March 3, 2002
MarkBernstein.org
 

The Mouse Driver Chronicles

The Mouse Driver Chronicles
John Lusk and Kyle Harrison

Lusk and Harrison left Wharton with their MBA's, the plans for a computer mouse that looks like a golf club head, and just enough capital to launch a novelty gift business. This lively, likable account of the first two years of MouseDrivers serves as a strange postscript to the dotcom era. Lusk and Harrison are acutely aware that Mouse Drivers is not a dotcom, that their enterprise is froth at the rim of the internet cauldron. They take some pride in this; they have a business model, they make money, they manufacture things people want. But, in the end, the whole idea is predicated on the dotcom bubble, as is the ease with which they raise their capital, the assurance with which they launch their business, and the willingness they seem to have felt throughout to envision the failure of the whole thing. A very welcome antidote to CEO-porn, the unfounded adulation and (more recently) ridicule that pervades so much popular writing about business.