Lucrative Expletive

Begun as a joke, F***ed Company.com has turned its creator, a disgruntled "geek" named Phil Kaplan, into a folk hero. And it's probably one of the few dot-coms that's making money -- an irony that is not lost on Kaplan.

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(Or how Phil Kaplan, founder of FuckedCompany, learned to stop worrying and love the dot-bomb)

Caroline Beddie had no idea what she was in for. Not a clue. The spunky 38-year-old had been a waitress at Ye Olde Kingshead, a tavern in Santa Monica, Calif., for more than a decade, and she thought she'd seen it all: the coiffed celebrities; the stargazers and wanna-bes; the surfers who consumed a little too much Bass Ale. But nothing could have prepared her for the night last January when Phil Kaplan, better known as "Pud," showed up. Kaplan is the 25-year-old founder of FuckedCompany.com, a Web site that for the past year and a half has chronicled the daily machinations of the dot-com bust. A few days before, as Kaplan prepared to leave his base in New York City, he alerted visitors to the site that he would be visiting L.A. and stopping in for a drink at the Kingshead. Did anyone want to join him?

You could say that again. "It was absolutely mobbed," Beddie laughs. "And they were all there to see him. He was like their local hero. They would ask in these discreet, hushed tones, 'Is that him? Is that Phil? Do you know which one he is?"

The Kingshead is no stranger to stars, says Beddie. Tom Cruise pops by every once in a while, and on the walls hang pictures of prior guests Rod Stewart, the band Oasis, President Reagan before he was President Reagan, Tom Hanks. "But this night," Beddie says, "everybody ignored the pictures because they were so desperate to meet this Philip person -- to build up the courage after a few pints to talk to this guy. All night long, it was 'Is that him? Is that him?' I just kept saying, 'He's that tall guy at the bar, wearing a denim suit, hanging out and talking to people and signing autographs.' I mean, people were waiting in line to meet him."

In the line was Kaplan's aunt, Marlen Mertz. She had wandered over to the Kingshead from her nearby home, hoping to get a moment with her nephew. "It was amazing," Mertz says, still slightly bemused by it all. "I felt like it was the Beatles! It was almost cultish. When I told people I was his aunt, I became famous, too!"

ENTREPRENEURIAL ADVISORY: This article contains frank language, ribald slang, and a prosperous dot-com, which some readers may find disturbing.

At the center of all of the brouhaha was Phil Kap- lan and his no-holds-barred Web site that, since its whimsical inception on Memorial Day weekend 2000, has detailed the tortuous ins and outs -- mostly outs -- of the dot-com debacle. As the site's own "What Is It?" page proclaims, FuckedCompany "has pretty much turned into the source for news about dot-com companies. Bad news, that is."

The site now attracts some 4 million unique visitors a month, according to Kaplan, and has attained a cultlike following among the pink-slipped or otherwise dot-com disenchanted. It has also become a must-browse for headhunters, journalists, and Internet analysts -- not to mention the just plain curious. For one, there's that name, which is nothing if not attention getting, as if daring one to indulge in a guilty pleasure. Even Kaplan's nom de Web, Pud, is obscene slang. "The site's name is so direct and in your face," says Anna Wheatley, editor of the AlleyCat News, a magazine that covers the business of New York City's Silicon Alley. "It's entertaining, if something of a gladiator sport. It's terrible that you're being entertained by carnage, a deathwatch. But what he has done so successfully is to make business into a form of entertainment. And Philip has turned himself into a personality, an entertainer. He is totally capturing the zeitgeist now. Totally! And I think he knows it."

Kaplan's 15 minutes of fame have been extended by the mass media. In the past year, he's been featured in the New York Post, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Industry Standard, and New York magazine, to name but a few. Kaplan has also made TV appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and CBS's The Early Show, which hosted Kaplan last January after the Women.com site named him Internet Bachelor of the Year.

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