PHILLIPS: Google has gone public on the Nasdaq. The search engine that gave a whole new lexicon as in “Google it,” got out the blocks at $100 a share, $15 higher than its initial offering price. It is set to make its young founders instant billionaires. But before Google, there was the theglobe.com.

CNN’s Jen Rogers has been Googling that.

JEN ROGERS, CNNfn CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): He toasted champagne at the Nasdaq MarketSite, partied like a rock star at New York’s hippest clubs, and was the media’s Internet darling.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you feel rich?

ROGERS: Before the Google guys, Steph Paternot and his partner, Todd Krizelman, two twentysomethings who started a Web-based community called theglobe.com, were the rich Internet entrepreneurs of the go-go ’90s.

It all started in November 1998 when theglobe.com went public, setting a record at the time as the stock surged more than 600 percent on its first day. The company had yet to turn a profit.

STEPH PATERNOT, FORMER DOT-COM ENTREPRENEUR: The perception is you’re a trillionaire. I mean, nevermind whether I was worth $100 million or a billion, I mean, people’s perception are, you are worth an infinite amount of cash.

ROGERS: That image of wealth changed Paternot’s life, even if his fortune, roughly $100 million, was mostly tied up in stock.

PATERNOT: Charities start calling, bankers are calling, you are getting anonymous mail, you are getting love letters with photographs of cute girls. I mean, getting photographs of cute guys. It’s like — it starts coming out from everywhere.

ROGERS: Juggling his admirers and a business valued in the billions proved a challenge, one Google’s co-founders will be intimately familiar with.

PATERNOT: They can now look back at everything we did right, we did wrong, and what everyone else did right and wrong and not make a lot of those same mistakes.

ROGERS: Mistakes that included a laser-like focus on the company’s stock.

PATERNOT: It takes over your life. People are miserable when the stock is down 20 percent. They are phenomenally happy when it is up 20 percent. So your emotions are tied to the stock price. And it starts to affect business.

ROGERS: Eventually business realities got to theglobe.com and the company collapsed, taking Paternot’s job and his millions. Which brings us to his last bit of advice, focus on your own balance sheet as well as the company’s.

PATERNOT: Well, I didn’t do a very good job of managing my money otherwise I would have something left.

ROGERS: These days his most valuable commodity may be his tale of life as an overhyped Internet icon. He has already written a book and now he’s working on the screenplay. Maybe these two will want to read it.

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