The Quilted Picker-Upper

Forget rise-and-fall biographies. New York City entrepreneursTownsend Baldwin, 29, and John Galbraith, 27, founders of privacyconsulting firm Incogniti Inc.; and Constantine Valhouli, 28,co-producer of documentary film Silicon Alley Stories; aretelling tales of Internet glory and defeat with the quilt, an artform Americans have been perfecting since colonial times. Butit's not the quilt Grandma made you. The DotCom Quilt is about300 T-shirts-bearing logos from companies ranging from Midwesternstart-ups to corporate spinoff dotcoms and internationalconcerns-collected by friends and donated by the companiesthemselves. Fallen icons (like Pets.com's sock puppet, thecenterpiece) are mixed in with logos of survivors likeSalon.com.

To attain both quality and a bit of irony, Amish quilt makerswill stitch the piece, which should begin touring variousuniversities and places like the New York Stock Exchange and theNASDAQ this month. The artifact of technological andentrepreneurial history also goes up for sale on eBay this month.The guys don't want to jinx the auction by estimating theclosing bid for the DotCom Quilt, but they're predicting a VCfund, investment bank, consulting firm or university will be thebuyer. The thousands of dollars it's hoped to sell for will bedonated to the New York City-based National Foundation for TeachingEntrepreneurship, a nonprofit organization that teaches low-incomeand at-risk youth to develop and operate their own businesses.