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quote

If it were me starting over I’d want to be learning from past mistakes of other people so I didn’t do the same thing myself.
Jeffery Pape, president of WrestlingGear.com"

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Prototype - Lessons of Survival, From the Dot-Com Attic - NYTimes.com

Mr. Kirsch, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, saw a way to ensure that the next generation of entrepreneurs could avoid the problems of that bubble, or “at least make new mistakes”: He would document what did and didn’t work during the flurry of business activity around the new technology called the Internet.

In June of that year, he started the Digital Archive of the Birth of the Dot Com Era, usually called the Dot Com Archive (dotcomarchive.org). Shortly thereafter, a partner of a venture capital firm that was closing its doors donated every business plan that the firm had received from 1999 to 2002 — documents covering some 1,100 companies.

Today, Mr. Kirsch says, the archive contains some 6.4 million e-mail messages, memos, slide presentations, photographs, marketing materials and databases representing thousands of companies. These data have begun to reveal interesting insights into the dot-com bubble.

[…]

For its first five years, the collection of business plans in the Dot Com Archive was easily accessible via the Web, and more than 87,000 people registered to use it. Most of these people were looking for model business plans.

Visitors today may use the archive only after signing a nondisclosure agreement. Interested individuals can send e-mail to Mr. Kirsch through the site. It is too early to tell whether entrepreneurs or investors will find value in the data-based entrepreneurship models and algorithms being developed by Exoventure Associates and by companies like YouNoodle, based in San Francisco, which used the Dot Com Archive database to help build its own “start-up predictor” that forecasts the future value of a start-up company.

Tags: /david kirsch /dotcomarchive.org /digital archive /internet archive