“I suggested it, and there was no push back,” Kaplan said. “I really wanted an expert to come in and help run AdBrite.” He founded AdBrite in 2004.

Speculation is that AdBrite will announce Ignacio Fanlo, a former executive at an e-commerce site that was lambasted on F***edCompany.com, is AdBrite’s new CEO. Kaplan said he will stay on to oversee AdBrite’s products.

Kaplan emerged as an unlikely player in Silicon Valley with F***edCompany. But last year, hejumped the fence and became an executive.

“I guess back then I never thought it through from management’s perspective,” Kaplan said of his days writing at F***edCompany. “I wrote purely from the perspective of the employees who were getting lied to and ripped off. It came from the employees. Now, I see how hard it is. I understand how a company works from management’s perspective.”

Kaplan says he is not sorry for anything he penned during his days as “Pud.”

“Much of what executives at dot-coms did back then was wrong. I’ll always think it’s wrong to lie to employees. We’ve never done that here,” he said.

During his 18-month tenure as AdBrite’s head honcho, the company was profitless, but it recently received $8 million in a second round of funding, he told CNET News.com. In the past six months, AdBrite has seen the number of publishers offering space to advertisers grow to 16,000. During that time, the company has upped staff size from 25 to 43.

Call it shooting fish in a barrel, but the 29-year-old entrepreneur (and onetime head of his own consultancy firm, called PK Interactive) insists that he never took undue glee in calling out the floundering on their way down. “I wouldn’t say it was sadistic,” Kaplan offers over lunch during ad:tech New York. “I would just say it’s funny. A lot of these companies started to go out of business despite these fabulous websites that we were making them. [So] I said, somebody really needs to track this, somebody should do a website that chronicles all the companies that went out of business.”

That “somebody” turned out to be him.

The thing you come to understand upon actually meeting Philip Kaplan—or “Pud” as he’s commonly known—is that all the stories you’ve heard about him are more than likely to be true. Over the course of two days, I learned that there’s little distinction between the sleek, self-made millionaire/bestselling author/magazine coverboy and the t-shirt & jeans-sporting programming geek who saunters in late to both our introductory cocktail meeting at Manhattan’s lush Soho House and at our lunch interview the next day (he apologizes for both).

Kaplan in the flesh is chatty and fraught with nervous energy; he’s a case of ADD mixed with a strong dose of political incorrectness.

“I’m not famous for being politically correct,” he tells me the second time we meet. “Every day, I’ll get a hundred emails that I offended somebody. I really looked up to Howard Stern in a lot of ways. Howard Stern offends equally. So I really took that to heart when starting F***edCompany.”