Books: A guide to cube farms for internots

The Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson Secker pounds 1

There is absolutely nothing remarkable about the Californian communities of San Carlos, Menlo Park, Palo Alto and Mountain View - unless you are an estate agent. Today the desirable residences that have obliterated the olive groves south of San Francisco appreciate, on average, by $1,000 a week. Why? Well, here's a clue: funny money goes with the territory, even though most of it consists of industrial megaparks connected by superexpressways. Welcome to the Santa Clara Valley, home of the silicon chip.

Po Bronson, a contributor to Wired magazine, has made "Silicon Valley" his stomping ground. The Nudist On The Late Shift is a sort of cyberguide to it, a travel book for techies and internots alike. His two novels, Bombardiers and The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest, were both best-sellers, so it comes as no surprise that he now lives in San Francisco, one of the most beautiful cities on earth. It must be a relief to head north after a day spent scurrying round the "cube farms" of Redwood City and Sunnyvale where deadline-junkie programmers work round the clock in cramped cubicles that form mazes of MDF.

In the crucible of information technology, time-frames matter as much as mainframes. The sooner a start-up company - often one guy with a neat gimmick like "a price comparison shopping engine" - can attract venture capital and go public, the sooner its creator will have a chance of becoming a supermillionaire. Bronson cites the case of Ben Chiu, a 27-year-old entrepreneur from Toronto who used to organise discos in Taiwan. He moved to the Valley and wrote the computer code that enabled KillerApp.com, the above-mentioned shopping engine, to discover where it was possible to buy, for example, the cheapest personal computer. Within 12 months he had sold his company for $46.6m. The truly weird thing is that Chiu "didn't do anything special to celebrate". Perhaps 18-hour days are their own reward.

At AMR Combs, half a mile north of San Francisco's main airport, those entering the terminal are greeted by a sign reading: THROUGH THESE DOORS PASS THE MOST IMPORTANT PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. For "important" read "loaded", but, as Nico Nierenberg - whom we see make $28m as his software company Actuate goes public - says: "there is always going to be someone smarter than you ... Always someone richer." Bronson is fascinated by the high life. He knows to check that there is fresh ice in the limo arm-rest, knows that even if you are a billionaire with a private jet or three, flying is still boring: which is why such men often learn how to take the controls themselves.

It is the fear of losing control, of - whisper the word - failure, that motivates these modern-day prospectors. George Gilder, "the Tupac Shakur rap master of futurism", is afraid of delivering a dull $20,000 speech. He doesn't: "The Internet will multiply by a factor of millions the power of one person at a computer." Think about that. Thierry Levy, a newcomer to the Valley, has just six months to make a success of his software, which turns plain web pages into interactive quizzes, or return to France.

The high life depends on most of us enduring the low life. Bronson meets the bottom-feeders as well: "The Cubicle Guy" who recycles the partitioning from failed companies; the tele-sales folk with impossible quotas; the party organisers who arrange for festive geeks to turn themselves into human darts (they don Velcro suits and get flung from a slingshot). Since it's always boom time in Belmont, no one starves.

Bronson, like most American magazine journalists, can't introduce someone without itemising their wardrobe. That apart, he is a snappy writer who goes light on the street slang and technical jargon. Furthermore he is excellent at describing complex processes - for example, games-playing programmes - in simple, easy-to-grasp terms. Like all the best reportage, this is research laced with anecdote and adrenalin. The nudist has a walk- on part in the introduction; he seems to be there only to provide a quirky title. If the subject of cybernetics is vast, Silicon Valley turns out to be a small world where everybody knows somebody who knows somebody: "it's three degrees of separation". And, although there really is nothing to see, the Japanese tourists have arrived, clicking away at the corporate HQs.