Valley bad boys fall out over girl

One supposed that Sean Parker would be more respectable in his new career as a venture capitalist. But old habits die hard. Parker, notorious for his unfettered behavior at earlier ventures such as Facebook, is thought to be behind a spate of prank attacks on a romantic rival's website.

Yelp's Jeremy Stoppelman, an entrant in last year's Valleywag hotties competition, recently dated a woman who had been involved with Parker. Execs at the online yellow pages site suspect Parker or his cronies have been creating spoof Yelp profiles, and spamming the database with bogus ratings for bars and restaurants. Yelp's Stoppelman says spam was removed as fast as it was added.

It's all very incestuous: Sean Parker's boss at the new Founders Fund is Peter Thiel, the buttoned-up entrepreneur and investor who founded Paypal and now runs one of the West Coast's hottest hedge funds. Thiel's partner at Paypal, and friend, Max Levchin, is the largest shareholder in Yelp. Thiel himself has a stake in the hot startup.

Parker's colleagues at the Founders Fund, Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, are also friends of Stoppelman. They all go clubbing together in San Francisco, which has made for some awkward late-night altercations, we're told, though no bar-room scuffles that we know about.

When he was at Napster, Sean Parker added to the music site's legal travails by glorying in copyright infringement, in email. At Plaxo, the online address book which was Parker's second venture, the serial entrepreneur so lost the confidence of Sequoia's Mike Moritz that he was summarily turfed out of the company. And, at college social network site Facebook, Parker commissioned erotic nudes as decoration for the restroom walls. We're glad to see that he's still making news.

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