The Baby Billionaires of Silicon Valley

When you get to Silicon Valley, the first thing you notice is that it isn't much of a place after all. Dot-coms are scattered in mirrored buildings along the forty-seven-mile stretch of Highway 101 that burns from San Francisco to San Jose. Urgent people with silvery Bluetooth earbuds zip past one another in shiny, tiny cars. Aside from the occasional refueling at a roadside Peet's Coffee & Tea, it's strange geeks passing in the night. If you want to make friends — people you can really trust — then you've got to work for it. Just ask the Brats.

They came from all corners of the Valley just to dip nachos this evening. Zuckerberg operates Facebook from an office on University Avenue, the leafy strip of restaurants and bars near Stanford in Palo Alto. Ross codes alone out of his crowded apartment in Mountain View, fifteen minutes further south. Todd Masonis, unshaven, dark bags under his eyes, twenty-six-year-old genius coder of Plaxo, the smart online address book, runs his operation down the way. The YouTube crew toils out of a mouse-infested loft above a pizza joint thirty minutes up the road. It hardly resembles the mythical Oz these guys dreamed about as kids. As YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, 28, recalls, "I thought they literally had skyscrapers made of silicon chips here."

Over drinks at the Redwood Room, they swap stories of their migrations. In some way, each exhibited an early DIY passion and a healthy disdain for the status quo. "Would it have been possible for someone with more experience to have started a Facebook or YouTube?" says Chen, who sports spiky dark hair and silver hoop earrings. "[Older people] bring a sense of hesitation into doing something untested. We're willing to experiment and take risks. That's what we share with other twentysomethings."

When they arrived at the tail end of the late-Nineties boom, they quickly realized their predecessors seemed more interested in cashing in than breaking ground. "Their business plans were ass-backwards," Pazornik says, "and the excess was, like, totally out of control." Pazornik, a square-jawed guy with a backward Yale baseball cap, raises his voice above the hip-hop music in the bar and tells the guys a cautionary tale. One night in 2000, he went to a geek bash. To hype their new product, some startup guys had transformed a warehouse into a rave. They hired dancing girls, DJs, put on a cheesy light show. For the finale, fog machines blanketed a stage in smoke. And then the guys wheeled out . . . an empty purple box. The big plan was to sell those boxes online. Boxes that, um, you would put outside your house to collect your FedEx packages. Yes, it was ludicrously dumb. Pazornik recalls gawking at the overkill — the hot girls, the lights, the fawning venture capitalists — and having one thought: "Man, this is crazy."

In geek-speak, hype that never materializes is called vaporware. The nascent Brats share a passion for creating something that will last. They found an audience by tapping a personal need. Ross, an earnest and self-taught prodigy, created Firefox after getting frustrated with the incessant pop-ups and viruses associated with Microsoft's ruling Web browser, Internet Explorer. Zuckerberg made Facebook as a way for students to keep in touch with one another online after his university, Harvard, dragged its heels on a promised student directory. Pazornik created LicketyShip, a shopping site that one-ups Amazon by offering same-day deliveries, after he ran out of ink while printing a term paper at Yale. "Each of us is running a company that is intended to change the game," says Pazornik. "We're not making building blocks, we're making explosive technology."

And in a serendipitous flash, the walls around each of the Brats came crashing down — and sometimes left them bruised in the process. Ross, a mama's boy who dreamed of writing children's stories, developed Firefox in consort with legions of coders in the free-software community online. Firefox quickly rose from program to religion, sparking a grass-roots uprising of surfers tired of Microsoft's buggy browser ruining their days. When version 2.0 debuted last month, it was downloaded over 2 million times in the first twenty-four hours. Suddenly, all the dot-com excess Ross had heard about zeroed in on him. Venture capitalists were taking him out for fancy dinners. He made it onto the cover of Wired. Meanwhile, a backlash had started among the free-software geeks. Theirs was a people's movement, and they resented how the media centered the story on Ross, the whiz kid. "It's simply a mischaracterization of the worst kind to suggest that Blake single-handedly created Firefox," blogged Chris Messina, a high-profile coder who worked on Firefox and Howard Dean's DeanSpace campaign. "And it ignores the real story, which is that open source is an available, alternative model for developing high-quality product that meet real-world users' needs." Ross took the criticisms hard. Success felt "like a curse," he says. "People imagine I must be enjoying all this. . . . But it's very hard to enjoy something when you know there's a community of people upset that they're not getting the press you are."