From the home office on Sand Hill Road, where dreams were made to be exaggerated beyond belief, comes today's Top Ten List! The Top Ten ways you know it's time to bail out of your failing dot-com: 10) Feminine products in restroom replaced with advertisements for The Pill and The Patch. 9) Your guest speaker for the influential speakers series isn't Tom Cruise, but Tom Poston. 8) Eccentric billionaire leadership decides new employees have to fetch real lava for the company's tchotchke lava lamps. 7) Mike Arrington would rather payoff than write about your company on a bet. 6) The CEO writes an open letter to a stronger company's CEO begging him to merge the two firms' operating systems. 5) A consultant recommends that your firm should take on iTunes with a digital music service; management agrees. 4) Your executive management team just came back from an outsourcing capital like India with the kind of afterglow usually seen on someone after sex. 3) Your $70k per year boss and his $120k per year boss begin telling $35k staffers that they are overpaid despite doing the work of three people. 2) Then: IPOs. Now: employee plasma drives to raise cash and pay the utility bills for the office. And the number one reason you should know it's time to bail out of your dot-com... 1) You are reading this post because you haven't had any real work to do for a couple of weeks!

Little .com: SketchUp. Answer: if you're not a developer... you better dust off the ol' interview suit ;)