The neighbors are turning into billionaires again.
At least two of them this time. Young fellows, in their early 30s. Clean cut. With nice smiles, and apparent social consciences to boot.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford University graduate students in 1998 when they founded Google, the search engine company that on Thursday disclosed its plans to go public. When it does so in the coming months, the friends turned founders will watch their net worths soar skyward and turn into celestial bodies.
Back down on earth, the everymen and women of Silicon Valley on Friday expressed guarded joy that two more technology entrepreneurs have punched capitalism's lottery ticket. Little heard, but not altogether absent, were the acid reactions of four years ago from those left out of a dot-com boom that minted hundreds of millionaires in their midst.
"God love 'em," Bryn Taylor, 33, a carpenter, said of the Google executives and their soon-to-be-found fortune. On the knuckles of Taylor's left hand is tattooed the word "fate," but he suspected that his was not to become fabulously wealthy.
"If I could become a billionaire overnight, I'd do it in a heartbeat," said Taylor.
A lot of hope has evaporated from Silicon Valley in the last few years. But the Google public offering appears to offer a symbolic gesture of revival. Some denizens seem not to be saying that "it could happen to me too," but, rather, that the success of Google might suggest a more general economic recovery that would lift all dinghies.
What tempers the enthusiasm is the undercurrent of fear that Silicon Valley could turn irrational again, and the corners would fill up with salesmen hawking hair tonic. The whispers are here, even though there has been no real sense that Google is hollow or that its founders are charlatans hawking empty dot-com promises.
Still, the attention to the public offering has reminded some here that they poured way too much money and hopes into failed companies during the late 1990s.
Alan Rogers, 45, an engineer with Analog Bits, a data communications company based in Chicago said he was less than enthusiastic about Google or any other public offerings. "Too many orphans and widows will invest in it," he mourned.
He added of the dot-com collapse: "It didn't do anything to help business or real life. Now we're dealing locally with the slump because of the bubble."
The economic calm was in evidence at the quiet Red Rock Coffee Company, an Internet cafe in Mountain View, where one of the handful of patrons, Ruth Robertson, 51, was doing an online search. The Palo Alto resident was doing her research using Google, as she often does, and she said she believed the company's public offering will signal economic recovery.
She, like many people here, did not know the names of Brin and Page, but the larger issue was fresh on her mind.
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