The phenomenon is growing so rapidly that friends-and-family shares are becoming a new currency in the Bay Area. Some new employees even negotiate friends-and-family shares as part of their employment contracts.

But the pre-IPO buzz about eTattler got louder and louder in the weeks immediately preceding the offering, largely because of the way we manipulated the media during that period. …

The "Friends and Family shares" situation was a total mess. As seems to happen in these circumstances, we all started hearing from so-called friends who claimed to have gone to kindergarten with us, not to mention people we'd never even met, and family so distant that we couldn't figure out exactly how we were related.