[...] 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.