Not the retiring type

Gautam Godhwani faced that decision at the age of 24. Only a few years out of UC Berkeley, he helped start an Internet company called AtWeb from his parents' basement, and Netscape snapped it up in 1998 for $93 million.

He celebrated by buying a Porsche 911 and a San Francisco apartment with three bedrooms and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Then he quit work and traveled the world first-class. Not sure what to do next, he founded and ran a community center for Indian Americans.

But, as is typical in Silicon Valley, the urge to innovate brought him back to the office. Now 34, he's plugging away in Mountain View at an online job-listing start-up called Simply Hired.

It's the Silicon Valley curse: Even with the means to retire young, Godhwani and other serial entrepreneurs can't ignore the drive that made them rich in the first place. That persistence helped cement the region's reputation as the tech capital of the world -- people keep coming back for second and even third acts.

"I love the challenge and reward that comes with having a hand in building a company," Godhwani said.

The region, which has weathered decades of boom-and-bust cycles, appears to be on an another up- swing. Local technology companies created 33,000 new jobs in 2006, the first increase since the dot-com slump of 2001, according to Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a business-community alliance.

"The fact that there are consistently people looking for the next new thing is very much part of what has made Silicon Valley survive," said Garth Saloner, co-director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

Many people became millionaires only on paper in the dot-com explosion, then lost that status when the tech stock sector crashed and the value of their holdings dwindled to little or nothing. But some young executives who did cash in couldn't stay out of the game for long.

Mark Pincus, who co-founded Freeloader Inc. in the early 1990s, tried to relax after the Internet company was bought for $38 million in 1996. For a year, he got up each morning with no responsibilities. He remembers sitting on his deck on weekday afternoons and drinking beer with random people he had just met.

"You think you're in heaven, but you're really in hell," he said.