Agency.com was founded in 1995. Its first big job: designing a site for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Now it builds entire online strategies for blue-chip clients including American Express, GTE, British Airways, and MetLife. “We didn’t need all the baggage that other agencies were trying to sell us,” says Richard Painchaud, MetLife’s VP of Interactive Commerce.

“When we first looked at the Internet in 1994, the National Science Foundation was still funding it,” says Suh. “And we thought that if commercial interests were going to take over, we wanted to go with the large companies, because we thought they would need this as much as anybody else and they would be able to spend the proper amount of investment on it.” And so while other Alley agencies focused on building impressive portfolios with dazzling, design-driven sites, Agency.com learned to speak the language of major corporate clients and focused on long-term results -- not only building Websites but also driving traffic to them. Last year, Agency.com acquired majority positions in Spiral Media, specialists in database development, which brought needed tech credibility. And it also added Online Magic -- the top Web shop in the UK, with high-profile clients such as The Economist -- to its portfolio, given it ready entrée to the rapidly expanding European market.

THE IPO

The website developer K2 design was humming along nicely when it decided in 1996 to forgo additional private investment and become one of the first Silicon Alley companies to go public. But not long after the offering hit traders’ screens at $6 a share, K2 began to run into cash-flow problems. The stock quickly tanked (it now trades at around $2), and Wall Street grew wary of its Alley neighbors.

Until February 20, 1998, the day of DoubleClick’s IPO, also known as “the day Silicon Alley became real.” Shares of DoubleClick, an Internet advertising company, were originally priced at $17 but opened on the first day of trading at $29 (and were about $35 a share at press time). All told, DoubleClick raised about $60 million in the offering.

Though DoubleClick’s business model is itself noteworthy, its management’s mastery of the IPO process -- the arcane financials and politics of going public -- garners it special recognition as one of the new breed of Silicon Alley survivors. Needless to say, the offering went a long way toward rehabilitating the Alley’s rep on the Street.

“I’ve always thought that Silicon Alley was real,” says Jamie Kiggen, an analyst at Cowen & Company (one of DoubleClick’s underwriters), “because there’s a lot of energy and activity there that will result in plenty of sustainable businesses, but DoubleClick certainly increased the visibility of that part of the world.”

The company, founded by Kevin O’Connor in 1995, offers a network of more than 60 popular sites to companies that want to place targeted ads. It has also developed proprietary systems for keeping track of advertising and direct-marketing traffic. “There was a real lull where people were second-guessing the Internet,” says O’Connor. “Then, all of a sudden, it was no longer a question of whether Internet advertising would be big; it was just a question of how big.”

As for the IPO, O’Connor says, “A lot of good things converged: The market was doing well, our story was understood very well, the investors were strong believers in the Internet -- in fact, much stronger than we anticipated. That was nice to see.”

THE MONEY MEN

There never were many new-media-venture-capital firms in New York -- two in fact, at last count -- and Silicon Alley needs them now more than ever. Unfortunately, Flatiron Partners, so named because of its supposed dedication to the home team, seems to have strayed -- after some recent deals with companies in Massachusetts and California, only 50 percent of the $70 million Flatiron has spent has gone to Silicon Alley. “The focus has shifted somewhat because we expected to do more content-related things,” says Flatiron founder Jerry Colonna. “Many of the companies in Manhattan were less mature than we had anticipated.”

Prospect Street Ventures, on the other hand, cannot stray even if it wants to: Founded with the help of the New York City Investment Corporation in 1995 (Con Edison, Brooklyn Union Gas, and the Small Business Administration are the other partners), it is required by charter to invest all of its $76 million within the five boroughs. “The mayor realized this was a growing industry and would benefit from the city’s support,” says Charles Millard, the head of the Economic Development Corporation. Prospect has already dispersed about half of the fund’s sums; its most recent investments have been in 24/7 Media, an interactive advertising network, and AirMedia, a digital-information broadcaster. “We try to back excellent people in big market segments, which is not as easy as it sounds,” says Edward Sim, an associate at Prospect Street. “There are more deals out in Silicon Valley right now, but I’d say things here are getting better and maturing. Silicon Alley is very promising.”

THE RETAILERS

“Category killer” retailers -- huge superstores that put everyone else out of business -- don’t seem to have quite the same bruising weight in cyberspace as they do in the real world. Those New Yorkers still bitter about the loss of Books & Co. and Shakespeare & Co. will be pleased to know that Barnes & Noble -- widely blamed for driving these and others into the ground -- is actually an underdog on the Internet. Seattle-based Amazon.com (which currently has about ten times as much in revenues) got out of the gate two years before barnesandnoble.com, which launched only in May of last year.