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Kaplan's father and business mentor, Sam Kaplan, a self-described "serial entrepreneur" who is currently a partner in CitiStorage Inc., in Brooklyn, N.Y., remembers that time clearly. "Philip didn't mind being part of it, but he saw it for what it was," Sam recalls. "Most people thought it was reality, but he thought it was fantasy." In fact, when Phil set up a retirement account for himself during the height of the dot-com boom, he avoided tech stocks. Sam recounts, "He said, 'No, don't invest in those stocks, because this thing can't last.' He realized that people were putting out $1-million contracts for jobs that could be done by two high school kids in a weekend."

It was a view shared by many who did the actual labor behind the Web-site explosion, writing code, designing pages, editing content. Aron Malkine, one of Kaplan's early employees and now a freelance programmer, was one of those people. "It was pretty obvious that the bubble was going to burst," he says. "There were a lot of really silly ideas being seen as something real." Another skeptic was Nick Baily, an old friend of Kaplan's and a former dot-com laborer. "I was saying, 'No way can we be making money,' but we had millions of dollars in financing," he says. "You keep it to yourself; you talk about it over a beer with your friends. But a lot of us were part of the collective delusion."

For the folks in the dot-com trenches, FuckedCompany touched a nerve. "People who went to Phil's Web site said, 'Wait a minute. I'm not the only one who thinks this is crazy," Baily says.

So Phil Kaplan -- or is it Pud? -- became the man of the moment. "Phil is the geek sex symbol," giggles Tracy Castelli, a director of creative services for Popsmack, a Los Angeles online-advertising firm. "This whole segment was ripe for an angry young man. Every generation has an angry young man, and he is ours."

Sometimes it can be hard to separate Kap- lan from Pud -- or to know which one you're talking with. "His Pud persona is this geeky guy," says Phil's mother, Leslie Kaplan, a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky. "Some people might look at Phil as a geek, but he doesn't think he is one. He thinks he's quite cool, but he writes Pud as if he is a geek."

"Pud is a character," agrees Bonnie Halper, a New York City headhunter. "He knows it, and he works it. I think he has the most fun at being an Internet star. It's almost like it's a parody of itself -- which is what is so brilliant about it. He parodies geek chic. And he looks, dresses, and lives the part."

"It's not so much me as what I represent," Kaplan says as he lopes across his loft to answer the telephone. "I'm a 25-year-old-programmer who lives in New York City and is somewhat cynical. This is what my life is like."

Sam Kaplan suggests that Pud's geekiness is far more orchestrated -- even more calculated -- than Phil's "Hey, dude, this is cool" nonchalance might suggest. "This is Philip's moment in time, and he knows it," Sam says. "Part of his persona is that he is this lucky, geeky kid -- that he's making it up as he goes along. But from a business point of view, that's not the case. There is nothing accidental that he does with regards to FuckedCompany. Nothing. I'm talking down to where things go on the page, to what he says, how he says it, what he promotes."

Adds Phil's older brother, Seth, "Philip would have made a great chess player because he's always thinking three or four moves ahead."

"There is Pud, his persona, and there is Philip," Sam says, laughing. "They're not always the same. But speaking as a father, I love them both."

"An Independence Thing"
To get to FuckedCompany Central -- housed on Manhattan's West 31st Street -- you must first negotiate a scary elevator that creaks precariously to the seventh floor. (Kaplan, in fact, has been known to store water and a sandwich above the elevator just in case it breaks down.) On a steamy summer day, gangly Kaplan -- he's six foot four -- is stretching his legs, eyeing a half-empty beer bottle on the table, and ignoring a plastic cup filled with an unidentifiable pink liquid as he tells his story.

Kaplan grew up in Chevy Chase, Md., during the late '70s and '80s. He was the second of three boys and an admirer of shock jock Howard Stern -- "He'll talk about anything, anything." But Kaplan also was a fan of his entrepreneur dad. "Ever since I was a little kid, I always said that I wanted to do what my dad did -- even though I didn't know exactly what he did," Kaplan recalls. "He goes into businesses, fixes them, and sells them. Part of the deal was that I knew he made his own hours. I knew it was pretty cool, so I was always interested.

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