Every self-respecting young man in Silicon Valley had considered the fantasy at one time or another. You could be pulling down a six-figure salary at Apple or Oracle you could have two patents registered under your own name . . . . . you could have a division of programmers under your command and it didn't count for nothing unless you had taken a crack at the big spin. You had to know: 'Could I do it?' It was easy for an older guy like Francis Benoit to ridicule the romance of a start-up, but if you were thirty, like Tiny, or twenty-nine, like Salman, you suspected that you'd never really lived if you hadn't done it at least once. They were always looking for the chance. And what constituted a chance? A decent idea and a team big enough to do the work fast but small enough to survive on credit cards. How many chances would they get like this? Darrell, meanwhile, had tried and failed once before, and he was just gaining enough distance on the experience to see the mistakes he had made. And so he was wondering, What if I . . . don't repeat those mistakes!