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In 1994, most Americans had never heard of the World Wide Web. Martin Rood had never heard of it either--until a postcard invitation to a University of Washington seminar sent him down a rabbit hole t...
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In 1994, most Americans had never heard of the World Wide Web. Martin Rood had never heard of it either--until a postcard invitation to a University of Washington seminar sent him down a rabbit hole that would put his hometown of Seattle at the center of an entirely new industry.
Rood wasn't a programmer. He was a car dealer. But when he decided to put his Nissan and Volvo inventory online, he didn't just build a website--he built DealerNet, the world's first automotive online marketplace and one of the very first commercial ventures on the Internet, period.
First Click is Rood's firsthand account of being present at the birth of e-commerce: the skeptical reporters, the ISPs who dismissed him, the scramble to explain "browsers" to people who'd never seen one, and the long nights spent proving that a "virtual showroom" wasn't science fiction. It's also the story of why Seattle--not New York, not Silicon Valley--became ground zero for the commercialization of the Internet, paving the way for companies like Amazon to set up shop in the same backyard.
Part business memoir, part origin story of the modern online marketplace, this is a firsthand look at the risk-taking and gut instinct it took to bet everything on a technology almost nobody understood yet.
If you've ever wondered what it actually felt like to build something the world wasn't ready for, First Click takes you there. Pick up your copy today.
