Chapter 47
Link in with LinkedIn
Twitter is like a bar, Facebook is like your living room, and LinkedIn is like the Chamber of Commerce.
—B. S. Stoltz
Although today Stone Melet is a serial entrepreneur in San Francisco, back in the late 1990s he was a local television anchor/reporter in Charleston, West Virginia. But Melet's life changed significantly after he was afflicted with a disease that was quickly spreading across the globe. Internetius Start-upitis was a fast-moving virus causing people of all walks of life to stop what they were doing and head west in search of Internet gold.
Certainly that's exactly what Jeff Bezos did in 1993, after he learned that this thing called the World Wide Web was growing at 2,300 percent a year. Bezos quit his job on Wall Street and pounded out a business plan in the car as his wife drove them across the country to their new home in Seattle. Bezos's plan was in fact brilliant, evidenced by his site Amazon.com. But as we know all too well, plenty of other people were not as savvy and, although they may have even received their share of venture capital (VC money), not a few flamed out with little to show for their efforts except maybe an impressive burn rate.
Burn Rate
Burn rate is a term used in the start-up world to indicate how quickly a company spends its investment capital, that is, the rate at which a company burns through its money. Needless to say, a high burn rate is usually a very bad sign.
Like these other Internet pioneers, back ...
