In the Silicon Valley where I'm from, the stories were almost never about money. They were tales about resistance, heroism, and struggle, yarns about the creation of something out of nothing-and the derring-do required to pull such a feat off. In short, they were about dragon slaying. That's still true, at least in the Silicon Valley I know.

Those were the stories that got me excited. And they still do.

I'm not saying there isn't an economic story to be told. In fact, I think that we are witnessing the greatest transition since the industrial revolution. A new economy— the information economy—is being created, and the center of that new economic order will be Silicon Valley. And if that's not the business story of the century, what is?

Still, the bigger question, in my humble opinion, is how that transformation will transform us. We begin to see the answer in the culture that's being created in Silicon Valley, now. It's future obsessed and forward thinking. It's technical and quantitative. It's market oriented. [...]