The Montreal native started his first company while he was still an undergrad at the University of California at Santa Barbara, studying economics and business. As a college graduation present, his parents gave him money to invest in the stock market; instead he used the gift to finance an online fax product, which he later sold to eSynch. (What pluck!) With a bio like Michael Dell's and a physical resemblance to Matthew Perry, he tools around the Bay Area in a new Lincoln Navigator SUV, wearing Dr. Martens and a TAG Heuer watch.

But we all know what's been happening to the Philip Brandeses of the world over the past year.

When the last company Brandes invested in and worked for went out of business in August 2000, he found himself out of a job -- "a start-up guy" at a time when start-ups weren't starting.

But this whole dot-com downturn business hasn't snuffed out Brandes' conviction that there's money to be made online. These days he's pursuing a new entrepreneurial scheme: teaching other out-of-work dot-commers to become online pornographers.

Brandes is now the self-appointed "dean" of a fledgling institution of online higher learning called the Adult Webmaster School. For $140 tuition, Brandes and his business partner, Morgan McNerney, 26 -- a guy he went to high school with in Newport Beach, Calif. -- teach wannabe online pornographers how to make a buck shilling T&A over the Net.

The school instructs webmasters on how to create "thumbnail gallery pages" -- collections of pornographic images that feature an ad for a pay porn site. If visitors to the page click through to the pay site and join, the adult webmaster makes a commission. To get eyeballs to their pages, the webmasters swap links with thumbnail gallery posts (TGPs), like this one, which act as clearinghouses for hundreds of links. He says this business can bring in $1,000 a week -- but as with everything else in the porn industry, it's impossible to say whether that's just another come-on.

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Over coffee, Brandes explained how he has recast himself from dot-com to dot-sex.

How did you get into the business?

In seventh grade, I would sell online reports to my friends -- e-commerce back when there wasn't e-commerce. I got my first computer when I was 5.

This is incriminating, but people would need book reports, and -- this is back before it was AOL, it was called Applelink then -- they had this sort of online encyclopedia that I would borrow from heavily for five- or 10-page reports. So I knew somewhere online there was a real business in the future.

But how did you get into the online porn business?

When the company I was with folded last August, that's sort of when everything started going downhill in this whole industry. So I bummed around for a couple of months not knowing what the heck I wanted to do.

I came up here [to the Bay Area] a few times to look for jobs, and I realized that, hey, it's not going to happen. I realized I was in trouble. And I was looking at my friends, too, and they were sort of in the same situation. They were getting laid off from their regular jobs.

But I have a friend out here that I went to high school with, kind of a surfer kid, and he said, "You should do what I'm doing." He was kind of a slacker type and he had been doing [online porn] since 1995. He had never done super-well with it, but he made pretty good money.

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