about $28. Theglobe.com's stock never again rose above $40, and last week hovered around $17. But Krizelman and Paternot have still made a paper fortune on a company with just $3 million in revenue and a loss of $6 million in the most recent quarter.
The object of all this investor frenzy is a curious site that offers a mix of chat, bulletin boards, polls, repackaged news feeds, stock quotes, an online art gallery, a love-advice column and a shopping channel that sells apparel and housewares like wine racks and vacuum cleaners. And Theglobe.com's recent acquisition of Attitude Network gives it links to online gaming sites.
There's also homepage-building, although Theglobe.com's homepage-building tools are notoriously skimpy. This, even though homepage-building remains the single biggest revenue source for Theglobe.com's competition. Krizelman and Paternot downplay homepage-building, claiming that equating it with community misses the point, which is ...
"Theglobe.com is content, commerce and community," attempts one marketing exec.
"The ambience of Theglobe.com is the ambience of NY," tries another. "It has this buzz because it seems to offer a wide variety of things, and everybody wants to live there at least for a year."
"I would describe Theglobe.com as the most interesting person at a party - the one who tends to attract a lot of people," offers a third. "Easy, quick, warm, nice, energetic."
That's where Krizelman and Paternot come in. In lieu of a concrete definition of its product, Theglobe.com has chosen to market its founders. Krizelman and Paternot's publicist, Andrea Smith, formerly with MTV, likes to package the Todd-and-Steph story as, "The American Dream Come True, With a Cybertwist."
"I saw a picture of them at my interview, and said, 'OK, they're marketable,'" remembers Smith. She joined the company two days before Theglobe.com's staggering IPO and immediately placed calls hawking the "American Dream" pitch. It worked. A story of Theglobe.com's IPO, complete with its barely legal founders clinking champagne on the Nasdaq floor, aired on CNBC's Business Unusual. CNN aired a piece that hit hard on the college-startup angle, complete with snapshots of the two CEOs from their younger, softer days. (In one, Paternot sports a ponytail, now long gone.) Two New York local news shows ran pieces on Theglobe.com's IPO - in one, the founders endured a pinch from the show's host to make sure they weren't dreaming.
Next came print. Smith encloses two different headshots of Krizelman and Paternot with every pitch. Both look even younger than their 25 years. With Wall Street lingo coming out of the mouths of these babes, it's easy to see their precocious allure. And don't forget the "cybertwist."
"The press knows the Net is a hot-button topic, and they know they have to cover it, but they don't know how to make it visually interesting," says Smith. Krizelman and Paternot's boy-wonderism hits a sweet spot that combines the sexiness of the Internet and its promise of riches with the sexiness of youth.
"In the beginning, it was like, 'You have to do press,'" says Paternot. "We have advantages that older CEOs wouldn't have access to. You need to come up with any advantage you can."
There are a couple of rough spots in the official story, however. One is the implied Horatio Alger angle. Krizelman grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley in Menlo Park. Mom worked at Visa, dad at Acuson. Summers were spent hot-air ballooning in New Mexico; fall meant the private Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, Calif. Paternot comes from a famously affluent European bloodline. His great-grandfather founded Nestle; his grandfather continued as CEO; his father was recently named businessman of the year in Switzerland after heading up a temp firm called Adia. Paternot was schooled privately in Europe and speaks fluent French.
There's another problem. On a typical day of interviews at Theglobe.com, it's not uncommon to hear Krizelman and Paternot being compared to Richard Branson (their idol), Lee Iacocca or Donald Trump. Krizelman and Paternot don't
