A Very Public Offering: A Rebel’s Story of Business Excess, Success, and Reckoning

In the volatile, fast-paced Internet industry, you can go from being a hero to losing it all in a nanosecond. Stephan Paternot knows this all too well. The poster child for Internet excess, Steph’s name became synonymous with the market mania of the late 1990s after his record setting IPO. This fascinating book is the story of how one man’s wildest dreams came true as well as the dramatic chronicling of the inception and evolution of an entire industry. Packed with behind-the-scenes details, the book reveals the personal and professional motivations that inspired Steph to found theglobe.com with partner Todd Krizelman at the age of twenty. Theglobe.com marked the beginning of enthusiastic funding, the high-flying stock prices, and incredible IPOs. It is an inspirational account of a dream that survived the birth and maturation of an industry. It is a riveting narrative that is part adventure story, part romance, and part documentary of an era that business will never experience again.