You have written your own book on how to succeed in digital business and you are chairman of two internet companies yourself. What can we learn from a book as old as Being Digital, your first choice?

Nicholas Negroponte wrote this book all the way back in 1995, right at the outset of the Internet revolution. What is so fascinating about it is that he explains in layman’s terms why it is that digital information will result in a communications revolution. It was an amazingly prescient book. I think for anybody wanting to understand the power of digital information this book is a must read.

How did he say the Internet would become so important?

He said the world would never be the same again. He wrote this from the perspective of being the founder of the MIT Media Lab, already well-known for its pioneering work, funded by all sorts of companies. It had literally hundreds of researchers and staff, so Nicholas Negroponte was very well-placed indeed to make observations about how the digital world would change communications.

For example, in Being Digital, he says there will come a time when people will stop reading books in paper form, they will be reading books on a screen. That is quite remarkable – this was 1995. Now it has actually happened. In the US, the Kindle outsells hardbacks, so for book readers it has made a huge, huge difference. If, like me, you travel a lot and it’s difficult to pack lots of books and there are weight restrictions, of course you want to have an electronic book reader. It enables you to take far more books than you were previously able to do. He also made the observation that there would be touch screen interfaces, which we have now become terribly used to. He is one of the leading tech visionaries and I think this is the book that set out almost an agenda for the digital revolution.

What is dot.bomb?

This is, I think, the quintessential insider look at what happened in the internet meltdown of the first part of this century. The internet business got an extremely bad reputation which it is only now shaking off, as something that combined management incompetence with grotesque corporate excess and total failure for shareholders. For me, this book, which describes an American internet company called Value America, says it all. There is a British equivalent about the decline and fall of boo.com, but with this one the failure was on a much bigger scale. It’s a very amusingly written book and it tells how this company wanted to change the face of American retailing, to go head to head with Amazon but do it better. They made every conceivable mistake that a dot.com could make.

What were they?

They had a site that completely failed to deliver, didn’t work very well; they had no proper delivery and order system; they grew much too quickly, built a huge office complex in Virginia at a very early stage; and the CEO, who has the delightful name of Craig Winn, got too big for his boots. He was so taken with his huge success that he thought he would take a run at the presidency, because his own self-belief was such that he thought he could take this business talent and use it to good effect in the White House. So, to me, this is an insider look at everything that was wrong with the initial internet era.

It sounds hilarious.

It is! It’s an extremely funny book, but there is a lot in there of value to entrepreneurs today of what really not to do.

Don’t run for president.

Don’t even think about it! Running a dot.com company is a seven-day-a-week job and there is no time for anything else. That’s mistake number one.