A VERY PUBLIC OFFERING: A Rebel's Story of Business Excess, Success, and Reckoning

On November 13, 1998, Internet startup theglobe.com opened on Wall Street with the largest IPO in stock history. Literally overnight, the online community's cofounder, 24-year-old Paternot, became a multimillionaire and dot-com prodigy in the eyes of the adoring media. But, as he documents in this giddy, fast-moving memoir, fortune can turn quickly: less than two years later, theglobe.com's stock price plummeted close to zero, Paternot's personal wealth evaporated and the press savagely attacked him and his partner, Todd Krizelman, as "global poster boys of Internet excess." Paternot briskly recounts the story of his rise and fall, briefly sketching his childhood before he arrived at Cornell University, where he and Krizelman started theglobe.com in 1994. After graduating, they moved the company to New York City's nascent Silicon Alley. Paternot would party all night at trendy Manhattan nightclubs before hopping on a private jet to woo big-name investors. But when the stock price began to tumble, the press blamed Paternot and Krizelman—even though, as Paternot points out, theglobe.com was one of the few start-ups actually turning a profit. The sustained attacks took their toll, and in August 2000, with the stock at just $2 a share, Paternot resigned as CEO. Rarely bitter (though the collapse of other dot-coms did give him some vindication), he wisely focuses on the day-to-day mania of the mid- and late '90s "Internet revolution," vividly showing what it felt like to run a brand-new company racing headlong across unknown terrain. (Sept.)