Lessons in Failure
Univ. of Maryland Academic Seeks to Chronicle Dot-Com Bust
Michael P. Bruno
Washtech.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 24, 2002; 9:56 AM
David A. Kirsch loves failure, and he could be looking for you.
Kirsch, a newly hired assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, has received a $300,500 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study and archive the boom and bust of the dot-com business era.
"I've always been attracted to lovable losers. Studying success is so obvious, it's so trite," said Kirsch, who has a doctorate in history of technology from Stanford University and has written a book on the elusive electric car.
Those who got rich during the boom-and-bust years will have the resources to tell their side of the story, Kirsch said -- and likely "blame someone else, you can bet." Instead of delving into the blame game of the dot-com era's high flyers, Kirsch wants "to produce a history of the Internet working class."
Starting from the "bottom up," Kirsch is seeking "lowly" cube dwellers. He wants to hear the stories of software developers and sales agents, customer service representatives and their customers. In essence, his project hopes to chronicle the stories of dot-com workers who were caught up in the middle of the bubble, carrying out the risky and often fatal business plans.
"A lot of what's interesting is the history of failure," said Jesse H. Ausubel, a program director at the Sloan Foundation. "The dot-com boom is one of the epic booms of business history. There really are only a handful on this scale."
The Sloan Foundation, a 68-year-old nonprofit based in New York, is interested in preserving "the raw material of history." It has backed archival projects on Charles Darwin, Thomas A. Edison, Kurt Godel and, most recently, the Internet.
But the Internet era's digital nature could be its historical Achilles' heal, Ausubel said.
"If you think of past events, historians use relics," said Ausubel, who also is director of the program for the human environment and senior research associate at The Rockefeller University in New York City. Ausubel noted that the Internet era's relics -- e-mails, PowerPoint presentations and Web sites -- are intangible.
"If this stuff isn't captured soon, there's a very high probability it could be lost altogether. They're disappearing even as we speak. Every one of us hits dead links every day. This is one of the great contradictions of the dot-com era," Ausubel said.
Kirsch's mandate is to create a permanent archive to be housed at the library at the University of Maryland at College Park. Kirsch specifically wants copies of dot-com business plans.
"These business plans are like the cathedrals of medieval Europe," Kirsch said.
But he also will consider some offline relics. "I've got one guy who has the lock and chain to lock up a Webvan warehouse. I know this stuff is out there," Kirsch said.
Kirsch and Ausubel are hoping that people will heed the call "to create the stuff of history." To gather archival material, Kirsch is working to launch bizplanarchive.org, and he is partnering with Nick Hall, an entrepreneur who created startupfailures.com.
Yet, sounding eerily like the business plans of so many dot-bombs, Kirsch laughed as he acknowledged that his project faces tough hurdles.
"It is an experiment like a lot of those companies," he said. If the archive project doesn't work out, "I'll have to convince a lot of people it was worth $300,000."