It's rooftop party season in Silicon Alley, which means barbecues. In Manhattan that means catering. My temporary conversation partner, a khaki-wearing entrepreneur on a deck chock-a-block with khaki-wearing entrepreneurs, has joined me where I'm standing, awkwardly alone but completely refreshed, beside a large tin bucket of beer. It was too crowded to move.

"Just like the bubble." he said. I suggested there were fewer tchotchkes this time around. "Well, fewer tchotchkes. And fewer strippers." Right, same thing.

The rooftop: Aerie to a three-story loft that belongs to David Larkin, angel investor and erstwhile host for Founders Club parties. That club, founded by Dina Kaplan just this year, is dedicated to celebrating New York entrepreneurs. Read: Anything San Francisco can do, we can do better.

"You would not believe the e-mails and lies I got to get in," she later told me, on speaker phone from her Soho office. "I said no wives, no girlfriends. I mean we've got the CEO of Digg talking to the founder of Wikipedia talking to the founder of MediaVest. But I am brutal with the guest list. Brutal."

Back on roof, beside the beer, Larkin's mottle-colored hound was gnawing on the bottle opener. I left him to it and joined a group of young confederates who were smelling each other's fingers and discussing their accidental viral hit, a lipsync of Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta."

"My friend is a friend of the guitarist and he said to tell you LOL exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point one!"

"As if like I'm typing fast and I let go of the shift key!"

"No seriously, he was like thank you this rocks. This was like the one thing that could make me listen to that song again."

Soon afterward we were ushered downstairs, where Dina jumped atop an upholstered bench and began thanking everyone for coming. A British gentleman reminded everyone to enter the drawing for a free business class flight to London. "It's worth $2000." Behind them, on the mantle, a collection of tin robot toys. A samurai kamishimo from the Edo period guarded the foyer. A couple beside the stairs regarded a painting: "Is that a Rilke?" "You mean Rothko?" "Yes." "No." (It was a Michael Boyd.)

I headed back to the roof, past a wall-sized photograph of downtown Manhattan, World Trade Center and all. Somewhere somebody said "Sanjaya 2.0." I fell into the Harvey Danger crowd again and soon we were joined by a girl whose blouse looked like an unfortunate doilie.

"Have you heard of Radar Networks," she said, plucking a random topic from our collective IP-thrummed unconscious. "They're building the semantic web. They're in stealth mode."

So they don't have a Web site yet.

"No, they do, they explain everything on it."

That's not very stealth.

She narrowed her eyes. I wouldn't be sleeping with her that night.

She turned to Jonathan Marcus, a young exec at Vimeo, and said, apropos of nothing, "You should move to San Francisco." There was a pause and she started listing neighborhood names. Hayes, the Haight, Castro. Marcus tried to interrupt. Nob Hill, she said. The Mission.

"I've lived in San Francisco," Marcus said, smiling. "I hate San Francisco."

Welcome to New York.