The AdMob deal announced today is the third largest acquisition in Google's history, behind only DoubleClick ($3.1 billion) and YouTube ($1.7 billion). But no one's really been talking about the mobile advertising network or its early-thirtysomething founder Omar Hamoui until now. Hamoui is downright anonymous.

Here's what we've learned about him based on his low internet profile and scant press clippings:

• Has all of 441 followers on Twitter. In contrast, Jason Calacanis, who sold his weblogging company for less than 1/20th as much, has 77,000 followers.
  
• 32 years old as of May.
  
• Earned a bachelor's in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles and dropped out of the MBA program at Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
  
• Ran computer programming company Vertical Blue for almost four years.
  
• Senior program manager at Sony Pictures Digital, about two years.
  
• COO of startup called GoPix.
  
• Started HerBabyShower.com.
  
• Started FotoChatter, for sharing pictures between cell phones, but left the venture behind after becoming frustrated with the inefficiency of advertising his site to mobile users.
  
• Came up with AdMob as a solution to the FotoChatter advertising headaches while at Wharton, at age 28.
  
• In 2007, Bill Gates personally asked Omar Hamoui to speak at Microsoft's annual gathering of journalists, according to a July 207 Ad Age article. Gates had just bought one of Hamoui's competitors.
  
• Last year, toured Kara Swisher of All Things D through his cramped headquarters in San Mateo, a town on the San Francisco Peninsula not exactly famous as a startup hotbed. (See below).
  
• Google bought AdMob after attempting to launch a mobile ad network of its own (AdSense Mobile).

(Pic: Hamoui by Rodrigo SEPÚLVEDA SCHULZ )

Not merely Julia Allison come the Valley, but a Jullia Allison only the Valley could breed; a fameball selling California's tech-money nexus on the notion it can turn its business ethos into a spiritual conscience. For attention-hungry Zuckerberg, the mildly political video above is just another in a series of high-profile lip dubs; for venture capitalist Tim Draper, another chance to clown. Kataoka, though, describes herself as a "Silicon Valley artist," and seems determined in certain scenes to elevate the clip into something of a performance piece.

Art and spirituality are, in fact, key to how Kataoka sells herself in the Valley. She is, on the most basic level, a blogger and Web entrepreneur, like virtually everyone else in the California tech enclave. Kataoka even attempted to hit her wedding guests up for free venture capital. But her ValleyZen blog offers big shots something special: the rare chance to blather on about their inner philosophy and intricate belief systems.

They leap at the chance. In one of four videos, Draper hugs and dances with Kataoka; book publisher Tim O'Reilly gives her a tour of his treehouse at home in Sebastopol; TV host Charlie Rose and Tesla CEO Elon Musk consent to backstage interviews.

The archetype for a ValleyZen sit-down is the one Kataoka did with her partner in the venture, uber attorney Bill Fenwick, who counts Apple Inc. among his clients.

Fenwick pitches Zen Buddhism as excellent preparation for corporate battle. With militaristic East Asian music in the background, he says:

There is an awful lot of similarity between the principles of Zen and what happens in a battle... If you can get enough people... to find commonality, you've got a force that's going to have to be reckoned with.

Kataoka also touts the practical benefits of Zen for venture capitalists:

It's a composure, a poised kind of calm that would allow to innovate and create and think of new ideas.

Innovation is not exactly a traditional religious selling point. But the dubious repurposing of Eastern religions into corporate strategy is hardly new, either; like Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has taken to using Sun Tzu's Art of War as a tactical business manual.

Kataoka is the perfect icon for this sort of awkward fusion. In a region overloaded with computer scientists and MBAs — men obsessed with numbers and code — there's something deliciously off-kilter about a "classical and jazz flutist" who claims "Japanese Samurai heritage" and specializes in a "2000 year-old art form of Japanese brush painting." She's drawn cover artwork for Wynton Marsalis, completed a commissioned portrait of 49ers Coach Bill Walsh and done extensive work for Stanford University. In fact, according to a student who attended the college in the late 1990s, her work became comically ubiquitous:

She... somehow managed to wrangle some deal doing art for the vast majority of official Stanford posters. So... every time you'd get a flyer for like homecoming or something, it'd look as though you were being invited to formal tea in Kyoto. It was weird.

Kataoka has drawn approving notices for her fashion choices. A pre-election encounter between the artist and Michelle Obama led the Fashion-y Blog to assemble the collage at left, adding,

"Drue does a really good job balancing funky and classic pieces. Her signature sleek '20s-style bob, bright red lipstick, and matching nail polish always make a statement, and she clearly isn't afraid to stand out."

Brush strokes, music, fashion, Zen: Everyone in Silicon Valley wishes they were this eclectic. The Bay Area man is supposed to be a renaissance man; it is not enough to be merely a venture capitalist or a programmer or a journalist, one should also be a rock-climbing, spiritually involved yoga instructor with a quirky electronic pop band on the side. Hence the local obsession with the annual hippie drug and art fest that is Burning Man.

If you feel like something of a let down in this regard, well, why not look to Kataoka and ValleyZen? In New York, where attention is worshipped via the media industry, those feeling insufficiently self promotional can look to the high priestess of fameballing, Julia Allison. In the Valley, where long hours coding or selling so often conflict with the eclectic ideal, Kataoka sells instead a facade of well-roundedness, with Pacific Century Asian flare to boot. And, soothing music and talk of Zen aside, she does so just as aggressively as her East Coast counterpart.

[top video via VentureBeat]

Age: 30

Residence: The tony Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air.

Childhood: Born in New York, Penske went to high school in the Detroit suburbs, where he made the All-American Lacrosse team.

Family wealth: Father Roger Penske, a race car driver, owns Penske Corporation, which owns auto dealerships, leases trucks and makes various auto parts.

Love life: Has dated actresses Lara Flynn Boyle, Gina Gershon, Jordana Brewster (left) and Devon Aoki (with Penske, top of this post)

Personality: Says an associate, "He comes across as hugely elegant, massively sophisticated then as you get to know him, you see this slightly skeevy side, heavy drinker likes to party."

Business: Penske's Mail.com Media Corporation took a $35 million investment from Steve Rattner's Quadrangle Group in September; but we hear he's been having trouble finding properties to buy.

Sites: MMC runs Mail.com, an also-ran email portal whose heyday was in the 1990s; OnCars.com; our former Defamer colleagues' Movieline.com, celebrity news site HollywoodLife (he shut down HollywoodLife the magazine earlier this year) and now Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily. It also provides private-label sites to large organizations like sports teams and universities.

Dragon fetish: Penske also runs Dragon Books, a vanity boutique book store he runs a little Bel Air shopping center. Its placeholder website has been under "redesign" for more than two years. Then there's the Luczo Dragon Racing team, which he co-owns with the chairman of hard-drive maker Seagate Technologies.

Flops: Started Firefly Mobile, selling cell phones for kids, in 2002; by 2006 the company needed a restart.

So how much did he pay for Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood?: Seven figures, supposedly. PaidContent's Rafat Ali reports that his company had been in talks with Finke at a lower number. We heard from Finke's editor at the LA Weekly, Jill Stewart, that Finke was talking as if she was looking at "so much money" while she pondered the deal. Seven-figures sounds mighty high for DHD, but if Penske was having trouble making deals, maybe he was willing to overpay.

Aspirations: Penske is said desperately seeking entree to the fashion world, part of a broader quest for elegance. The same associate:

He wants to be a modern day Si Newhouse, he wants to have a glamourous publishing company.

We hope, then, he reconsiders the name Mail.com Media Corp. as the name of his flagship.

Age: Next month Peter turns 42.

Source of wealth: Oil business started by his grandfather, J. Paul Getty, and sold to Texaco by his father, the composer Gordon Getty, who is worth around $2.5 billion.

Occupation: Outside of blogging for SFGate, has described himself as a playwright, advertising copywriter and actor. Was in a rock band; started one now-defunct record company and talked about starting another, though that effort apparently fizzled. Upon the debut of one opera he wrote, in 1985, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "If you or I had written this, it wouldn't have gone beyond the living room."

Also authored an anonymous music blog, available here.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Wife Jacqui, defacto Coppola: Jacqui de La Fontaine was pregnant with Francis Ford Coppola's granddaughter when her boyfriend Gian-Carlo "Gio" Coppola was killed in a boating accident. Francis looked after the widow and daughter Gian-Carla ("Gia"), later walking Jacqui down the aisle during her 2000 wedding to Getty.

Jacqui has worked as a stylist at Harper's Bazaar, and as a costume stylist for music videos (Bob Dylan, Beastie Boys, Faith Hill) and movies. This background no doubt influenced her Bazaar photo shoot; in the attached picture she's on the left with Gia in the middle.

Best friends with British opposition leader: According to a 2005 Mail on Sunday story, Peter was close with David Cameron in Heatherdown, a British prep school. A former instructor said Peter Getty was "one of Cameron's best friends at school." The story added: "During the summer of 1977, Getty's family invited Cameron and four other boys at the school to fly to America on Concorde for a threeweek holiday including seven days at the Getty family mansion in Pacific Heights in San Francisco." How fun!

'Nexus of hipster Hollywood:' A 2004 Bazaar profile called Jacqui the "nexus of hipster Hollywood" and said the couple's nondescript home at the top of the Hollywood Hills, along with a Malibu home rented each summer, form a "crash pad" for their celebrity and artist friends to mix "in a freestyle, nonconventional form." The couple also throw a popular Halloween party.

Celebrity pals: The couple's friends include:

• "Close pal" Demi Moore, who met Jacqui in a Kentucky antiques store in 1988.
• Ashton Kutcher.
• Jason Schwartzman, who probably knows the couple since he's Francis Ford Coppola's nephew, partied with the couple right after their marriage and attended his 40th birthday party five years later.
  
• Actress Heather Graham also attended Peter's 40th birthday party.
• The various Coppolas, obviously.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.His rock band: Virgin-Whore Complex, whose 1996 release "Stay Away from My Mother" was in the mold of English new-wave band XTC. Spin magazine did the release party. The band reportedly refused to perform live concerts. None of this shielded the group from criticism; the music zine Octulus wrote, "The male lead singer's nasal delivery begins to sound like a bad imitation of a sleepy Fred Schneider."

Ironic lyrics included:

Son, I know you're scared
But we think it's time you knew
How much poverty and crime it takes
To finance one of you

Playing dress-up: Getty's clothes have betrayed the same superficial alienation from his privilege as his controversial SFGate posting. He assumed the character Spats Ransom in his band; other makeovers have seen him costumed as Willie Wonka (courtesy a gift from Jacqui) and an 18th-Century sea captain (from the Bazaar photo at top). Around town in San Francisco, he takes pride in an aggressively casual appearance, judging from the society columns.

The Coppola music hook-up: Jacqui's Hollywood connections have not only helped attract a circle of celebrity friends but also aided Peter's business: His now-defunct record label Emporer Norton Records released the soundtracks for two popular movies directed by Coppola's daughter Sofia, Lost in Translation and the Virgin Suicides.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.May have literally slept with Gavin Newsom: The Getty family is a longtime benefactor of Gavin Newsom, the hard-drinking, womanizing, hair-gel loving mayor of San Francisco and potential Democratic nominee for governor. Newsom's father, Judge William Newsom, was financial consigliere to Peter's father Gordon. So it was probably inevitable that his interests would intersect with those of Peter.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Getty scion has been a partner in one or more of Newsom's business ventures, which include wine, restaurants and resorts. He rented his one-bedroom, $2.5 million apartment (left, via SocketSite) to the mayor after his divorce from Kimberly Guilfoyle. And things got even cozier at the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Peter shared a hotel room with Newsom, his brother Billy — and just two beds.

Exes: Met Jacqui when he was dating Lauren Hutton, 24 years his senior.

San Francisco home: This, bought (obviously) with help from mom.

Facebook's new $200 million funding round does not directly involve Usmanov. Instead, it comes through an internet holding company run by Yuri Milner, the Russian who parlayed a Penn MBA and stint at the World Bank into a key role in some of his country's earliest stock deals. Facebook is said to covet his ties to the Russian government. The rising star plans to take his company public within three years.

But Usmanov is a major source of Milner's money, to say nothing of his connections, joining marquee investors like Goldman Sachs and Renaissance Capital. An owner of newspaper and TV properties in Russia, the former Soviet prisoner now finds his interests enmeshed with new forms of media on the other side of the globe. So he's worth getting to know.

Claim to global fame: Usmanov owns 24 percent of London football club Arsenal. After the oligarch and his London-based partner Farhad Moshiri increased their stake in the team, directors threw up roadblocks to his ever taking control of Arsenal. The team is widely loved among the English.

Worth: $1.5 billion, according to Forbes, down from $5.5 billion in 2007.

Source of wealth: As the Soviet Union started to liberalize, Usmanov launched a venture selling plastic shopping bags. He made still more money buying and selling shares of other businesses in the early days of Russia's equity market. Eventually, he acquired former Soviet metals factories and mines. His investments now also range from gas giant Gazprom to a mobile phone network to media properties.

Nickname: "The hard man of Russia."

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.'Gangster' censorship controversy: Craig Murray, Britain's outspoken former ambassador to Uzbekistan, in 2007 alleged on his website that Usmanov served jail time in the old Soviet Union not as political prisoner, as the billionaire has claimed, but because he was a "gangster and racketeer." Usmanov was only released, Murray further alleged, because Uzbek ruler Islam Karimov did a favor for an "Uzbek mafia boss."

Usmanov's London lawyers not only had the article removed by Murray's Web hosting provider but also warned various bloggers to remove posts referring to the allegations. The move backfired, drumming up blogger outrage and bad press for Usmanov who, some noted, declined to challenge Murray's claims directly in a libel case, despite British laws heavily favoring libel plaintiffs. (In an interview outlining his version of events, Usmanov later said he would file a libel claim if Murray could prove himself sane.)

Diamond controversy: A company controlled by the diamond corporation De Beers named Usmanov in a suit alleging "fraud" and "unjust enrichment" in a fight over ownership of a diamond mine in northern Russia. Usmanov's press agents have denied the charges in strong terms.

Page Six reports the software entrepreneur just threw a party on a 147-foot Dutch yacht before taking his G4 private jet to Cannes. (Update: Saylor says he doesn't own a G4 and was not in Cannes this year, see our correction.) The press-friendly tech exec — he once counted the media among his three key "constituencies," along with Wall Street and his own employees — didn't necessarily have anything to do with the tabloid item, or with his mention in a March Forbes article titled, "Ex-Billionaires Poised To Make a Comeback."

But back in 2000, even before he lost more in a single day than any human other than Microsoft founder Bill Gates (up to that point), Saylor's consumption was less flashy. He lived in "a dreary Northern Virginia townhouse," Slate reported. "Money holds little interest for him."

Saylor always had hubris, though. Here he is comparing himself to Thomas Edison and the ancient Romans in Fortune. So it's not a stretch to imagine he's now angling to be known as something other than a man done in by his own accounting error. If we're to be inundated with fresh news on Saylor, we might as well remind ourselves of who he is.

Claim to fame: He wishes it was McLean, Virginia-based MicroStrategy's data-mining software. Insted it's that $6 billion loss in personal wealth, incurred after the company retroactively slashed 1999 revenue by 25 percent due to erroneous accounting of two long-term contracts.

God complex: Saylor's employees have been known to say they are part of the "cult of MicroStrategy." The company is known for its six-week boot-camp for new recruits; for an annual winter cruise (no spouses allowed) and for an annual weeklong "university."

Saylor's sermons to staff have been known to run up to nine hours, the Washington Post has reported. His onetime chief of staff told the paper, "I've never seen someone who could transfix a room like Mike Saylor."

So he has issues?: Sure. WaPo also said he suffered from "volcanic impatience" and had been known to recite Bill Gates' well-known line, "That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard." The newspaper cited his strict Southern Baptist upbringing by an Air Force Chief Master Sergeant for his "strong sense of insularity and control."

Doesn't sound like a playboy: No. In fact, Saylor used to hardly drink at all. That changed some time after he lost all that money, the Washington Post said, and now the New York Post has him jetting off to Cannes "with six friends."

Who does he date?: Interesting question! The Washington Post's gossips seemed pretty surprised when a woman there, Jess McCann, listed him as a "past flame" on an invitation to her book party. "Saylor keeps a tight lid on his personal life," the Reliable Souce column noted, and Saylor would say only of the woman, "we were associated" — not whether she was his girlfriend.

Slate thought it worth noting that Saylor "lets himself be advertised" as DC's most eligible bachelor.

WaPo once wrote that Saylor had once been known to invite women on dates, only to ask them to sit and read while he worked.

Ton-That owns the domain name viddyho.com, now offline, which hosted a form asking people to log in with a Google account in order to watch a video. The ViddyHo worm then seized control of their chat and email accounts and sent contacts a disguised link.

Even if Ton-That had nothing to do with ViddyHo, he (or she? how am I supposed to respect this person's deeply nuanced personal concept of gender without hearing explicitly the gender narrative he or she has constructed around a completed sense of self?) would still be an interesting character — a classically quirky yet herd-following San Francisco Web-software entrepreneur. His Twitter profile describes him as an "Anarcho-Transexual [sic] Afro-Chicano American Feminist Studies Major."

Ton-That frequently posted on Twitter about going to Sugarlump, an overwroughtly hip San Francisco "coffee lounge" in a rough-hewn but gentrifying corner of the Mission District, the preferred neighborhood of twentysomething Web developers. HappyAppy's office address is listed as 25 Stillman Street, a classically South of Market location for a startup. (In fact, it was once the home of Socializr, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams's current company.)

In his work, too, Ton-That has followed the herd. A Google-cached version of Ton-That's blog gives this career biography:

From July 2007 to July 2008, I built 16 Facebook apps (with different codebases) with a combined unique install base of 6 million. In March 2008 the applications had over 150 million page views. In August 2008, I sold the top apps (Have You Ever, Would You Rather, Friend Quiz and Romantic Gifts).

I've also built 8 iPhone apps, notably Expando being the #2 app in September 2008 receiving 4 stars and over 400 reviews.

Ton-That's involvement with Facebook apps tracks precisely the rising and falling arc of Silicon Valley's craze for the social network's add-ons. And at the same time as many, Ton-That jumped from the Facebook-app wave to iPhone apps.

A Harvard Crimson reporter found extensive online links between ViddyHo and Ton-That's software business, HappyAppy. Ton-That hasn't admitted to the hack, or denied it. It's possible that whoever perpetrated the worm also hacked Ton-That's site. But his personal website is now offline, and he hasn't updated his Twitter feed since yesterday afternoon, when the first links between Ton-That and ViddyHo were reported.

Everything about Ton-That's life and work is a screaming stereotype of San Francisco's Web crowd — a bunch of supposed individualists who'd be paralyzed with fear by the idea that they're not living in the right neighborhood, working in the right office, and chasing the right technological trend. That's the irony of Ton-That's involvement with ViddyHo. If he is indeed the perpetrator of the worm, it may make him hated. But it would be the first truly original thing he's done.

(Photo by Terry Chay)

Has a real media job. Lazar has already achieved something beyond the reach of most fameballs: Steady employment with a large, traditional media business. She hosts Open House LA and First Look LA on KNBC, the Los Angeles-based NBC station. (She's also a host on the Reelz channel, whatever that is.)

Has lived in LA since 2004. Lazar is something of a personality in the self-proclaimed L.A. tech/blogging scene. (In this photo, she attempts to interview Perez Hilton.)

Dov Charney's stepsister. Lazar, described as a "hot peppy Jewish girl from Montreal" by one YouTube user, went to the same Canadian school as Charney, now the CEO of American Apparel, but 14 years apart. When she interviewed her scandal-plagued stepbrother last August, she did not mention his history of sexual-harassment lawsuits, or, in fact, any relationship to Charney at all. That's family loyalty for you! Also not disclosed in the video: Her habit of picking up free clothes from American Apparel. (TV stars get tons of free clothing from airtime-hungry designers, but not usually from their stepbrother's firm.)

Went to Emerson College. Bachelor's degree in TV/video.

Participated in the 2005 Ujena Bikini Jam.

Flirted with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. Lazar showed up at a TechCrunch party last July. The doughy blogger accosted her and asked her why she was there. That encounter begat a working relationship where she tried making a few video clips for him. The talks never went anywhere, as she's on contract with NBC through February.

Began dating Rose near the end of November. No professional interest here: "Rose just wants to bang hot chicks off his Twitter list," says one informant who has observed their relationship closely. He does have a large online following, thanks to the popularity of Digg, his news-discussion site, and Diggnation, a companion online-video series where he drinks and discusses Digg headlines on camera. Could Lazar be hoping to leverage Rose's crowd?

Drew controversy at the Sundance Festival. Arrington — perhaps miffed that his play for Lazar went nowhere? — complained that Lazar had cheated to win 24 Hours at Sundance, a competition organized by Rose and Kutcher — and also claimed she'd been bragging about dating one of the organizers. Assuming Demi Moore has nothing to worry about, that would be Rose.

Went to Barack Obama's inauguration with Julia Allison. Allison, the Time Out dating columnist who briefly pursued Rose and remained obsessed for months afterward, claims she's over him. Curious, then, that she cozied up to Lazar in Washington, D.C., offering Lazar her spare ticket to the inaugural. Aubrey Sabala, a Digg marketing manager, may have helped make the introduction hobnobbed with the two in D.C. That's especially curious because I've noticed how extraordinarly protective Digg employees have become about their founder's love life lately. Introducing his girlfriend to the famously indiscreet Allison hardly seems like the way to further that goal. Then again, perhaps that's why Sabala dived between them in the last photo below. Update: Allison, in an expletive-laced IM conversation, informed me that Meghan Asha, her Silicon Valley heiress sidekick, met Lazar at Sundance and subsequently introduced the two.

How serious are they? This is Rose we're talking about, who's not known for his long-term relationships. And the two live and work in different cities. Sean Percival, an L.A. tech personality, says it's over already.

(Photos via Twitpic, Nonsociety, TheChimp.net, LAist, and AnchorBabes)

Over the next dozen years, her relentless upward trajectory took a pause. She'd moved up the org chart from 3M to DEC to Sun Microsystems, where she was vice president of worldwide field operations, a top sales post. Then she went to Autodesk, becoming the first female CEO of a major software company; was briefly celebrated as one of the "top women of the '90s" alongside the likes of Jodie Foster; got invited to President Clinton's first economic summit; and disappeared.

Yes, Autodesk grew from $300 million in sales to $1.5 billion before she stepped down as CEO in 2006. But the company's software, mostly used by architects and product designers, was hopelessly obscure. A 2004 profile in Business 2.0 was the last major look at her career.

Bartz is no egomaniac; she's pleasantly folksy, dressing down in jeans for an interview with BusinessWeek at the time of her resignation from Autodesk. But there has always been an undercurrent of resentment that she has not won more attention. It shows, at times — like a speech she gave students at Stanford University, where she started a speech by carping about all the empty chairs. And while she's unpretentious about her looks, she's glammed up noticeably in the past decade — which, sad to say, still seems to be a prerequisite for a woman to rise in corporate America.

if Bartz secretly craves attention, she surely got it by taking Yahoo's top job. The company has been better known as a source of drama than of innovation. Here's what we know about Bartz:

Fearless. When she joined Autodesk, it was run, unofficially, by a small group of engineers known as "the Core" who were loyal to batty founder John Walker and had all but deposed her predecessor, a nebbishy accountant who didn't use email. Bartz imposed order over them when she joined in April 1992, even as she found, on her second day on the job, that she had developed breast cancer. She delayed treatment until June and took only four weeks off. She called an executive she'd been trying to recruit from her hospital room, hours after a radical mastectomy. He took the job.

Blunt and profane. Bartz once walked into a meeting and said, "Tell me why I shouldn't fire the lot of you." She likes to drop the f-bomb. In 2004, she summarized Wall Street's bubble-earromance with now-forgotten dotcoms as "Used-Fucking-Golfballs.com," and questioned a rival's entry into her market by asking, "What the fuck does Adobe know about engineering drawings?" Yesterday, at her first all-hands meeting, she promised to "dropkick to fucking Mars" anyone who leaked information to blogs.

A loving if terrifying mom. Bartz has three children and is married to Bill Marr, a retired Sun executive. More magazine described her family's reaction to her 2006 retirement:

When she told her daughter, Layne, 17, the news, "She looked at me like I was crazy." Bartz's husband, Bill Marr, who retired 10 years ago, warned her, "Don't expect you're going to come be CEO of the house and boss us around." "They were terrified," Bartz says, laughing.

Bartz showed up in jeans to the BusinessWeek interview because she'd spent the morning hanging out with her daughter:

She's in back-to-back meetings at a Starbucks near her home, dressed in jeans and an orange sweater, wearing no makeup. Earlier that morning Layne, who's anxiously awaiting responses from colleges, crawled into bed with her, something she hasn't done since she was a child. "She's more stressed than I've ever seen her," Bartz says. "I knew something was wrong and so I just hung." All the while, she knew the clock was ticking on a breakfast meeting she had scheduled. She comforted her daughter, threw on clothes, and raced out, already late. "The concept of balance is perfection," she says, miming a seesaw motion. "And that's crazy."

The kid seems to have turned out okay. Layne graduated from Sacred Heart Preparatory School that year, debuted at the Peninsula Ball, and is now a junior at the University of Southern California, according to Facebook. She has not posted anything embarrassing about herself on MySpace, as best Google can tell.

Wealthy, but grew up poor. Bartz and her family live in Atherton, Calif., the wealthiest ZIP code in America. Yahoo paid her a signing bonus of $10 million in cash and stock, with a salary of $1 million a year and a bonus that ranges from $2 million to $4 million a year. That's actually not a vast improvement over what she made at Autodesk 16 years ago, when her salary was $650,000; she also reportedly made $230 million from her Autodesk stock options. If she's driven to make that kind of money again at Yahoo, it will be because of her upbringing. More magazine relates her childhood and young adulthood:

Carol Bartz's early story is one of vulnerability — and the refusal to be vulnerable. She was born in the town of Winona, Minnesota, in 1948, to a mother with a chronic, disabling disease. Shirley Bartz died when Carol was 8 and her brother, Jim, was 8. For the next few years, Carol would drop Jim off at the sitter's on her way to school and pick him up on the way home. Their father worked at a feed mill for $40 a week. His idea of discipline was to beat the children with a belt.

When Bartz was 12, her grandmother, Alice Schwartz, took her and Jim to raise in her own home, 30 miles away, in Wisconsin. Schwartz was smart, supportive, loving, and strong. Encouraged to succeed, Bartz bloomed: In high school, she was a majorette, the homecoming queen, and one of just two girls in her physics and advanced algebra classes.

She found another home of sorts in the bank where her Sunday-school teacher was president, working her way up from secretary to teller. Like any person with clear memories of money struggles, Bartz remembers every decimal of those early paychecks. She earned 75 cents an hour as a teller. Right after she graduated from high school, the bank managers realized they owed her back pay because of a change in the minimum wage, and gave her a check for $350. It was "the biggest windfall in my life," says Bartz, who years later would cash in $11 million in Autodesk stock options in one year. "It was an incredible amount of money to me."

The bank managers also helped Bartz get a scholarship, allowing her to go to William Woods, an elite all-girls college in Fulton, Missouri. She wasn't one of the crowd, though; she had a job in the cafeteria serving food to the wealthy students. "A pretty humbling experience," she calls it. "I was one of very few students actually working there. It wasn't the kind of school where people did that."

Bartz through the years:

Anything to add to her record? Send us a tip or leave a comment.

(Photos by AP/Getty Images/Yodel Anecdotal)

• Age: 39. Marital status: Single, though we hear Bulick may be his live-in girlfriend. Residence: San Francisco's Marina district.
• Last year, Men's Vogue called him the "rising prince" of a "new political dynasty." He's so green it hurts, refusing to wash his clothes during peak hours of energy use. He also rides San Francisco's electric Muni buses, which predisposes us to like him.
• Pelosi is president of San Francisco's Commission on the Environment, a powerless advisory group. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is his cousin, and they're supposedly good buds. But Pelosi was appointed by Newsom's predecessor, Willie Brown.
• Pelosi fling Nicole Bulick isn't what you'd call a professional model; she donned lacey underclothes in her part-time, contract position as "Arbiter of Zeitgeist" for Moxsie, a San Francisco online-fashion startup. Bizarrely, when Valleywag reported on Bulick's brief modeling career and mentioned her relationship with Pelosi, she sent us a threatening email claiming that she neither worked for Moxsie nor dated Pelosi. In fact, their relationship is well-known and she's frequently found on his arm at San Francisco society events.
• Pelosi earned three degrees at Georgetown University — which kept him conveniently close to mom, who was first elected to Congress in 1987. Georgetown received hundreds and his thousands of dollars from his mom and dad. (Paul Pelosi, Sr. is a wealthy real-estate investor who's been involved in some questionable deals.)
• His LinkedIn profile is a bit incomplete. It discusses his investment-banking work for Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. And it mentions his job at Countrywide, for example, where he worked as a loan officer — at one of the mortgage companies most scrutinized for its role in the housing bubble and ensuing collapse of Wall Street.
• But it pointedly omits his $180,000 a year job as a senior vice president at InfoUSA, a marketer of consumer databases, which he started less than one month after his mother became House Speaker, while simultaneously holding his job at Countrywide. InfoUSA CEO Vinod Gupta also paid Bill Clinton millions of dollars as a consultant, so many suspected Pelosi's job was an attempt to win influence with Nancy Pelosi. Paul Pelosi's explanation: He got to know Gupta as a client for whom he refinanced a house, and his experience as an investment banker was useful in evaluating acquisitions.
• InfoUSA is best known for peddling lists of seniors with gambling addictions and serious diseases like Alzheimer's or cancer to opportunistic telemarketers. Gupta resigned as InfoUSA's CEO in July 2008. Pelosi is not listed on the company's investor-relations website as an officer of the company.
• Which raises the question: What was a former investment banker doing working as a mortgage loan officer, anyway?
• Pelosi is currently working as an advisor to NASA on environmental issues, and he's joined the board of Blue Earth Solutions, a recycling outfit. So basically, he dabbles in a lot of green work, but isn't holding down anything resembling a full-time job at the moment, as far as we can tell.
• Know more about Pelosi? Tip us off.

(Photo of Pelosi via Men's Vogue; photo of Pelosi and Bulick by Drew Altizer via SFLuxe)

Here is what we know so far, gleaned from a historical combing-through of the Gawker archives, America's number one source of Fameball historiography:

• In early 08, Karp really started becoming a media "boy wonder" for inventing a slightly easier way to blog. This moniker was undeserved.
• He accused Sierra Mist of ripping off an ad idea from him, which he ripped off from Apocalypse Now.
• He likes to make beautiful music with Julia Allison.
• Karp is bestest friends with IminLikeWithYou's Charles Forman, but not in a homosexual way, regardless of how you may interpret their photographs together.
• He went out with CNET writer Caroline McCarthy. Later they broke up and became slightly passive-aggressive.
• He is a "Playboy of Tech," allegedly, whatever that means.
• And now his non-revenue-producing company is worth $15 million (ON PAPER)!

He's just like all young men, except (notionally) richer. Soon he will be forced to retreat to a mountaintop fortress to protect his microblogging fortune from the hungry hordes of urban paupers, Tumblr-img requests for him to donate money to them and shit. Sad. [Pic: Flickr]

1. Stay off of television: You got yourself a (well-deserved) spot as a TV election pundit during the election cycle, Nate. But your future is behind a computer. You're not particularly telegenic (don't feel bad, neither are we!), and besides, the punditocracy is already overflowing. We don't need another talking head; we need a true guru. Plus, TV appearances require you to learn to apply makeup, which the Times has already packaged as an anecdote to poke fun at you. Don't fall into this trap.

2. Follow the money: Statistics show (never gets old) that corporate America has all the money. Baseball fans and political junkies are fine people, but they're not the ones holding an extravagant portion of the world's wealth in their dessicated, greedy hands. In order to have a long-term career you're going to have to do something that appeals to the corporate types. Luckily, they love numbers too!

3. Open a consultancy: "Consultant" is the best job of all. You get to sell your advice for steep prices—then, if your advice turns out to be awful, it doesn't matter because you already got paid. Your future is in selling your statistical magic to evil corporate overlords. And you're already ahead of the game, because you have a catchy name. "Silver Consultants" or something like that should look good on a business card.

4. Don't be evil: Just because we stole this slogan from The Google doesn't mean it's bad advice. Just as there are plenty of TV pundits, there are also plenty of consultants willing to pimp out their expertise to the highest bidder, regardless of how many sweatshops they run. Your advantage, Nate, is that you're actually better than your competition right now, which gives you some leverage over your clients. That means you can pre-screen to ensure that Silver Consultants does not provide its trademarked Mystical Statisticals to any firm that wants to do terrible awful things with the knowledge! In this way you become both rich and ethical, at least by the standards of the rich.

5. In four years, sign on with Obama: Might as well make it official. This election was your audition. We all know it. Everyone knows you're good. You have three years to get your consultancy up and running, make a pile of money, and then become the chief pollster for Obama '12. This is truly Living The Dream. Nate Silver, you are the new Mark Penn. Only younger, smarter, and less evil. We hope.

[Pic via Newsweek]

Cub Reporter
Being a cub reporter isn't just a career phase; it's a lifestyle. The cub could be a new Journal hire or a long-time writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Either way, they'll love you. They'll buy your lines about how you're growing your organic community using user-generated content that facilitates open discussion. They've got better gag-reflex suppression than a sword swallower, those cubs. They'll interview you in the middle of a party. They'll print all the silly lines you spoke in your unchecked wine-facilitated giddiness. They are without malice; but their readers aren't. So stay sober and don't make them your friends, or it'll all end in tears and confusion like a prom-night car ride.

Brand Name
It's exciting to talk to a real pro like the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg. For any brand-name reporter, use your best talking points but go easy on the bull. (A stupid line looks much stupider as a New York Times pull-quote.) On the upside, there's a higher chance they'll call back to factcheck.

Remember to be respectful. Scandals aren't made from fights with small-time bloggers, but get nasty with the Times's John Markoff and he may end up writing a book about it.

Femme Fatale
The gorgeous young (but not too young) reporter asks for an interview. You want to do it over cocktails. You're doomed.

Never do an interview with the femme fatale, no matter how charming she is, and how charming she seems to think you are. She doesn't. Good femmes fatale get juicy information from guys who are trying to impress them. (But not vice versa; blame psychology, sexism, or supply and demand.)

Not that you're listening to my warning; you'll fall for her anyway, you'll get burned, and you'll crawl back for more.

Speaker for the Dumb
"This is a stupid question, but bear with my demographic." I heard that in a press conference this week, followed by a question so basic ("What makes Facebook different from Yahoo?") that Facebook's founder didn't know how to answer.

It's easy to get a message across to a specialized audience, but a really worthy idea should be explainable to the public. This is a test of how fundamentally simple you can make your message, and it's actually great practice for stripping away the insider jargon you've probably wallowed in. The average USA Today writer is quite intelligent; they know that the smartest person in the room is the one willing to ask the dumbest questions. In a conversation with such a writer, if something feels stupid, it's probably you.

Salaryman
Or woman, naturally; but the male-specific Japanese term for the tired 9-to-5 worker perfectly describes the average reporter. Sure, maybe in J-school they had a mission and wanted to speak truth to power, whatever that means. But now they just want the story before that bastard from Wired gets it, so they can pay the bills for one more week.

Of course, that makes them your best bet for a fair story and not too many difficult questions. The salaryman wants to do a good job, but at the end of the day they'd rather meet a deadline than use the Socratic method to expose you for the fraud you are. So feed them names of other sources, supply clips of your work, find a good headshot of yourself, and answer their calls on time; treating reporters right is about making their jobs easier.

Blogger
Oh god, everything could go wrong. The blogger probably has less experience, more unearned arrogance ("I have pageviews in the triple digits!"), and half the resources to properly research your story. They're more likely to have an agenda, and it's more likely to be wrong. (For instance, Valleywag doesn't care about your new press release except using it to mock all your preconceptions about the world.)

Bloggers are great at playing gotcha. On the upside, you can indulge their new-media whims and do interviews by e-mail, where you can more carefully craft your answers than in person or on the phone. But avoid IM unless you're good at pausing before you hit "enter."

Definitely butter them up and milk them for some of their own secrets; bloggers are easy to corrupt, and you can control your message if they're more your friend than your objective observer. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, for example, likes to brag about his lack of objectivity. Which reminds me: you can always play off a blogger's hatred for a rival. Just do it in person, where they can't record your taunts and send them to their enemies, thus revealing your trick.

Photo by Scott Beale, Laughing Squid. Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag and Look Shiny. His favorite lie is "Off the record."

• Chairman: The traditional classic. As powerful as the board wants him to be.
• Founder: "Gone, daddy, gone." Louis Rossetto gets "Founding Editor" on the Wired Magazine masthead. Louis Rossetto hasn't edited a thing for Wired since Providence Equity seized control of Wired in 1997.
• Vice chairman: Extra gone.
• Chief Technology Officer: Great place to stick a nerdy founder who can't manage people. He attends conferences while the VP of engineering builds software.
• Chief Strategy Officer: Flip side of the CTO — he knows people but is totally faking the tech side.
• Chief [Name of Company]-er: Let's put it this way: When's the last time Yahoo CEO Terry Semel gave the stage up for "Chief Yahoo" Jerry Yang?

BONUS CHAT TRANSCRIPT:

Valleywag: And if you really do want the CEO to keep doing something — what do you make them?
Valley vet: CEO.
Wag: Really, a CEO has nowhere to go?
Vet: If they're useful, why move them? But Eric Schmidt shows that the CEO title doesn't necessarily mean anything.

Earlier: Bubblewatch: Folded and fucked [Valleywag]
Photo: Philip Kaplan [Noah Glass on Flickr]