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"FuckedCompany is a site for people in the trenches," says Kaplan. "It punishes the CEOs and the founders who have laid off so many people. The only people who don't like the site are the founders -- and, good, because they deserve it. All of the depressed, laid-off dot-commers love the site."

"Rock On, Pud"
FuckedCompany is also a solid business of its own. Kaplan brings in revenues from banner advertising and online sales of merchandise that includes FuckedCompany T-shirts, mouse pads, and coffee mugs. Kaplan also says he reels in some $90,000 a month from 1,200 subscribers, who pay to search through unfiltered tips about layoffs and barricaded doors at dot-coms. Kaplan estimates that he receives some 400 unsolicited tips a day -- often from programmers on the front lines. They're the nameless souls who played with Nerf guns, worried about their sites' "stickiness," and populated the cubicles of Internet start-ups. Today their tips -- often made anonymously with online pseudonyms like techdude, dottedeyes, and notagoy -- provide the core of FuckedCompany's database.

And Kaplan talks back to them, which is key to FuckedCompany's mystique, not to mention its sheer drawing power. He regularly starts message threads on his site, and he also E-mails 65,000 of his fans a free newsletter -- signed by his alter ego, Pud -- that has become increasingly full of what Kaplan calls "personal stuff." On May 29, for example, Pud wrote, "Today is fuckedcompany's 1-year anniversary! Woohoo! Hope everyone had a good Memorial Day. As for me, I woke up at around 3:00 pm, watched TV for a few hours, ordered Chinese delivery which never came, just finished about a million bowls of raisin bran, still wearing my bathrobe, ready for sleep again. Okay so Thursday night, I went on a blind date. I was all excited cuz I hadn't been outside in weeks, recovering from strep throat and just being a loser in general." After describing the disastrous date, in which he was "coughing all over the place, sweating, spilling crap on myself, trying to act normal," Kaplan signs off, "i will forever suck. anyway ... rock ... on, pud."

"The site's name is so direct and in your face. 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. He is totally capturing the zeitgeist now."

Kaplan's use of online forum software and E-mail newsletters harks back to the early days of the Web, observes Allison Hemming, founder of the Hired Guns, a consulting firm in New York City. "Community-driven content is so cost-effective," she says. "Phil is utilizing true economies of scale. And he has captured the true spirit of the Web. His site is a real model for how to use community-driven content."

One thing is for sure: it works. Consider the math. At Kap- lan's current rate, he will bring in some $1 million a year from his "hot tips" subscription list alone, not to mention the less predictable but recurring revenues he receives from advertising and merchandise sales. Not bad when you consider that his overhead basically comprises one full-time assistant and a portion of his rent -- Kaplan's Manhattan loft office doubles as his apartment. "In covering the demise of the dot-coms, Phil has succeeded in creating a viable Internet company," observes Geoffrey Kloske, the Simon & Schuster editor who in May commissioned a book from Kaplan tentatively titled F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts. "And he is making money. He has succeeded where so many others have failed. Phil is viable and profitable, and I wish" -- and here Kloske pauses -- "I wish I owned shares in Phil."

"This Is a Joke!"
In retrospect, it would seem that Kaplan and his fellow FC-ers were some of the only people in America who were not taken in by the dot-com hype. Kaplan saw through it as early as April 1998, when he moved to New York City to work as a technical producer for Think New Ideas, a Web-design firm. There, working on the Avon.com site, he began to realize just how fragile -- and transitory -- the dot-com craze was. "We built a Web site in three to four months, and Avon paid about $1 million for it. I remember the invoice," Kaplan recounts. "Money was just being thrown around. I knew it was not going to last. Meanwhile, all the programmers were sitting around in cubicles, saying, 'This is a joke! How the fuck is this being sold for $3 million?"

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