The bags under my eyes have grown so large I'd have to check them before I got on a plane. Over the past week, as my new company sped toward the launch of our Web site, I've managed to strip away all non-work distractions, including rest. Shaving, making sure my pants match my shirt and returning phone calls are out, while basic hygiene, changing clothes on a daily basis and talking with my fiance are hanging by a thread. I've become a rumpled mass of humanity with a strong coffee smell who does little more than work and sleep-though the latter has suffered in the past 48 hours.

Anyone who has worked at a startup company, specifically an Internet one, knows that it requires making some difficult lifestyle choices. Primarily, those decisions involve giving up any sort of lifestyle in exchange for the vague possibility of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The days when a business takes years to develop have disappeared in favor of a mad rush to become "first to market." My company, a Web site for men that mixes the editorial feel of magazines like Maxim and Esquire with the Net services offered by iVillage or Yahoo, went from idea to reality in less than four months.

Since your clever concept could be very similar to someone else's clever concept, being first can mean the difference between success and failure. That means formulating your idea and putting everything together on the fly-get things down on paper, raise some money and add the pieces as you go. Even my involvement with the company happened through a fairly random lucky break, coupled, perhaps, with a willingness to leap without looking. Forget resumes, lists of trade magazines whose fortunes I've revived or anything else that has to do with my carefully cultivated "skill sets"-my new bosses found me funny.

It seems that while surfing the Internet they had happened upon this column, specifically the one about how all evil relates to the Big Mac. I've never asked how they knew my ability to write 500 goofy words about a McSandwich would translate into being an executive, but they offered, and I accepted.

One day I was working a steady, albeit boring job for an established Internet company, the next I was searching for office space, hiring a staff and working toward a nearly impossible September 9 launch date. Creating the new site was not work as much as it was a really involving hobby that people have decided to pay me for, but it's been an exhausting few months.

Having worked at established companies, I had come to take certain things for granted. It seems that pens don't make their own way to the supply closet, and paper, while it does grow on trees, requires some intermediary step before it makes its way to the printer or the fax machine. Like moving from your parents' house to a dorm room, the shock of leaving a corporation for an infant company is occasionally severe.

We're having a party tonight to celebrate our launch and our soon-to-occur domination of the online world. There'll be food, music, drink, tons of press and over a thousand people wishing us well. I'm not sure about the rest of the staff here, but I'd prefer a really long nap.