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

The quintessential story of the American dream played out in the late 1990s market mania In the volatile, fast-paced Internet industry, you can go from being a hero to losing it all in a nanosecond. Stephan Paternot knows this all too well. The poster child for Internet excess, his name became synonymous with the market mania of the late 1990s. This fascinating book is the inspirational story of how one man's wildest dreams came true as well as the dramatic chronicling of the inception and evolution of an entire industry. Packed with behind-the-scenes details and little known facts, the book reveals the personal and professional motivations that inspired Paternot to found theglobe.com with partner Todd Krizelman at the age of twenty. Theglobe.com marked the beginning of enthusiastic funding, the high-flying stock prices, and incredible IPOs. A Very Public Offering is a positive, inspirational account of a dream that survived the birth and maturation of an industry. It is a riveting narrative that is part adventure story, part romance, and part documentary of an era that business will never experience again. Stephan Paternot (New York, NY) cofounded theglobe.com in 1994, the company that would be the first to experience IPO euphoria, setting off the outrageous stock and valuation phenomena that followed in the industry. The company has been ranked a top fifty site worldwide by MediaMetrix and has accumulated $30 million in revenues in 2000. Andrew Essex (New York, NY) is the articles editor for Details magazine and continues to publish articles in the New Yorker, Harper's, Elle, Details, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times.