Glory Road: Peapod
Technology revolutions always have a boom-bust-rebirth-boom pattern. The key to this is surviving the down draft when it hits. Mary Meeker, whose career has taken a similar path, laid this out in a very powerful way. She aggregated the market caps of Google+Yahoo!+eBay+Yahoo!Japan+Amazon over time.
Pre-2000 IPO = $2B
3/2000 Peak = $178B
10/2002 bottom = $32B
11/2005 value = $262B (approaching 10x the trough and 150x pre-IPO!)
One of the most overlooked rebirths from this era is Peapod. Remember the $1B smoking hole in the VC road called Webvan? How about Kozmo or the array of other dead home delivery companies? Many started with low burn approaches but quickly ramped their burns in the hope of grabbing market share. My friends, Tom and Andrew Parkinson, founded Peapod in 1989, guided the company through the crash and now have, arguably, the most successful online home delivery grocery firm as part of Ahold. The May 1st Red Herring article "Life After Webvan" is a great article detailing this great story. I highly recommend it to all aspiring entrepreneurs. As I have written over and over again, controlling your burn equates to controlling your destiny.