What would you do if you became a multimillionaire? In Silicon Valley, the answer is often surprising: Get back to work.
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.
Pincus eventually decided that the lifestyle didn't suit him, so he called his old partners and they started brainstorming.
He compared the experience to being in a band that had broken up. His buddies, who had also just been killing time, were eager to start a new act.
One of their projects became tribe.net, a social-networking site. Pincus ran the company, then left it, and then started running it again.
"You can sit around and do nothing and go to the beach," he said, "But after a while, you realize you're not engaged with the world. That's what is fun about life."
Godhwani said selling his company, which helped small businesses improve their websites, gave him "more money than I ever dreamed of."
He decided to rejoin the workforce anyway. But several of his friends who cashed in on the dot-com boom of the late 1990s were paralyzed by the choices of how to spend their time.
"They had immense confusion about what they were supposed to do, and a number of them got terribly depressed," he said. "But it's not the kind of thing where you get a lot of sympathy."
This melancholy is not uncommon in Silicon Valley, where many people define themselves by their jobs, said Stephen Goldbart, co-director of the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute in the Marin County town of Kentfield.
"Sudden wealth syndrome" -- that's how Goldbart and his colleagues describe the depression and confusion many entrepreneurs face when they achieve financial success and realize it doesn't guarantee happiness.
"They ask, 'Now that I've made it and money is no longer a driver, what is the meaning and purpose of my life?' " he said.
His institute has offered classes that teach these entrepreneurs how to relax and adapt to not working grueling hours toward a sole purpose.
The condition isn't limited to Silicon Valley. Microsoft Corp. created many millionaires who keep founding tech companies in the Seattle area. Hollywood is filled with filmmakers such as Clint Eastwood who keep directing and producing, though they could have retired years earlier, and some rich athletes such as Michael Jordan have struggled to leave the game.
"What brings an actor back to the stage when he's 70 years old?" said William F. Miller, a professor emeritus at Stanford who himself could have stopped working long ago but is still going strong. "It's the sense of making an impact."
