Philip J. Kaplan’s “F’d Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts” is too raw a book to make it onto most business school reading lists. Which is a shame, because there are gems within it.
In May 2000, Kaplan created a Web site with an unprintable name that tracks corporate demises and allows frustrated employees and ex-employees to vent their spleens. The book is a sampling of new economy inanities from his site.
It’s a quick read. More than 100 firms are featured in 180 pages, which include a skippable 13-page introduction. There is not a lot of analysis as to why each venture failed, but a fair criticism would be to ask why most of them were funded at all.
Kaplan often includes the initial amounts of financing each generated, no matter how off-key the ideas were. And in a nice humanistic touch, he also often records how many employees lost their jobs when the company finally went belly-up.
What the book lacks is a glimpse at the business plans. But even without these, the sheer number of firms sounding the same note
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