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NICK DOUGLAS — After a year of Silicon Valley startup parties and conferences, I thought I hated startups because the staff was deluded and vapid. I was wrong — I just hated their PR people. Here's why your startup should fire its flacks.

1. You're smarter than you think. Yesterday I met with the founder of a search startup who pointed out one list that his company added to the site's front page. "When we added that, our traffic quadrupled." He then drew conclusions about user behavior and his plans to extend those into a new site section. His insight convinced me that this startup was in good hands and was headed somewhere — much more than the hype I'd seen around it for the past months. That, not heady visionary talk, is what CEO blogs are for: no-nonsense explanations of why the product and company are good.

2. Training a flack is like training your entire staff. If your company only employs ten people, a everyone should know enough about everyone else's job to explain it to me. I'm a journalist, if a fake one, and I want to hear the whole story of the company. Even an intelligent PR person can't understand the company or its product as well as someone who made it. So why not schedule time for employees to push their own products? As a bonus, they'll sound more sincere than the flack who was hired just last month.

3. Educated flacks are the worst. We all use clichés because we're too lazy to really talk. I majored in English, so my clichés are "deconstruction" and "thesis statement." PR pros majored in marketing and came out saying "content" and "community input." When a kid named Brandon re-enacts Goodfellas, that's "content;" when a hundred people argue whether soda at breakfast makes you fat, that's "community input." Ugh. Again, I don't get anything out of phrases like "We're moving into an exciting space." That could describe my morning rush to the bathroom. Geeks can't talk. I like that. Founders with a business background can talk, but they still know the value of a minute, and they don't waste that minute with fake words — or fake math, like "if we get 1% of that video market, that's three million people." (Great arithmetic, kiddo, but it assumes that you can snap up one out of every hundred people who already love your competitors.)

4. You can pitch me and I won't feel pitched. I love meeting new people at tech parties. What I don't want to meet is someone who evangelizes a company and then marks their conversation with me as billable hours. Whenever I talk to a startup founder, even if I don't like the company they describe, at least I can honestly ask them why they launched such a dumb idea. It's...I grew up Christian, and talking to a flack is like talking to an evangelist who hasn't even studied the Bible. I spend the whole time wishing I could just call up God.

5. That said, here are my favorite flacks. Okay, eventually your company will grow and you'll need a flack so you and your employees can get back to work. One company I recommend is Bite PR, which has offices in New York, San Francisco, London and Stockholm. I've met several of the SF and London flacks, and I love them. They're witty, friendly, and talk about plenty more than the companies they represent. Thus when they do invite me to a pitch session, I'm cool to go. I also recommend Best PR. The eponymous Susan Best represents Craigslist (and married CEO Jim Buckmaster). She knows how to throw a party, and as for press mentions, well, Craigslist gets 'em. Best knew to keep the commanding (but charmingly disarming) Buckmaster and the self-effacing nerdy founder Craig Newmark in the spotlight. And isn't the best flack the one who lets the founders do the talking?