http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/louismonier http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/louismonier A new report reveals that when the Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, invested in Cuil, a search engine, they valued ex-Googlers Anna Patterson, Russell Power, and Louis Monier's startup at a ridiculous $200 million. With Monier leaving, does that mean it's worth 33 percent less? The search engine's sloppy launch has likely proved more damaging to the founders' paper wealth. But Cuil's outsized funding should hearten every Google customer-service rep: The stock may be down, but the value of putting "Google" on your LinkedIn profile remains overinflated. Just tell the investors about the time you beat Larry Page at foosball, and their wallets open right up.

]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5049927&view=rss&microfeed=true Cuil, the would-be Google killer backed by Wal-Mart family money, has lost one of its highest-profile executives, Louis Monier. Monier, Cuil's VP of product, founded AltaVista and previously worked at eBay and Google. and VP of product Louis Monier just a month after the site's public launch. "We’ve heard but haven’t confirmed that he and CEO Tom Costello just couldn’t agree on the Cuil product road map, and that the botched launch didn’t help things much either," TechCrunch reports. Cuil had a road map? It must have pointed to a dead end. In August, Hitwise reported Cuil had 0.007 percent of the U.S. search market.

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