RANDALL E. STROSS

In eBOYS, Randall Stross takes us behind the scenes and inside the heads of the gutsy entrepreneurs who are financing the hottest businesses on the Web. The six tall men who started Benchmark, Silicon Valleys most exciting venture capital firm, put themselves at the cutting edge of the new economy by backing billion dollar start-ups like eBay and Webvan. The risks were enormous--but the rewards have proven to be staggering. Within two years, eBays net worth grew from $20 million to more than $21 billion, while each Benchmark founding partner saw his own personal net worth soar by hundreds of millions of dollars.For two roller-coaster years, Stross had total access not only to Benchmarks executives but to the companies they financed. He was a fly on the wall as fortunes were made in an instant, snap decisions got locked in, and new ventures took off--and sometimes crashed. Here are the testosterone-pumped conversations, round-the-clock meetings, and gutsy deals that launched the eBoys and their clients into the stratosphere of mega-wealth. Written like a novel but absolutely true, eBOYS brings to vivid life the glory days of the greatest business adventure of our time.

Bulls in the China Shop is an engagingly anecdotal, lucidly written account of the tragicomic cultural and political misadventures that have plagues American commercial ventures over the past two decades in the Peoples Republic of China. When diplomatic tensions between the two countries were eased in the 1970s, American businesses rushed to China, lured by the worlds largest national market. As they tried to introduce capitalism to Chinas socialist society they soon discovered that the rules of business, as they understood them, did not apply. Chinese buyers placed huge orders for which they had no money to pay: Chinese marketing bore no relation to capitalist exigenciesplaying cards were named Maxipuke (pu-ke: poker), designer mens underwear, Pansy; million-dollar projects already underway were cancelled without warning. The Chinese, in turn, were astonished by the indiscretion of the Americans, who prized directness above all in negotiations and were at once brash and guileless in exposing weaknesses in their own bargaining positions. Like Mark Twains innocents, Americans were woefully ignorant of Chinese etiquette, and prone to embarrassing gaffes. And more: the Chinese found the American insistence on lengthy, detailed contracts fatuous, if not insulting. Bulls in the China Shop is a fascinating look at the uneasy commerce between American and Chinabetween capitalism and socialismand at the cultural, political, and historical significance of trade between the two nations.

Thomas Edisons greatest invention? His own fame.At the height of his fame Thomas Alva Edison was hailed as the Napoleon of invention and blazed in the public imagination as a virtual demigod. Starting with the first public demonstrations of the phonograph in 1878 and extending through the development of incandescent light and the first motion picture cameras, Edisons name became emblematic of all the wonder and promise of the emerging age of technological marvels.But as Randall Stross makes clear in this critical biography of the man who is arguably the most globally famous of all Americans, Thomas Edisons greatest invention may have been his own celebrity. Edison was certainly a technical genius, but Stross excavates the man from layers of myth-making and separates his true achievements from his almost equally colossal failures. How much credit should Edison receive for the various inventions that have popularly been attributed to himand how many of them resulted from both the inspiration and the perspiration of his rivals and even his own assistants?This bold reassessment of Edisons life and career answers this and many other important questions while telling the story of how he came upon his most famous inventions as a young man and spent the remainder of his long life trying to conjure similar success. We also meet his partners and competitors, presidents and entertainers, his close friend Henry Ford, the wives who competed with his work for his attention, and the children who tried to thrive in his shadowall providing a fuller view of Edisons life and times than has ever been offered before. The Wizard of Menlo Park reveals not only how Edison worked, but how he managed his own fame, becoming the first great celebrity of the modern age.