y Combinator.

Each book reports one organisation from inside over a defined stretch of time: a year among Y Combinator's batch companies, Benchmark's partners through the dot-com IPO wave, Edison's Menlo Park laboratory. The result records how venture firms and inventors actually spent their days, which reads as evidence rather than retrospective summary.

San Jose State University