1. Basic metadata on over 2,200 companies, most of which are no longer operating. We do not have business plans for all of these companies, but we do at least have a record of their existence. If you were involved in a dot com company, and it’s not in our database, please come to the site, and tell us about it, regardless of whether or not you have specific business planning documents related to the firm. If you find a company that’s listed, but for which we have only metadata, feel free to add your own recollections and experiences to the collection. 2. Business planning documents from over 900 companies. If you search by "documents available" from the main archive search page, hundreds of executive summaries and other related documents are now available. Within this group, multiple documents are available for more than 600 companies. In most of these cases, a full copy of the business plan has been submitted to the Archive, but we may not have received approval to release the full plan for public access. Again, if you find a company that you were involved in, and you can either grant us authority to release the plan or put us in touch with someone else who can, please do so. Alternately, simply tell us what you think. What additional perspectives and documents are missing? 3. Sample In Depth Case Studies. We have one deeper archival collection currently available, and several more in the works. These collections demonstrate the potential to use the Business Plan Archive to richly document the existence of dot com ventures, from business plan to IPO, sale or dissolution and to allow participants to add their own materials and perspectives to the company history. If you are interested in developing a deeper account of a firm with which you were affiliated, let us know, and we may be able to help.
1. Voices of the Dot Com Era Survey. This extensive survey is intended for those who actually worked in the trenches at internet technology companies. It asks you to reflect upon the totality of your work experience, from the content of your work to the nature of your relationships with your former co-workers to the strategies of the firms you worked for. If the Business Plan Archive captures the histories of firms, the “Voices” survey is intended to document the experiences of the individuals who actually did the work. What happened to you in the late 1990s? Take a look, and let us know what you think.
2. www.CreativeDestruction.org. This new website will serve as the entry point for both the Business Plan Archive and the Voices of the Dot Com Era Survey. To get things started, we will be running a series of interviews with former senior executives at internet companies. Our interviewer, Nicholas Hall, organized www.startupfailures.com in 2000, and will be talking to people about what’s happened to them in the intervening years.
Prof. David Kirsch Robert H. Smith School of Business 4544 Van Munching Hall College Park, MD 20742 United States
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September 15, 2003