Entrepreneur: A Ceo's Lessons in American Capitalism

This book takes a very detailed and personal point of view starting with the author's decision to leave his telecom company and start a new one with several of his colleagues. You are taken through the entire progression of his company from basic foundations through to the IPO and subsequent collapse. It's a great story and discusses a lot of issues any entrepreneur needs to think about.

In Entrepreneur: A CEO's Lessons In American Capitalism, author and successful entrepreneur Charlie Thomas (Chief Executive Officer, NISCO Solutions) draws upon his more than seventeen years of experience serving on corporate boards, founder and chairman of Net2000 Communications, and his work with NISCO Solutions to provide aspiring corporate managers and directors with a compelling and informative account of growing a company through the market volatility of the 90s and through the unexpected and widespread corporate crises of the first years of the 21st Century. Complete with Endnotes and Appendices, Entrepreneur: A CEO's Lessons In American Capitalism is one of the most readable, attention engaging, highly recommended compendiums of ideas and experiences that can serve to inspire and challenge anyone charged with advancing the interests of their companies within highly competitive marketplace whether on a local, regional, national, or even international basis.

This book really covers two subjects. One is that it is a book about the formation, rise, operation, decline and fall of a company. The other is that it is about the rise and fall of the telecom market in the early 2000's. The author was the CEO of Net2000 a telecom company formed in 1993 to its final hours in 2002. Inbetween was the magical moment of an IPO making the company listed on NASDAC. Only about 300 companies a year do an IPO, and that's out of about 600,000 companies that are started each year. The other part of the story is about what happened in the telecomm market during these years. This was the time when WorldCom made the slight error in their accounting, only a small error, just a little over $10 billion. This is the book of how they took the company from just an idea in the telecom business, through getting it started, initial funding and finally an IPO. Then the market changed. The best planning they could do failed. I am left with the question of what could another set of managers have done or was the marketplace so disruptive that nothing could have saved them.