also-rans

Brian Lent, two-time loser

Owen Thomas · 01/23/08 01:43AM

Stanford University is fertile ground for startups. It's also a fertile ground for also-rans. Brian Lent, now CEO of mobile-search startup Medio.com, missed out on the chance to join both Yahoo and Google on the ground floor. Having declined a job offer from Yahoo cofounders David Filo and Jerry Yang — "You couldn't pay me enough money to work for a company called Yahoo!" — Lent then passed on Google: "We all said, 'There will never be another Yahoo!'" Lent had that much right: Larry Page and Sergey Brin must be quite glad their company is not another Yahoo.

Third-Place Finisher Marie Osmond Deprives 'Dancing' Audience Of Much-Anticipated Emotional Meltdown

mark · 11/28/07 05:50PM


Truth be told, we can't be made to care about who took home the Golden Tap Shoes—by far the most coveted of all the celebrity-based reality TV talent competition trophies—on last night's Dancing with the Stars finale, even after discovering that the heady rush of victory was so overwhelming that the show's new champion was moved to drop his fiancée like she was a tango partner who caught fire in the middle of a dip. The only reason we even bothered to tune in to the fifteen-hour coronation ceremony was to check in on Marie Osmond, America's Emotionally Fragile Sweetheart, whom we weren't sure would survive the defeat her now-legendary Baby Doll Dance of Despair made all but inevitable.

Facebook's wannabe founders

Owen Thomas · 07/16/07 07:42PM


As Facebook's theoretical value soars, the interest of its hangers-ons grows practical indeed. I think that's why Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra are pursuing their lawsuit against sandal-sporting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with such tireless vigor. But the three Harvard school chums, who say they hired Zuckerberg to work on their competing ConnectU site before he launched what became Facebook, are far from the only ones pressing a claim to have been present at Facebook's creation. (For the record, long-suffering Facebook PR chief Brandee Barker says the company's official cofounders are Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskowitz.) After the jump, a gallery of everyone who's not an official founder — but who'd like to be.