Abstract:

Companies grew rapidly during the dot.com boom thanks to the ample availability of venture capital, which created a gold rush dynamic (Lefsrud & Suddaby, 2012) with many seeking to exploit the potential of the new technologies underpinning the internet and, increasingly, mobile phone technology. Email use became ubiquitous in organizations in this period and was considered the “original killer app” (Downes & Mui, 1998). Our case study focuses on a company we call AuroraTec (a pseudonym), which provided services for website providers that wanted to make their pages available on mobile phones in the pre-smartphone era. Our paper considers how individuals and organizations – particularly those in gold rush scenarios (Lefsrud & Suddaby, 2012) - form quite fixed views of the future that constrain how they interpret opportunities and make decisions regarding business models and resource allocation. The dot.com boom presents a unique setting within which to consider this question, as many firms ultimately failed (Kirsch et al., 2006). The few successful ‘Big Tech’ companies that emerged from this era (Amazon, Google, etc.) dominate our understanding of how visionary organizations and individuals exploit the opportunities inherent in new technologies. Through qualitative analysis of a dot.com start-up’s email archive, we are able to appreciate over time how these perceptions of the future influenced strategizing at an organizational level.

Please choose your submission type: Developmental Paper

Primary Track: Entrepreneurship

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Prof David Kirsch