I wrote something reasonably short here:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/to-grow-you-must...

I wrote something much longer here, but this material is mostly from other CTOs who I surveyed:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-survey-of-ctos...

If you are in New York City, we have 2 different speakers who will speak to 2 different aspects of this problem, at our event on February 27th.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=etoy+vs...

First you need to know how conformist the culture was in the 1990s, when my wife and I would visit Manhattan we looked like two hippie throwbacks to the 1960s and got told we were the weirdest looking people in the city. I couldn't have stood to live there because you would look up and see a Tommy Hilfiger billboard and look down and see a lot of people wearing Tommy and if you couldn't take it, you couldn't take it. You couldn't get as good of a cup of coffee as you could get at an indy espresso bar in a small town in a flyover state because there was a Starbucks on every block to convince stock market analysts that it was like that coast to coast.

In Dec 1999 there were the WTO riots which have broken the WTO ever since (e.g. the old "corn law" fight over free trade in agriculture reached the impasse it at now) and it had an effect that washed over everyone. For a few weeks there was a wave of honesty, for instance I saw an article in the tech press that somebody went to a Microsoft press conference and he was bored out his mind.

So when Etoy had their domain stolen by Etoys many people from radical artists to people who didn't want to have their private property taken away rallied. We had a system where people would visit our web site and we'd use iframes to DDOS their web site. It ran for a few days with no effect, then I contributed a code snippet that made the attack many times more effective and brought the site down for a short time during the last shopping day of the year. Immediately they called the FBI who pulled the server out of the rack.

We put a lot of effort into public relations and talking to the media, never mind flooding stock market discussion groups with propaganda. We knew we were being infiltrated by the FBI so we used the tactic of creating new mailing lists with (we believed) a clean list of participants periodically. (A general answer to "Eternal September" problems)

The stock dropped precipitously when we were working on it, and a few weeks later they settled with etoy, an event we knew about before it was announced at their earnings call. It wasn't a good earnings call and the stock price spiraled downward and eventually the company folded (might have been more than three weeks but the critical part was about that long)

The management and IT folks at Etoys would minimize the contribution of activists, wrote a blog about how they defeated our DDOS (but we scared them enough to call the FBI, caused a panic on the most critical day of the year, and could boast that the registration numbers that they triumphantly announced were inflated dramatically by fake users we injected) and would say that the company failed because the earnings were not good.

I would say, however, that Etoys could have been a viable business in the long term if investors believed in management, selling toys online in 1999 was an idea with legs. Activism contributed to investors not believing in management, so they were forced to throw in the towel.