At 10 o'clock in the morning, Markus Frind leaves his apartment and heads to work.

It's a short walk through downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, but somehow the trek feels arduous. This is not because Frind is lazy. Well, Frind is a bit lazy, but that's another matter. The problem is that he is still getting used to the idea of a commute that involves traveling farther than the distance between the living room and the bedroom.

Frind's online dating company, Plenty of Fish, is newly located on the 26th floor of a downtown skyscraper with a revolving restaurant on the roof. The gleaming space could easily house 30 employees, but as Frind strides in, it is eerily quiet -- just a room with new carpets, freshly painted walls, and eight flat-screen computer monitors. Frind drops his bag and plops himself down in front of one of them.

He looks down at his desk. There's a $180,000 order waiting for his signature. It's from VideoEgg, a San Francisco company that is paying Frind to run a series of Budweiser commercials in Canada. Like most of his advertising deals, this one found Frind. He hadn't even heard of VideoEgg until a week ago. But then, you tend to attract advertisers' attention when you are serving up 1.6 billion webpages each month...