I would be more impressed if Sequoia hadn't pulled this act before when the last bubble burst. True, they called the movement of the market. But it's conventional wisdom today that the economy is tanking.

But what does the economy have to do with the startups Sequoia funds? The whole point of venture capital is to nurture companies that need capital. Part of the art of investing in startups is knowing when to push them out of the nest. Templated cost-cutting advice, applied across Sequoia's portfolio, is hardly a value-add.

And it's not clear how this was bad advice a year ago. Sequoia's portfolio should have been keeping a close eye on costs then as now. The IPO market is definitely ailing now, but it's hardly been healthy over the last few years. Large acquisitions have been scant since MySpace and YouTube got bought. The chaos on Wall Street doesn't change the bleak outlook for exiting startup investments profitably that existed beforehand.

So what's really going on here? Consider two of the companies that heard Sequoia's speeches last time around: PayPal and Google. They both spent and grew aggressively in the face of a local recession. They both managed to IPO when few tech companies were going public. And they both delivered handsome profits to Sequoia.

I'm just guessing at Moritz's game, but here's what I suspect is going through his head: He could have delivered a cost-cutting sermon a year ago, true. But his entrepreneurs are far more likely to listen to it now. And the rest of Silicon Valley is listening, too. He's made his bit of noise, knowing full well word would leak out, and put a scare in all his competitors.

How convenient that this scare-tactics summit was held just a month after Sequoia raised $1.7 billion in new funds. While everyone else is hunkering down, Sequoia will cull the weaklings from its portfolio, double down on the winners — and profit before anyone realizes the good times are back. Well played, Michael, well played.

As it should be. It's always at the height of a bubble that some fad — bandwidth delivery! online ad-networks! social media marketing management! — starts looking like a sure thing. But most startups fail, tech startups included. Few make any money for their investors; VCs, like Hollywood studios, live off the hits.

What to do if you work at the 17th Ajax-enabled online calendar to hit the market, the 217th YouTube clone, the 397th online-ad network ? Give up, move on. Despite the headlines, people are still hiring — even, sometimes, as they shed jobs. Wall Street may have failed in its job at allocating capital. But Silicon Valley's particular genius is in matching talent to markets.

So embrace it! The world has countless real problems to solve. You're not going to make a fortune copying someone else's idea. Come up with your own genuinely good one, and you'll never have to read about your company's fire sale in Valleywag.

At various times in our progress, people have come up to me to deliver a now familiar question: "did you ever imagine Facebook would be this big?" And I give a familiar answer: "well... yea, actually". Frankly, Mark and I knew even at the beginning this was something the world needed. We went into the college market as a stepping stone - identifying dense nests in the graph that would lead us to the rest of the world. We could see far enough in the future to know there would be an impact, we just didn't know exactly what it would be. Now I can look back on our progress and see the ways the world has changed, the ways we have changed it. We've altered the future in a score of ways, from making it easier to look up phone numbers and email addresses to making it more difficult for terrorists to isolate impressionistic youth in the middle east. At the same time we've built a competent and vibrant organization, driven by a passion to push the world more open.

In the process of helping to build a company, I found I had another passion: making companies themselves run better. It's easy to confuse this with a desire to manage, but even when I tried to do that I found myself drawn back to code for the solutions to my problems; I didn't want to construct efficiencies, I wanted to engineer them. Communication is the key to scale in any size organization and technology is the key to communication. I've seen us unblock ourselves time and again with new tools to increase transparency and passive information flow and many times it was the fruit of my own labors. While working on improving Facebook's tools, however, I came to a very difficult conclusion: doing this for all the companies of the world was not the same project as doing it for one of them. This idea is one that needs an organization that was built to do it, with every fiber of its DNA engineered in a way that producing an extensible enterprise platform becomes little more than the logical consequence of an organism executing its own nature. Further, the things we've scoped for Facebook's product team to do are the right things to be doing and I wouldn't have agreed with asking the company to divert significant resources to approach a project so different and so boundless in scope. Every time we introduce something new, we do it at an opportunity cost and this is too large a detour to take when we are already moving swiftly in the right direction.

And Facebook is moving in the right direction. When Facebook has a billion members (and 800 employees? maybe 900?) and someone leans over to ask me if I ever imagined it would get that big, my answer is going to be "you're damn right I did. how come it only has 20% of the market?". To know that this is Facebook's future and decide not be a part of it is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, but it's allowed me to have a broader perspective for the future. Like you, I've worried about the people leaving the company but it took becoming one of them to understand that this is just another part of the ecosystem (you should just take my word for it though). I'm not leaving the movement - I'm becoming a new part of it. The inevitable flux of the men and women behind these organizations is what moves the industry forward in the same direction in a way that cross-company collaboration alone never will. As the world moves to modular stacks and applications built up from a smorgasbord of platforms instead of single toolkits, then the companies that build the parts will need to act more and more like cooperative teams in a single larger organization. As Justin would undoubtedly say, I am simply viewing the industry from a different level of abstraction. These changes are difficult and sad, and that's certainly an understatement for me... but change brings new things and this particular change will bring a new ally to our mission - I think we can all be pretty pumped about that.

Whether I work here or not, I'll forever bleed Facebook blue. Facebook has been my passion and my purpose for the past 5 years. Our new project is not a replacement for what we build here, but instead both a complement and a compliment, and we have every intention of making it feel like a natural extension of Facebook's product and purpose. Similarly, my timing in leaving is not an indication that I have lost faith in our ability to succeed, but an affirmation in my confidence in the company's enduring success irrespective of changing faces.

Justin and I going to be around for at least another month and I am really looking forward to going deeper on this idea with everyone and how we can continue to work closely with Facebook. I'll always be really proud of the work we've done and grateful for the opportunity to work with such a uniquely remarkable team. We'll also be at the Q&A later to help continue the conversation right away.

Dustin

From: Calley Nye
Date: Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 8:35 PM
Subject: I could really use your help :)

Sorry for the mass email, but I wanted to keep you all informed about something I'm working on, and to ask for your support.

Today, I launched a social media fundraising experiment that I'm calling Start Me Up. Most of it is explained here http://calleynye.com/post/52663867/start-me-up

The accompanying post is pretty self-explanatory, just an explanation of my startup and why I'm raising money. But I wanted to share with you my real intentions.

In Jason Calacanis' email the other day, he talked about the startup depression. Several other people have been talking about it as well, and I think it could be a real problem. In a failing economy, it's not hard to lose faith in business and in part, yourself.

I hope that this can be a demonstration that there is always another way. The message is that it's not the end of the world if you can't get institutional capital, and that you hold some control in these troubled times. Entrepreneurial spirit is why we all wake up in the morning, and I don't want to see that die or suffer in anyway.

I would really appreciate your support in this, anything would help. Donations, tweets, blog posts, Facebook bulletins or forwarding this email.

Thank you, and if you have any questions you know how to find me :)

Calley Nye
Entrepreneur/Blogger/Marketing Consultant

(Photo by Andrew Mager)

Artist and designer Glenn Kaino originally envisioned the site as a social network for jetset hipsters, and his cousin Scott Sassa signed on as CEO after a spell at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins. You might remember Sassa as the CEO who presided over Friendster's slide into irrelevancy, or as a Hollywood executive managing NBC's West Coast entertainment operations. Sassa likely was the one to hustle up the investors, as well as celebritard users like Rob Lowe, Lisa Ling and Cory Kennedy.

But in May, the site was drawing only half a million users a month according to Nielsen Online. (Sassa put the number at 2 million.) That's orders of magnitude smaller than similar sites like Six Apart's Vox or off-the-shelf social network Ning, either of which could have done more for Discovery with less money.

Our theory: Events on Wall Street did have something to do with Uber's shutdown. But not the way Uber would like you to think — that the site was a thriving concern kneecapped by some kind of mysterious liquidity crisis. No, the market meltdown merely provided the convenient excuse to close down a stinker of a company. Expect more cash clawbacks in the months to come — from startups that should never have gotten money, in good times or bad.

Before flirting with the idea of Seesmic as an online-video studio, Le Meur had been aggressively pushing Seesmic as a platform for blog comments, even trying to convince Valleywag to deploy the company's product. The startup had been engaged in a major redesign, already delayed, that would have highlighted its video shows, according to a source. The layoffs suggest that plan is off. It's also attempting a complete rewrite of the site's backend code — an expensive endeavor. One has to wonder if this is a truly a strategy shift or just a ploy to slash the company's burn rate.

It'll be catnip to the bloggers featured on Techmeme, an automated news aggregator which has attracted an obsessive following among tech bloggers, if not actual traffic worth speaking of. Instead of seeking actual pageviews, Techmeme gamers try to collect some ineffable sense of self-importance. And so they'll inevitably start linking to Zemanta-suggested stories out of laziness. Even reporter Anthony Ha admits, "Linking and adding other media can feel like time-consuming distractions when I’m writing VentureBeat posts."

With all the TechMeme pile-on posts drawing from the same pool of Zemanta-planted background links, the feedback loop in tech blogosphere groupthink will be turned up to 11. Honestly, with an algorithm finding your story leads, an algorithm doing your research, and an alogrithm choosing the relevant ads, why do we need human tech bloggers at all?

Jobster gave away much of the farm when it raised its third round, way back in 2006. The $18 million third round brought the total raised to $48 million, but on a valuation only a little over $100 million — meaning there's probably little equity left to sell to investors. The $7 million secured in April was likely a "down round," or offered on an even lower valuation. Investors were probably looking to snap up what equity was left and keep the company going for just long enough to sell to someone. Anyone. Please.

But if they're trying to cut the burn rate through layoffs, why is the company maintaining such a large office on the sixth floor in a prime Seattle location looking out over Elliott Bay? Our source was incredulous. "This makes no sense to me at all. No matter how good a deal they have, office space for 20 people would cost less on a cash basis." Maybe as a showpiece for possible acquirers? If that's the case, I'd take a cue from when the Mariners played in the Kingdome and the upper deck was always empty — cover the empty cubicles with a festive covers and bunting to keep it from looking like a mausoleum.

ROOM AND BOARD AS PAYMENT FOR A FULL TIME RUBY(?) CODER (NE OFF SANDY
Reply to: gigs-832919343@craigslist.org [?]
Date: 2008-09-08, 1:56PM PDT

We are looking for an excellent developer who can work on extending the capabilities of our alpha demo. It was written in ROR, flash, red5 and I think C# You may decide that there is a better, more robust way to code this application. Once we get our alpha demo to the stage where we can launch the product we will qualify for funding. We have already been approached by TechCrunch to be one of their TechCrunch50 companies but we aren't ready to launch yet so we couldn't do it. They are going to do a publicity piece about us as we are so disruptive. We need your expertise.

We need someone who is analytical and can do an architectural study and then write code. Detailed specifications have been written.

We will provide a nice room, wireless access, food, utilities all in exchange for a workaholic (like we are) who can get it done.

No drugs or alcoholics. Must be clean and sober. We will do a background to check for a criminal history.

Your ability to stay here will be based on the work you produce.

If interested, please send a resume and cover letter for consideration.

We hope to hear from you.

* Location: NE OFF SANDY
* it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
* Compensation: no pay

PostingID: 832919343

(Photo, "Internet Stock Certificate," by LiquidShirts.com)

Barton, who famously founded travel Web site Expedia as a Microsoft property before it split off and sold to IAC, has apparently been telling investors that the company will make $40 million in revenue by the end of the year — even though the best estimates within the company peg the amount at more like $8 million, according to a source. Meanwhile, the company maintains a lavishly appointed office on the 46th floor of the Wells Fargo Center in Seattle's central business district, and has raised a total of around $87 million in three rounds of venture capital funding.

Trulia, which offers similar price estimates for properties, is neck-and-neck with Zillow in terms of visitors according to Compete. However, Trulia has only raised $33 million and is headquartered in a relatively humble office building at the foot of San Francisco's Portrero Hill. Granted, savvy visitors probably check both sites because the numbers provided can often be wildly inaccurate. Sort of like Barton's revenue estimates.

But hey, Joost's plugin adds a social layer and RSS feeds! What, nothing for Facebook or the iPhone?

If you're going to placate disgruntled investors like Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman with technology buzzwords, try to pick something they might have heard of. Cofounder Niklas Zennström might want to stick to yachting, because at least that enterprise is a winner.

Yet everyone got their panties in a twist over the Iranians using Adobe Photoshop to fake up a few extra missiles. Lucky for Tehran, Photoshop and Adobe's other compositing tools are still the way to go for blatantly lying in propaganda. Because while it seems like a good idea to insert yourself into the iconic opening flying scene from Great American Hero like I did, the number of hoops you have to jump through at Bigstage.com are maddening, and the results anticlimactic. Keep trying, CIA, and we may just believe that disgraced Enron CEO Ken Lay is actually dead sooner rather than later.

Watch both the city of light test shoot and the meditation on skateboarding as HD clips from Vimeo and you won't be disappointed.

Pranky crank film professor Arnold Baskin, a teacher at New York University, asked my class last fall why they preferred film over digital. "Because it's more magical," replied a classmate. Not to be too much of a shill for the company started by Oakley shades magnate Jim Jannard, but Red's digital cinematography efforts have created their own, more than estimable, magic — and at a relative bargain price of $1,250 a day and $3,750 a week for a rental in Los Angeles.

Months ago, the company slashed the price on its hardware. More recently, it began offering porn and shortly thereafter introduced a sale on 99 movie titles for only $0.99 each. All of which makes it sound more and more like Akimbo.(Photo by Juha-Matti Herrala)

But in the section, "How to bond with a journalist," he suggests that "you can cut to the front of the line by spending just 30 minutes researching the journalist you're pitching." We're not sure what's creepier: (A) that Calacanis emailed the piece directly to me and very special contributor Paul Boutin, nagging us to post it, or (B) that his suggestions describe the duties of the minion he employs to monitor us.

I've gotten so obsessive about this that my liaison Tyler, whom anyone who's met with me in the last year knows, keeps tabs on our journalist and blogger contacts. He not only reads their work, he always stays in contact with them. This means we are in constant research and dialogue with the folks who are covering us. This means when we meet about a story we know as much about the journalist as they know about us—sometimes more! Tyler will hand me a stack of stories and background information on the people we're meeting with on the flight to another country so I can play catch up.

I have officially been scared into never oversharing again, lest some flack or wantrepreneur watch and wait until I'm in a vulnerable emotional state to better prey on me.

Acquired in October 2007, Twitter rival Jaiku still doesn't accept new users. Its current ones complain of system slowdowns and malfunctions. On May 30, 2008, founder Jyri Engeström wrote:

Contrary to some voices out there, we DO have plans for future development and we will involve our developer community as much as we can. Just to reiterate, we are working very hard to ensure you have a useful and usable service. We feel the short term pain, too.

Acquired in October 2006, JotSpot is Google Sites now, and according to longtime users, it's not what it used to be.

Purchased in 2005, it took Google six months to assign any new engineers to the project. The founders quit in 2007, and one, Dennis Crowley, will tell any entreprenuer who will listen to reject Google's siren song.

Google acquired GrandCentral, which provides a suite of telephony services, in July 2007, immediately closed it to new users and hasn't opened it since.

Google acquired Measure Map in 2006, hoping to incorporate its features into Google Analytics. "And we did that," reports Google VP David Lawee. Too bad for bloggers who missed Measure Map's blog-specific features and don't use Google's Blogger.

Probably because it's the first animal listed in most dictionaries, implying there will be many more products to similarly anthropomorphize. Assuming the funds from the "mega-Series-A round" the company is looking to close doesn't run out first. According to the prehensile news nose of Kara Swisher, the valuation will be "larger than is typical at this stage in the game." Mahalo and Wikia leave me unconvinced that creating new tools to get help from friends on Web queries will ever make a dent in Google's search market share. If I wanted to ask my friends — even strangers — a question, I've got all sorts of social networks I rarely use like Twitter and Facebook. Email and IM work better, anyway. It's called the Lazyweb for a reason. Why make it harder? (Photo by MontageMan)

Do the math: Ling joined Facebook in October 2007. He's leaving Facebook in a few weeks, months before his one-year anniversary — and it normally takes one year of employment for stock options or restricted stock to vest. However miserable Ling was under Elliot Schrage — Sandberg's personal flack and de facto chief of staff, whom she put in charge of Facebook's development platform, to the utter shock of the entire Valley — can you imagine he walked away from that much money? Far more likely: Sandberg and Schrage asked him to resign in exchange for getting to keep his shares. Ling, who was well-regarded at both Google and Facebook, now gets to walk away from Sandberg's mess.

Cohler, formerly Facebook's product chief, has also made nice noises about Sandberg — and he, too, needed the cash. He's now a general partner at Benchmark Capital, where Sandberg's husband, Dave Goldberg, is employed as an entrepreneur-in-residence. (None of this is coincidence.) General partners at VC firms normally buy into the funds they invest; Benchmark Capital's most recent fund, raised in February, is an eye-popping $500 million.The amount Cohler would have to invest personally comes to roughly $500,000, by my estimates. Selling his Facebook shares seems like the most likely way he'll come up with that money. Isn't it likely that in exchange for making nice noises about Sandberg on the way out, Cohler got an assurance that Facebook won't make trouble about his share sales?

The fundamental problem with Sandberg's take-no-prisoners management style: It's exquisitely tuned for the zero-sum world of Washington, where you're either in power or out. She's treating her appointment as Facebook's COO like a new administration coming into the White House. Her years at Google, which was the only tech-startup game in town for the long years of the bust, reinforced the wrong lesson. Washington's bitter internal rivalries thrive on a scarcity of opportunity. Today's Valley has an abundance. Her employees have options, and not just the kind she can grant.

Which leaves the question: Why is Sandberg so determined to drive talent out of Facebook? My working theory: She wants to remake the company in her image. Here comes the Sandberg Administration! But to do so, she'll need to find skilled accomplices, not servile yes-men like Schrage (who wouldn't know an API if it extended his subclasses). And she'll need to articulate what, exactly, her new vision is.

For all of Mark Zuckerberg's flaws, he's created a website which will soon have 100 million users, and is worth billions of dollars according to a long line of Silicon Valley moneymen who are slavering to buy his employees' shares. What, exactly, has Sheryl Sandberg done, besides buy a lottery ticket by joining Google when it was still private?

Sometimes you have to tear down before you build. But no one knows what, if anything, Sandberg is building — besides fear and doubt. That's hardly the mark of a Silicon Valley leader. It's a tactic that may have worked in Washington, D.C., where Sandberg worked for the viciously political Clinton administration. But she's killing the company's morale with her Beltway tactics. If she has a bright idea, she'd better start talking about it. It will take far more than three days to rebuild this temple — and it's not clear she has time to spare.

1. Show your product within the first 60 seconds
Don’t spend five or ten minutes "setting the stage" or "giving the background." If you don't have a product to show, don't take the meeting.

2. Take less than five minutes to demo
All the tiny little features, you don't have to show them. Larry and Sergey wouldn't open up the advanced search.

3. Leave people wanting more
It's up to you to make such a compelling core product that they are intrigued enough to explore it.

4. Talk about what you've done, not what you're going to do
Steve Jobs doesn't waste time on what Apple's going to do. Weak startup leaders immediately start talk about "what's next.” What really matters is the core functionality.

5. Understand your competitive landscape—current and historical
I've had three or four companies pitch me on [products that unknowingly re-implemented] Third Voice—the controversial "Web annotation" service from Web 1.0.

6. Short answers are best
Answer questions with the most concise answer. [Then stop talking!]

7. PowerPoint bullet slides are death
Slides that are not boring include charts, product shots, feature set tables and the like.

8. How to use this new device called the phone
When presenting over the phone use a handset and a land-line only! Mobile phones and speakerphones sound horrible, disrespectful.

9. How to handle questions you don't know the answer to
No one has an answer for everything, except b.s. artists. Feel free to say you don't know.

10. Always confirm the time of your meeting/call, and always be 15 minutes early
[Start off on the right foot.] Send a simple email saying "Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow at your offices at 123 Main Street at 3pm. If anything changes you can reach me on my mobile at 310-555-1212." Show respect by being in their lobby or on hold on the conference call five to 15 minutes ahead of time.

Slydial is easy to explain: You sign up, then dial 267-SLYDIAL from any cellphone or land line. Enter the phone number whose voicemail you want — cell phones only — and Slydial lets you record and leave a voicemail message without ringing the other party's phone first. I can finally do my Leonard Cohen impression into my wife's inbox without disrupting her board meetings. Slydial limits you to one phone number per message. That's good — let the telemarketers dial us one at a time.

1. Two things are broken: record labels and movies.
2. Simplified browsing. The space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox.
3. New news. PerezHilton and TechCrunch, Reddit and Digg are just the beginning.
4. Outsourced IT.
5. Enterprise software 2.0 for smaller companies.
6. More variants of CRM: make interactions with customers much higher-res.
7. Something your company needs.
8. Dating.
9. Photo/video sharing services.
10. Auctions. EBay is doing a bad job.
11. Web Office apps.
12. Fix advertising.
13. How can you teach kids through the web?
14. Tell who the most productive people are in large organizations.
15. Off the shelf security. Stitch together alternatives out of cheap, existing hardware and services.
16. A form of search that depends on design. Google has no sense of design.
17. New payment methods.
18. The WebOS.
19. Application and/or data hosting. Start by writing Basic for the Altair.
20. Shopping guides. How do you decide what you want?
21. Finance software for individuals and small businesses.
22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid.
23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia.
24. A buffer against bad customer service: a wrapper around common bad customer service experiences.
25. A Craigslist competitor.
26. Better video chat.
27. Hardware/software hybrids: iPod/iTunes.
28. Fixing email overload.
29. Easy site builders for specific markets. What's the best way to make a web site if you're a lawyer?
30. Startups for startups. We're one; TechCrunch is another.

Will Slingshot actually produce anything besides cushier jobs for restless talent at MySpace? Yahoo's Brickhouse is a cautionary tale. The San Francisco office was meant to house creative new projects — like Flickr, but built in-house. In practice, however, it's nearly impossible to pay employees as richly as the startup stock-option lottery does. A sinecure at a big company is less risky, and less rewarding. Will the likes of Granado produce a big payoff for MySpace? Unlikely. But it must be worth something to put studs out to pasture, rather than see them running with the herd at Facebook.

It's a long-held truism in the Valley not to risk your own money on a project when there are plenty of people willing to let you risk theirs in the hope of a return. You can now add that you probably shouldn't risk your company's most vital assets in exchange for loans from interested parties. As it stands, all of Flagship and partner Ping0's employees have been laid off, and HanbitSoft along with competitor Perfect World are now sniffing around the remains looking to poach whatever engineering and development talent they can, while Roper and other executives are said to be paying the last of the team's salaries out of their own pockets.

And according to our source, the death of the company couldn't have come at a worse time. The development team were just putting the finishing touches on the code to allow players of Mythos to make "real money transactions" — in other words, pay for in game items and new content as they played. By offering the game for free or nearly so and then charging the players nominal fees afterwards, the game can benefit from wide adoption early on and a revenue stream to pay for the development of more features and content as time went on.

But it meant that Flagship would have to eat the cost of early game development (which can be wildly expensive) and would almost guaranteed not to recoup the full cost on release. While it's an interesting business model that could prove wildly profitable a well-funded company, at one where Roper's old pal from Blizzard, CFO Ken Williams, couldn't keep the burn rate under control and was pawning IP off to licensees in exchange for bridge loans, it might make a little more sense to get some sales in first and nickel-and-dime players later. (Photo by Gamerscore Blog)

As sole founder, she's bootstrapping for now, but upfront about her plans to cash out in three years — how L.A. gauche, yet refreshingly honest! Valley entrepreneurs only blather dishonestly about how they're "building a company for the long term." Meanwhile, she'll be penning a column for TV Week, Digital Dish, about the experience transitioning from Web technology into the entertainment industry, which should make interesting reading for those of you out there looking to go Hollywood.

But as Oprah proves, inspiration sells more ads than sob stories. What is the market for loser-generated content? That's what Wainwright is now testing.

Presenting herself as a heroine to the middle-aged estrogen set strikes me as deeply disingenuous. She may want to present her career as a triumph of girl power, but really, Wainwright's c.v. reads more like an example of the Peter Principle at work. A marketer at Clorox, Wainwright stumbled into the software business in the '90s, and a startup industry desperate for CEOs grabbed onto her. Reel.com, an attempt backed by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen to compete with Amazon.com in the video business utterly flopped; yet she parlayed her tenure there into a gig as CEO of Pets.com.

That's where the overpromoted marketer really failed. By buying television ads at a time when Internet access was not yet universal, she spent millions of dollars in venture capital on wasteful commercials that promoted the Pets.com sock puppet but didn't drive users to the website. The commercials did, however, fill up the telegenic spokes-CEO's clip file. She now takes credit for barely avoiding bankruptcy by shutting down Pets.com, neatly dodging the question of how it got to such financial straits in the first place.

Also lost in Wainwright's narrative: the two or three startups Wainwright has launched between Pets.com and SmartNow, only given the briefest of mentions in her LinkedIn profile.

With the bubble in social networking still frothy, and advertisers eager to reach women online, Wainwright will no doubt be able to flip her new startup to some buyer like Samir Arora's Glam Media, who will then offload it to an even greater fool. She'll no doubt account for it as a win. But even such a sale will not disguise this fact: Throughout her career, the only thing Wainwright has ever successfully marketed is herself.