Beautiful people only, plz. (Photo: Veetle)

Sometimes when it's a boring news day, we like to troll the depths of Craigslist for story ideas, and today we unearthed quite a gem. It’s an ad posted to the NYC jobs section, seeking “mobile ambassadors” for the Valley-based startup Veetle, a Viddy-like service that allows users to stream live video clips.

Of course, you need active users to build a successful service like Veetle. If Reddit built their site with an army of fake accounts, Veetle will build its platform with an army of beautiful people, ugly users be damned.

"We're looking for actors and actresses to be Mobile Ambassadors - aka use our free mobile app to broadcast their lives on a semi-regular basis," reads the ad entitled "Good looking people needed." "You will use the mobile app to to broadcast live (can be anything - trips to the store, gyms, conversations, anything random in your life... )." Because who wants to watch ugly people doing mundane things?

The ad continues:

You should be:
*Extremely Photogenic
*Lead an interesting life (and not be afraid to share it)
*Have an iPhone or Android phone

The Veetle team will kindly pay you $10/hour to grace the site with your lovely mug, all in the name of growing their startup business. Really, it's almost like they're doing you a favor.

Sadly we only meet one of Veetle's stringent requirements. Guess we won't be serving as a Veetle Mobile Ambassador any time soon. :(

Mr. Basch (Photo: LinkedIn)

If anyone is familiar with the Valley's success method du jour, it's Diego Basch. Mr. Basch founded IndexTank, a hosted search tool that was acquired by LinkedIn in 2009. Today, he hit the front page of Hacker News with a post about how to exploit Silicon Valley "for profit (and maybe fun)."

Mr. Basch's parable is a familiar one: An average Joe goes to Silicon Valley, raises money even though he doesn't really agree with the VC's philosophies, builds a company with the express intent of getting acquired by a larger company, sells the company and makes bank. Only then does he finally have enough money of his own to build something he actually cares about.

Mr. Basch's tale of Joe Founder exposes some key flaws in the Valley's current culture. Aside from the founders just looking to spit out a one-off product, sell it and retire at 25, there are people out there who want to build something meaningful but can't corral the capital or resources to actually do so without first engaging with this cycle.

The discussion on Hacker News is pretty spirited, though the following comment did make us almost spit out our coffee: "$6m really isn't that much these days. Might get you a nice house in the Silly Valley and a few years of living expenses, but that's not "set for life" money if you're in your 20s." Ugh.

Anyway, at least we're not alone in our jadedness here at Betabeat. "Here's to cynicism and hustling," Mr. Basch closes. Indeed.