If Silicon Valley is mentally disconnected from this week's Wall Street mess, it's because ad-supported companies dominate the Valley these days. High-net-worth investors aren't reeled in with cheap banners, so the demise of Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch hardly pinches budgets. Lehman spent just $501,900 on ads, both online and off, in the first half of 2008. Merrill Lynch, which has a much larger consumer business, still only spent $38 million on advertising last year. Still, some 150,000 people will lose their jobs in this week's fallout. That's a lot of tech infrastructure no one will want to pay for anymore. Lehman, for example, spent $309 million on IT last quarter alone. What's more, Lehman's investment banking connections run deep in the Valley's world of startups, VCs and big company buyers. Below, five tech companies that find themselves wishing they could unleash themselves from Wall Street's fate.

An insightful article on "startups on a shoestring" in the New York Times covers the rise of companies running on angel investors, loans, or even credit cards. It's a switch from the more famous method of raising piles of venture capital from a firm. But what does that mean? It means startup founders get to keep more of their money and power.

"Anger From 1 Ripoff + 2 MBAs = a Game Plan," says the Washington Post, summarizing how Goozex came to be. From this profile and the site itself, here are the fast facts about this game-exchange web site.

By Megan McCarthy

As TechCrunch reported and Reddit announced this morning, Condé Nast bought social bookmarking site Reddit. I talked to Wired Digital general manager Kourosh Karimkhany, who will directly oversee Reddit as a Wired property.

"IS YOUTUBE DEAD?" screams the San Francisco Chronicle. "For many of us, there's a definite vibe that the wild fun times will soon be coming to an end. It's like your parents are coming up the driveway."

By a reader

A loyal reader-commenter, "That Chinese Broad," asks Valleywag:

The New York Times goes crazy for Peerflix today in a particularly uninsightful article, in which the bartering site's CEO brags about taking $10 million from venture capitalists.

A dynamic duo is more likely to found a hit company than a lone gunman. Hewlett and Packard, Yahoo's David Filo and Jerry Yang, Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, — even Steve Jobs had his Steve Wozniak. The character of the company, then, lies not in one personality but the relationship between two. For YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, that relationship, according to Fortune, is the classic nerd-and-businessman pair.

CNET employees loved CEO Shelby Bonnie, according to the San Francisco Chronicle (and a CNETter confirms to me that there was loyalty since he'd been at the company since Day One). So it was a shock when he seemingly fired himself this week over overseeing improperly backdated stock options.

The culture split between Yahoo and Google is Hollywood versus the nerds, according to most journalists (take, for example, a CNET compare-and-contrast article from 2005). Yahoo is the one that brought in TV and film execs like CEO Terry Semel and "went Hollywood," a move often blamed for the company's financial and cultural woes. But so has Google, as a corporation and as an executive team.

So now that Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, which YouTube employees, managers and investors can cut and run, and who has to work another year before leaving a millionaire? An old-school dot-com journo explains the windfall to Valleywag.

High on the "will this startup tank after five months" checklist — I think it's number 14 — is "Does this company want to be the next Google?" Would-be search innovators fail for several reasons:

It's the place you go for Family Guy clips and last night's Jon Stewart interview. For now, media companies keep their hands off YouTube and cut deals with the site instead. But some day, if it doesn't die first, YouTube will have to sell out, and the buyer will become a juicy legal target for every other media company whose stuff is pirated on the popular video site. What clips are in danger if one of these top potential buyers bites?

Hey, nothing against the eleven corporate leaders profiled in Business 2.0 Magazine's latest feature, "The Disruptors." (Except you, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Nobody likes you.) It's just that "glory stories" like this make us giggle, because by definition they have to play down the arguments against their subjects. And B2 added Wired-worthy hero shots like the one shown here. So here's a guide to the most egregious idolatry:

Takeaway: The Senate Commerce Committee ran a pro-big-media marketing campaign disguised as a "bipartisan poll." The message is obvious: the committee is in bed with telcos and Net Neutrality is dead.

Takeaway: YouTube's new deal with Warner Music looks like the dot-com's salvation, but it could be its downfall.

Today a flack from public relations firm SS PR sent me yet another piece of spam following up an e-mail pitch I never asked for, proving that PR folks need some guidance in how to avoid being "that annoying flack" that journalists and business development workers gossip about at the bar. Because by pleasing journalists, you don't just help them — you help yourself.

Last night, I cheated my way into a book party for California-based writer and web publisher Arianna Huffington at the San Francisco guest house of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and romance novelist Melanie Craft Ellison. First lesson: Don't go to a society event dressed for a Silicon Valley geek party. Second lesson: F. Scott Fitzgerald was right, the rich are not like you and me.