What's not in this book is a roundup of the Valley's Most Important People [...] The Valley is about the opportunity to become a mover or a shaker, not about being one. That opportunity is what gets young people to move here every day from Illinois and India and Canada.

[...] He is twenty-seven and has an MBA from the University of Tennessee and wants to build the technology that changes how the world lives and works. I don't hear this kind of idealism very often anymore; it's like Scott's time traveled here from 1994. It's a plain vanilla idealism, perhaps the sort of unironical viewpoint that can only develop in the heartland of the country -- where they know absolutely nothing about what it's really like here. I give it three months, and then, like an accent, it'll disappear.

Silicon Valley today: Get lean, get stripped down, live on nothing. Bare bones. Focus. Be a fighter. Stamina. Ration yourself to one Snickers bar, one jacking off, and one Dilbert cartoon daily. Forget about love that nourishes. Forget about food that satiates. Forget about long conversations that get good only late in the middle of the night, when the third bottle of wine is uncorked. Forget about poetry: the whisper, the leaf, the tuck of hair. Forget about politics: the bilingual ed revolt, the dams diverting more water south.

Get ready for ultracapitalism.

"No, when I make my first twenty million, forget about it," says Thierry.

"Forget about it?" I ask.

"No, forget about it."

"You won't be here?"

"No, I'll go home. Maybe here in small doses only. Those people you write about -- they make twenty million, and it is not enough for them. I am not greedy like them."

The other thing open all night is the Safeway, great for his long-houred "lifestyle." They sell Barilla spaghetti, the same brand he would buy in Paris, in the same blue-and-red box, $1.59 for 16 ounces. He says that when he gets venture capital financing -- when he gets rich -- he's going to move up to the real stuff, De Cecco brand pasta, twice as expensive at a bank-account draining $2.59 per box.

"Three months, come and see me maybe," he says. "I"ll be making spaghetti."

He's psyching himself up again by using me as his audience. "The great thing about our e-commerce software is, it helps small companies feed their families. And it helps them hire people. Jobs and food, that's what this is really about. It's not about getting rich."

I'm having drinks at the Stanford Park Hotel with a group of all-around earnest guys in the twenty-five-to-thirty-five demographic. This is an organisation called "Round Zero," a nifty euphemism for the mill grist and sweat equity that goes on before the venture capitalists swoop in with rounds one, two, and three of financing. They're still young enough to regularly pull all-nighters. There's a drinking hour before the dinner, but most attendees are holding Diet Cokes, served in highball glasses and garnished with a maraschino cherry. Dinners are semistructured debates. The main point of the monthly salon is to retain an intellectual framework around one's job.

[...] 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?