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If you're anything like we think us, you're lazy as hell. And we're certainly not going to spend $15 dollars of our hard-earned smack cash just to learn how to unlazify ourselves. Thus we sent poor Intern Neel to last night's performance of Mediabistro on Ice:

How d I do? Laurel Touby, Mediabistro.com CEO and featured speaker at Makor s From Cocktails to CEO: The Mediabistro Story, asked a small crowd that had gathered after her 1-hour lecture. She put her arm on my shoulder. I got off to a bad start cause I was so nervous that YOU were here. She was, of course, not referring to me as an individual, but rather as the physical manifestation of Gawker at her event. Though it wasn t exactly unexpected, she added. I had a feeling you guys would be sending someone.

After the jump, Neel soaks in Touby's prescient genius.

Gut instincts (salient business point #4 of the talk: Use your intuition but watch the numbers! ) are what have helped Ms. Touby propel Mediabistro from its profitless, 10-person cocktail party origins in 1993 to its current status: a 200-event-a-year, 350,000 member networking community building operation that nets — er, it's hard to say how much it nets, because Ms. Touby refused to detail any of the company s financial specifics, other than that she is a 62% shareholder and that all employees receive stock options (yes, even her self-avowed "frenemy" and Gawker co-bitch Jesse Oxfeld.) She did, however, note that Mediabistro parties have been responsible for countless one night stands, five marriages, and three babies one out of wedlock. Pity the children.

Throughout the event, which read like an Internet Business for Dummies primer, Ms. Touby, sporting two pigtails and green floral pants (she left the trademark boa on the podium), seemed acutely aware of our presence. This can more or less directly be attributed to an exchange we had before the event even started, as Ms. Touby worked her away through the room for a round of pre-lecture introductions:

Ms. Touby: Hi (extends hand). What brings you here today?
Me: Oh, not much. Curiosity, mainly. And I m on assignment to cover the event.
Ms. Touby: Oh, nice! There are some people here from Inc. Magazine. Who are you here with?
Me: Umm. Gawker.
Ms. Touby: (Nervous laugh, followed by a few seconds of palpable silence). Ahhh that s funny. Well, be nice!

As it turns out, there wasn t all that much to be mean about. Ms. Touby s advice to budding entrepreneurs was fairly straightforward ( Perseverance and resolve are key. Take cues from your competition. Go out of your way to meet lawyers and financiers; ask them again and again for their money and/or time ), and she went out of her way to answer questions (question #1 from a balding, middle-aged man in the back: How do you make money from blogs? Get in line, partner).

A bit more puzzling was how Touby differentiated between networking, a word she openly abhors, and community building, which she stressed is the fundamental purpose of Mediabistro. After hearing her claim that she essentially cold-called random magazine staffers and editors to get them to come to her parties during the incipient stages of her company, and after watching her exchange email addresses and business cards with more than a few attendees after the lecture, I wouldn t exactly say the line was clear.

But lines be damned (well, not those types of lines) when you re throwing kick-ass, socially-stratified parties! Ms. Touby openly admitted to forming a group of parties exclusively for people with full-time media jobs after receiving complaints from editors who were annoyed with the constant flux of mid-party pitches from unemployed freelancers. She did, however, stress that parties for freelancers still exist, some of which are even attended by open-minded editors who are willing to give freelancers a shot. After I expressed doubt as to how many open-minded editors there actually are, Ms. Touby invited me to come to a party and see for myself. Community-building, here I come!