Martha Lane-Fox looked like someone without a care in the world yesterday, sitting under the early summer Spanish sun, laughing and joking.
The Lastminute.com co-founder was in Barcelona to address the Industry Standard's Global Internet Summit, apparently unfazed by the past two months' barrage of criticism caused by the company's flotation. Nor did she seem overly worried that back home demand from investors for new internet stocks continued to crumble.
The reason for her optimism? For perhaps the first time since the float, Ms Lane-Fox was attending an internet conference where her floundering share price was not the hot topic of gossip.
Instead, all the snipers were focusing on the collapse of e-tailer Boo.com and information provider Net Imperative, and which would be the next dot.com to run out of cash.
With £130m in the bank, Lastminute.com seems to have enough cash to make it through to break-even. "We have always said that the IPO [flotation] changed nothing about the day-to-day running of this business except that it gave us the funds to build it to the size we have always envisaged," Ms Lane-Fox said.
Elsewhere at the summit the mood was sombre, with an acceptance that the stock market party was over - at least for now and perhaps for ever for the more flimsy enterprises.
Rob Hersov, chief executive of Sportal, summed up the mood: "The IPO window has been closed. It's private placement time now. Investment banks are no longer pitching for floats. Everyone is rethinking their valuations."
Nick Denton, chief executive of Moreover.com, a news aggregator which is close to finalising a new round of fundraising, pointed out that traditional ways of valuing companies were coming back into fashion. "[It is a return to] revenue models, sustainability and technological advantage - the traditional things that define great technology companies.
"Six months ago venture capitalists were judging companies by the strength of their stories and the prospects of getting a quick flip at IPO."
Others were more bullish. John Palmer, chief executive of Letsbuyit.com, said his company still planned to list on the Neuer Markt on June 7. However, he admitted that when the company was finalising its last round of fundraising in March, which included a €16m (£9m) investment from BSkyB - investors were more demanding than previously.
British newsreel footage firm Newsplayer also pressed on with its flotation yesterday, setting out details of a listing that values the company at around £55m. Newsplayer, which operates through a video-on-demand model, set the price for its flotation on London's Alternative Investment Market at 84p per share.
Victor Basta, managing director in London of technology-focused investment bank Broadview, said a shake-out of the market was long overdue.
"Many of the companies were lucky to be funded in the first place. They were run by people who were underqualified and some of the deals violated the basic tenets of venture capitalism," he said.
The FTSE 100 blue chip index last night underlined the dramatic shift going on in the fortunes of new-economy stocks.
If the FTSE had been undergoing its quarterly reshuffle, many of the dot.com companies welcomed with such fanfare in March, such as Thus, Kingston Communications and Psion, would have been jettisoned.
In their place would come more familiar names: Hanson, Scottish & Newcastle and, perhaps, British American Tobacco and PowerGen.
