Charge people.

Hansson told me that many aspiring Web entrepreneurs thanked him for the presentation he gave last spring. "Many felt that being in San Francisco, they were being pushed to start the next billion-dollar social-viral-whatever thing, and if they were not doing that—if they were just trying to think about a business that makes money—they got the feeling that they were doing it wrong," he says.

Since then, however, Hansson has seen some evidence that rationality is coming back to the startup world. Consider the nascent microblogging sector. The much-ballyhooed startup Twitter now has more than a million users, but it still has no way to earn a single penny from them. But in September, a new microblogging service hit the Web. Yammer is pretty much identical to Twitter except in one major way—it charges businesses a fee to manage employees' Yammering. It's unclear whether this is the right model, but at least it's a model—something Twitter might have thought of, Hansson notes, if it hadn't been given a free ride by investors. Incidentally, Twitter seems to have heeded the message; the company says it'll reveal its business model next year. Hopefully that won't be too late.