[...] I wanted to know what fills their daydreams as they drive along the 280 every evening. Nobody daydreams about "liquidity." These guys don't even really daydream about money, since they already have nice houses in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Prestige. That's what this is about. It's about getting the respect of one's peers. It's about a valley full of superachievers trying to climb up that highest rung on the ladder. [...]

Riding the limo down to Wall Street, Dan and Nico are blowing off steam. This involves cracking a series of inside jokes with embedded references to road-show misadventures. D&N are like junior high girls at the water fountain, giggling over details only they find funny. Any reference to a credit card, for instance, causes them to burst out screaming with laughter; apparently Nico can't use his credit card because he maxxed out the credit limit. Why that's so hilarious I don't know. Another inside joke is that whenever they say aloud the number "three," they hold up four finders on one hand. [...]

[...] "Options are really a West Coast thing," said Dan Gaudreau, who spent eighteen years in management at General Electric. "On the East Coast, they don't consider options as having any real skin in the game. Only if employees really buy the stock does it count as skin." If options collapse in value, the employee doesn't lose anything, since the options were a gift. To paraphrase: the East Coasters prefer to see some Fear as well as Greed. But West Coasters know that having upside without downside is what stimulates entrepreneurs to take the wild risks on new ventures. Without options, there wouldn't be a Silicon Valley.

He takes a stroll. The long walk around the sales floor. His face hangs with gloom, he tries to give a pursed smile but it just shows hurt. He paces back and forth, his hands on his hips. His steps are ponderous, searching. He looks like he has been stretched like a Gumby. He is worried about Dan Gaudreau, who has just heard from his brother about his mother's condition, which hasn't improved. Have you accepted that you have no control over your fate, Nico Nierenberg? Have you accepted that being a public company means having a crack-addled manic tyrant as a business partner? Have you accepted, Nico Nierenberg, your utter puniness?

For me, more than any other sign of how smooth the IPO transaction has become is the culture clash that didn't happen between high tech and high finance. It used to be that these scruffy-bearded, sandal-wearing engineers would ride in their VW vans up to San Francisco, where they would take the elevator up into the world of summer-worsted pinstripes and gel-slicked hair.

Now the engineers follow the stock market closely, and half of them hold puts and calls on tech indexes. Every third sentence out of an engineer's mouth these days uses the phrase "value proposition." The investment bankers rarely wear anything fancier than polo shirts over khakis, and they can talk for hours about developing object-oriented software on the Solaris 2.4 platform versus Windows NT 3.51. The subcultures are gone.

I walk into a conference room and I cannot tell which are the bankers, which are the lawyers, and which are the entrepreneurs. High tech and high finance haven't met halfway, it's more that they've both gone all the way. It's not a culture clash, it's a culture mash.