Wolff will run out of money in six weeks without fresh funding. The quest to feed the burn rate takes Wolff on a wild ride. First, Machinist tries to combine Wolff New Media with Magellan, a West Coast search-engine company. And the combined entities will make for a more powerful initial public offering. Magellan is far bigger than Wolff, but Machinist shrewdly manages to turn the deal into a merger of equals and then into a takeover of Magellan.
Negotiations bog down, however, and the window for Internet IPOs slams shut.
Magellan is eventually sold to Excite, a competing search-engine outfit. For Wolff and his investors, it's on to Plan B, then C, then D. Wolff's narrative wanders, and the sequence of events is sometimes confusing. Eventually, he hits on the idea of producing a magazine version of NetGuide , sort of a TV Guide for the Internet. The only problem is, for all of the comparisons to TV, the Net is nothing like it. Fortunately for Wolff, most of his potential funders have never actually used the Net.