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"My father just seemed too smart to work for anybody," Kap- lan continues. "I don't see myself like that -- well, maybe I do. It's not a smart thing or an intelligence thing, it's just like an independence thing." As he talks, Kaplan's eyes twitch in a gesture that connotes more restlessness and speed than nervousness -- but definitely jibes with the fact that, as a boy, Kaplan took Ritalin, was arrested once (for "attempted destruction of private property, involving a slingshot," he says), and was expelled from school twice. "I just hated all school," he says with a shrug.

In fact, Kaplan recently attempted to obtain his mug shots from the slingshot incident. "I thought that it would be really cool to have those," he says. "But they wouldn't let me, because I was a juvenile at the time, and they couldn't release the records. But I would love to use those pictures for your story. It would be like the O.J. cover -- remember his mug shot? Cool." ("That is Philip's persona," cautions his father when told how much his son likes to talk about his arrest. "That's Phil marketing Phil.")

As a boy Phil also had firsthand contact with several business builders. Sam belonged to the YPO -- the Young Presidents' Organization -- a group dedicated to creating leaders through education, recounts Phil's mother. "They often had family events, so the boys grew up knowing people who were the presidents of many of the businesses in town, from stores to travel agencies to service companies, manufacturers," she says. "Other children might grow up knowing colleagues of their father, but the boys grew up knowing presidents of high-profile businesses in town."

Phil also had an early love affair with the computer and often stayed up all night. "If you wanted to punish most kids, you took away the television," Leslie says. "But if you wanted to discipline Philip, you took away the computer. There were times when I wanted to put the computer in the trunk of my car when I went off to work. We used to call it computer addiction."

The addiction translated into what was, in many ways, a precursor of FuckedCompany. While in high school, Phil ran an online bulletin board with some 400 members. "In those days everything was dial-up through the modem," Sam remembers. "His door was across from ours, and all night long we would hear people dialing up through the modem."

"Well," Phil suggests, "it's more fun to be involved in an online community if you started it and you have ultimate control over it. That's one of the reasons that I built my bulletin boards in high school."

Phil's exposure to the more traditional working world also started when he was a young teenager. He held a series of summer and after-school jobs, always moving on when he felt he had learned all that there was to know about the business at hand. And he used the proceeds to rent office space from his father to house a music studio. "Music is my art," he says.

"Phil is the geek sex symbol. This whole segment was ripe for an angry young man. Every generation has an angry young man, and he is ours."

In 1997, after graduating from Syracuse University with a degree in information management and technology, Kaplan joined Booz-Allen & Hamilton Inc. in McLean, Va., as a senior consultant. There his independence was readily apparent. "I really did see the entrepreneurial side of him," recalls Karen Base, then a colleague of Kaplan's. "His big tag line was, 'Meanwhile, we could be doing this.' He was always multitasking and thinking of better ways to do things. If I could quote Phil, it would be 'Meanwhile."

The following year, Kaplan moved to New York to pursue his music career -- playing the drums is his passion -- and joined Think New Ideas. "As an employee, it was not unusual for me to be reprimanded," he says. "One time I fixed a program because there was a bug, and even though I fixed it correctly, everybody yelled at me. So I was like, 'Whatever ...."

That's when Kaplan seriously considered working for himself. "I have a lot of different skills -- writing, programming, different ideas, financing, accounting," he explains. "At most companies you have a job title, and if you do something outside your job title, then you're seen as stepping on other people's toes. But now that I have my own business, I'm allowed to step on whoever's toes that I want to!"

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