So you want to buy into the next Google?  Follow every rumor about these Silicon Valley venture capitalists. 

One afternoon last May in Menlo Park, Calif., a venture capitalist named Ray Lane led me from his office to the parking lot, where an automobile had been delivered a few hours earlier by flatbed truck. The car, built in Norway, was powered by batteries and had a plug-in outlet hidden under a flip-top cover near the driver-side door. To my eye, the car resembled a generic European compact, but with some differences; the body, for instance, was made from a textured, plasticized material. In a lot full of gleaming new vehicles, some of them owned by the wealthiest venture capitalists in the United States, this car — branded the Think — seemed distinctive mainly for its lack of sparkle.

“You want to drive?” Lane asked, tossing me the key. Inside, the dashboard was seemingly made of densely woven fabric, and the seat was covered in a material that felt decidedly un-Corinthian. “The Think is 95 percent recyclable,” Lane said matter-of-factly, giving me the sense that we were about to drive a milk carton rather than a car. A turn of the key started up a barely perceptible hum somewhere under the hood. “There we go,” Lane said, sitting back with a pleased expression. I shifted into drive and hit the gas pedal — actually, the electricity pedal — a little too hard, and the Think lurched forward.

It was one of those hot, dry, cloudless days on Sand Hill Road, the wide avenue in Silicon Valley lined with some of the country’s most powerful venture-capital firms. It would have been a fine adventure to see if the Think could hit its top speed of 65 m.p.h. on U.S. 101, which snakes through Menlo Park and down into Mountain View, Sunnyvale and San Jose, high-tech towns where Lane and his colleagues at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have been financing companies (Google and Netscape, among others) for the past 36 years.

My feeling is that the better the correction, the more old line corporations that are slaughtered, the better the boom will be.