Gawker: valleywag, valleywag, where are they now

Now we can blame the Pets.com sock puppet for two burst bubbles

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:40:00 EDT

The last time I saw the the Pets.com sock puppet was during an E-Trade Super Bowl commercial. In it, a chimp rides a horse through a postapocalyptic, postbubble Silicon Valley. At the end of the 30-second spot, a wrecking ball crashes through an office building, and the puppet flies out, landing dusty and ragged at the chimp's feet. The chimp picks up the puppet and a tear rolls down his face, as he mourns a tarnished symbol of '90s exuberance. But watching today's financial news, I'm thinking the chimp should have burned the little sucker. Because then BarNone — a subprime lender, of course — wouldn't have been able to purchase the rights to the puppet for $125,000 and keep its wretched curse alive. "Everybody deserves a second chance," my foot.

Valleywag emeritus Nick Douglas's new comedy show

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:40:00 EDT

When we at Valleywag discussed writing up founding editor Nick Douglas's new comedy show, Blank White Cards, associate editor Jackson West chimed in:

I'm avoiding that show with a ten foot pole. I have given Nick's show press in the past, and they inevitably failed miserably. So for his sake, I ain't gonna jinx it.

But why should we worry about all that? Check out Episode One, below. If BWC lasts even one-sixth as long Douglas's last venture, Goggleburn, Episode Two comes out next week.

Axe Mouth Spray from Nick Douglas on Vimeo.

Where are Facebook's missing cofounders? We found them on LinkedIn

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:20:00 EDT

We know what Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes are up to. Zuck lets COO Sheryl Sandberg run most of the company now while he plays industry visionary; Moskovitz is hiding from Valleywag's fearsome scrutiny; and Hughes is busy spamming your inbox with updates from Obama campaign director David Plouffe — sorry, revolutionizing politics on the Web. But where have unacknowledged cofounders Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin gone? Their Facebook profiles aren't open to the public, but rival social network LinkedIn isn't nearly so skittish. Here are their profiles, with our notes:

Click to expand the images.

Stephan Paternot of TheGlobe.com

Nick Douglas — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 21:04:36 EDT

Before there was Facebook founder and future billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, there was someone much less deserving: Stephan Paternot (pronounced Pat-er-noh, but I like to pretend it rhymes with Hot-or-Not — on which, incidentally, Stephan would be rated a 6.2) In 1998 the 23-year-old millionerkind took his company (TheGlobe.com, a community site with a few million users per month) public for a record 606% first-day stock price increase. Paternot boozed and partied "the CEO in the plastic pants." Then the world realized that the Globe would never make money, and the stock price dropped from $97 to under a dime. Now he's an actor who's appeared in three movies — two of which he produced (Good sign? Bad sign). Then there's this breathless montage of news clips that he recently put on his blog.

Valleywag editor Owen Thomas found this by clicking on a Google Ad. That means Paternot is such a raging egotist that he bought Google ads to promote a YouTube clip of himself making and losing $100 million ten years ago. But is that sadder than Paternot starring as a beleaguered donut-making version of himself?

To be fair, that film ("Wholey Moses") had some success in film fests. And Clive Thompson, one of the best journalists in tech, called Paternot "quite funny and nice." But it takes more than that to balance out the rocker lifestyle, the ballooning of a company using a billion dollars of other people's money, and most of all, that silly montage.

PayPal Verified: A review of the companies founded by PayPal grads

Nick Douglas — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 22:11:54 EDT

Google's purchase of YouTube means one more success story for former PayPal employees, as co-founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim all worked at PayPal in its early days. The payment company, now a division of eBay, boasts many other successful startups founded by its alumni.

For example, PayPal VP Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn, the most popular business-networking site, and one of the few social networks with an actual point. Another former VP, Jeremy Stoppelman, cofounded review site Yelp with early PayPal employee Russ Simmons, funded by former PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. Levchin was also one of many PayPallers (including his co-founder Peter Thiel) to executive-produce the film "Thank You for Smoking." Thiel also funded Facebook, which is possibly days away from making its own billion-dollar sale.

But not every PayPal grad project is popular. Levchin also sank his time into Slide, a photo-sharing site described by blogger Eran Globen as "a mashup of photos and the marquee tag," since its main service is providing slideshows of photos hosted elsewhere.

Wikipedia lists a plethora of other startups by PayPal grads: the conservative World Ahead Publishing, Room 9 Entertainment (which made "Thank You for Smoking"), spacecraft launch vehicle maker SpaceX, and Craigslist wannabe HourTown. Some are successful, some can barely build a web page, but they hint at a sort of entrepreneuring bug in PayPal's core team. And hey, if some crash and burn, who's going to mock someone who built one of the 90s dot-com boom's few worthy survivors?