Winners of the Webbys, the annual awards for the best and brightest in the dot.com world, are limited to five words in their acceptance speeches.
One, the online magazine Plastic.com, had already gone bust when the awards were presented on Wednesday night, and duly summed up the bitter-sweet mood of this year's event with the words: "Bankruptcy never felt so good."
Many other nominees and previous winners were either no longer in existence or in deep financial trouble, but the atmosphere in the War Memorial opera house in San Francisco was determinedly upbeat and jolly.
The spirit of the start-up world was perhaps best reflected by a Judy Garland impersonator who sang Somewhere over the Rainbow.
Outside the opera house Thomas Muscante stood beside the red carpet holding outa sign saying: "Will swap options for food".
He said he had worked for three companies which failed, and was left with little more than a company baseball cap and T-shirt. But he was hoping that his own new website (devminds.com) might yet take off.
More than 500 dot.coms have become dot.gones in the past 18 months, and if anyone had created a perfume for the night it might have been called Schadenfreude.
Tiffany Shlain, listed in the programme as "Founder, Director, Survivor" of the awards, told the cheering audience of 3,000-plus, who had been told to "dress gutsy". "We've all had a painful year".
She added: "Whether a great creation stays in business or not does not diminish its value."
Her point was underlined by the night's theme: Darwinian natural selection.
Among the nominees that were gone or going were Feed magazine, Plastic.com, Popular Power and ChickClick. Previous winners which have hit hard times or folded are Napster, Gamers Central, BeZerk, Family Planet and AudioNet.
Of the 71 previous winners, more than a third have run into financial problem. Four of the five nominated in the news category this year - CNN, Salon, Inside and CNet - have been laying off staff.
The Webbys were launched in 1997 as the awards of the then new International Academy of Digital Arts and Science, which now has about 350 members, chosen for their excellence in the field of online content.
Its members and judges have included David Bowie, Matt Groening, Tina Brown, Larry Ellison, Francis Coppola and Bjork.
This year's event, with 30 categories of awards, was the biggest yet. Some of the winners were familiar names in the business: Microsoft Windows Update was the only recipient to be booed, when it won the technical achievement Webby.
Yahoo won the finance award. The Onion was a popular choice in the humour category, as was Peter Pan in the weird category.
Julia Butterfly Hill, who stayed up a tree for more than a year in a successful campaign against timber felling, handed the activist Webby to VolunteerMatch who told the audience: "Just volunteer - it's that easy."
"Spy on Washington - it's fun," said OpenSecrets.org when it won the politics award.
"Thanks, now please go away," said Travelocity on winning the commerce award.
BBC World Service won best radio Webby. Other winners included: Swell.com (sport), Sputnik7 (music) and Requiem for a Dream (film). Google.com won the best-practices award.
The Scottish actor Alan Cumming brought all his skills from his old Broadway role as the MC in Cabaret to the event and relished reading out the name of one nominee, fuckedcompany.com (it can never be mentioned in American newspapers), nominated in the humour category.
The night's only standing ovation went to three grand old men of the internet world. Vint Cerf, one of its inventors, gave the annual achievement award to Douglas Engelbart, who helped to create the first non-network e-mail system, in the 60s, and also developed the computer mouse, and Ray Tomlinson, who is credited with inventing e-mail in 1971.
