Janszen and his tulips

For more than a year, Eric Janszen has entertained Internet surfers with his parody Web site, iTulip.com, which describes itself as the Internet Stock Mania Co. The play on the famous 17th-century tulip-buying frenzy in Holland suggests on tulip-adorned site pages that visitors "Buy an iTulip.com stock certificate." It goes on to disclose that "Not only does iTulip.com not have any assets, revenues or profits, it doesn't even exist."

Janszen's site, which supplements the jokes with some serious counsel for investors who are up to their necks in tech stocks, has grown in popularity since its inception in December 1998. It now averages about 9,000 new visitors each month.

But is Janszen just a bull in bear's clothing? While he goes by the pseudonym Arnold Greenspatz on the Web site, referring to himself as the "Prez," in real life he is executive director of Boston-based Osborn Capital. Osborn is a technology venture capital fund that has been providing seed capital to a host of Internet start-ups since January 1999 (a fact that Janszen reveals in the Q&A pages of the site).

Moreover, though Janszen draws parallels between today's inflated Internet stock values and the tulipmania that drove Dutch investors to pay 4,200 guilders ($1.5 million at current prices) for certain tulip bulbs in 1637, he says that he actually believes in the future of Net investing. "I'm certain that the current speculative frenzy will end suddenly, but my long-term view of the Internet is highly optimistic," he says. As for his investments, Janszen says, "We only invest in firms with a solid business plan."