Nonfiction review: 'Once You're Lucky'

sfgate_get_fprefs();
Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good
The Metempsychosis of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0
By Sarah Lacy
Gotham Books; 294 pages; $26

Sarah Lacy have reported on startups and venture working capital houses in Silicon Valley for almost a decade. Following a stretch as the engineering newsman for the San Jose/Silicon Valley Business Journal, Lacy co-wrote Associate in Nursing influential screen narrative for Business Week about Digg laminitis Kevin Rose. She currently composes the Valley Girl column for BusinessWeek.com and co-hosts the "Tech Ticker" on Yokel Finance. In her first book, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good," Lacy's expertness in vale ways outputs a work that is frequently piquant but ultimately unsatisfying.

Jay Adelson - chief executive officer of Digg since 2005, and the laminitis of Equinix in 1998 before he had a drawn-out falling-out with the new direction starting in 2001 - offerings Lacy's premier illustration of sustained religion in the concern potentiality of the Internet. Today, Adelson efforts to screen the little Rose from the hurting that befell him during the Equinix debacle. Lacy portrays Adelson and Rose's common "man-crush" with good wit and relish, in a manner that looks possible lone because she is a woman. Despite their ritualistic rumbles about the media, the numerous work force Lacy interviews have got no problem gap up to her complete crepe papers at Titanium Couz or drinks at the Fly Bar.

Lacy's brilliant entree lets for rich observations of the human kinetics behind the technical school wall of Silicon Valley. Much of what she associates would be familiar to people with vale experience, but it's illuminating for the general reader. We larn that "angel investors" prop up up promising new ventures before constituted venture working capital houses are willing to take a risk. After venture rugged individualists supply the heavy money, there are inevitably latent hostilities between the VC's end of ensuring a good tax return and an entrepreneur's desire to keep control over the way of his company. Lately, "nontrepreneurs" - people who desire to "build cool new Web land sites without having to construct them into companies" - have got emerged on the scene. Lacy places Evan Williams, who first built Blogger and later built Twitter, as a nontrepreneur par excellence.

But all of Lacy's insight and explanatory art doesn't indeterminate the fact that the organizing rule of her book is inconsistent. For example, Adelson's narrative is certainly not about being "lucky" at first (his Equinix experience was anything but) and "good" the adjacent time. Lacy also profiles Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg, who was too immature to be lucky in the late 1990s. His first chance is right now, and so far he's proving lucky and good at once.

The somewhat deceptive statute title mentions to the members of the so-called "PayPal mafia": the people who had a manus in PayPal's successful sale to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002 (particularly co-founders Max Levchin and Simon Peter Thiel), and are still enjoying success. Maffia members now have got bet in Prime Minister Web companies such as as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, Yelp and blogging software system supplier Six Apart.

These land sites are all illustrations of the amorphous conception of "Web 2.0," a phrase coined by Tim O'Reilly inch 2005 to capture the thought of using the Web to promote individual look and make community. (In contrast, the theory goes, Web 1.0 land sites are locked boxes that military unit people to act in stiff ways.) Whether it's a cant or a meaningful idea, in some manner Web 2.0 is here to stay. Therefore Lacy's selective presentation of the Web 2.0 landscape - given a caption that confidants a much broader geographic expedition - is the most distressing facet of the book.

Several organisations acquire short shrift. Digg rival Reddit is hardly mentioned, despite its co-founder Henry Louis Aaron Swartz being deemed a nontrepreneur in a widely read Valleywag article a twelvemonth ago. Wikipedia acquires only a passing play glance, and there is no reference of San Francisco's Basswood Labs, the Godheads of the 3-D online human race Second Life. Lacy makes admit Facebook rival MySpace, but often simply to observe that vale insiders contempt its Los Angeles headquarters.

One must reason that Lacy's end is not to document the wide landscape of Web 2.0, which is an admittedly formidable task. Rather, she takes to show the personalities and histories of people in Silicon Valley whom she have establish compelling. There is nil incorrect with this, but Lacy should have got delineated her penchants from the beginning.

Within the concluding pages Lacy states her personal investing in many of the land sites she discusses, offering some of her most compelling writing: "Everyone who have experimented with societal networking have his or her aha! moment. Anyone who believes societal networking is just a craze simply hasn't tried using it." I hold and hope that Lacy maintains honing her reportorial accomplishments as societal webs go more than embedded in our lives. Lacy's true passionateness is societal networking, not the almost impossibly indeterminate Web 2.0. If her adjacent book contracts the focusing to social-networking tools, it will be a pleasance to read.

Marcus Sir Joseph Banks is a bibliothec at UC San Francisco. He blogs at mbanks.typepad.com. E-mail him at .