No, this is not a glimpse of an actual plan for a dot-com casket company. But in the current mania for getting rich quick online it could be. The Funerals.com pitch is part of the deliciously vicious sendup of Silicon Valley greed run amok in "The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur," a self-help-cum-business fable by valley veteran Randy Komisar.

In a book brief enough to suit the media diet of even the most information-overloaded Net exec, Komisar uses the fictional tale of a clueless wannabe entrepreneur, Lenny, and his morbidly avaricious "big idea," Funerals.com, to illustrate what's wrong with many of the current crop of dot-com start-ups and what it would take to fix them. His remedy is nothing as simple as a tweaked business model or even a new management team. It's a wholesale change of heart.

"What would it take for you to spend the rest of your life on Funerals.com?" queries the sage Komisar. The baffled Lenny intends to spend no more than a few years on Funerals.com before enjoying a nice fat liquidity event. Then he'll get on to whatever he wants to spend the rest of his life doing, thank you very much. Komisar argues that it's just this attitude that condemns most start-up ideas to mediocrity, and eventual failure.

"The Monk and the Riddle" is Komisar's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" for the dot-com set, complete with a revealing motorcycle ride through Burma (now Myanmar), where the seeker (Komisar) encounters an enigmatic monk with a riddle that will conveniently unlock the key to a life well lived back in Silicon Valley.

Of course, most spoilers who chastise Silicon Valley for its rampant greed are taken about as seriously by the people who actually work there as a random individual investor demanding to get in on a $100 million venture capital round. Uh, yeah. Whatever. Back to work.

But Komisar's one of them. He has worked closely with companies like WebTV and TiVo in a "strategic" capacity, without ever taking on a full-time management position, getting paid in equity. His funky job title: "Virtual CEO." And he has the belly-of-the-beast start-up experience to play this unusual role of insider who remains outside; he has been CEO of LucasArts Entertainment, CEO of Crystal Dynamics, a gaming company, CFO of GO.com and a founder of Claris. Translation: Komisar didn't just move to the valley six months ago with dollar signs in his eyes.

Bonus: Komisar has a shaved head, wears cowboy boots and rides a motorcycle. No boring khakis here. Did I mention he meditates daily? And unless you're already in his extended network, he doesn't even want to know you. His phone number is unlisted: "If you don't know someone I know, you can't find me," he boasts in "The Monk and the Riddle."

In short, the author is the poster child for the Silicon Valley businessman as rebel, the start-ups' wise man, who refuses to be pinned down to any one company. He's the kind of only-in-Silicon Valley character who makes the media go into spasms proclaiming the dawn of a New Economy and the birth of the Brave New Capitalist.

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