With just $20,000 in cash but gobs of gumption, ambition and talent,
Ethan Bloch and two partners are turning an idea into a Web-based
business.

"I came to San Francisco to build a big company that does important things," said the 24-year-old Baltimore native.

Last year, Bloch co-founded Flowtown.com, which creates personal and
professional profiles of people by gathering information from social
networks, data it then sells to marketers.

"We're either going to make it big or fail spectacularly," said
Bloch, who became fascinated with the region as a teenager growing up
during the dot-com era.

"It was definitely inspirational," Bloch said.

Wednesday will be 10 years to the day that a plunge in the Nasdaq
index punctured the dot-com bubble and ended the most frantic race to
riches since the Gold Rush.

From its March 10, 2000, peak of 5,132.52, this index of tech and
biotech stocks fell to a low of 1,114.11 on Oct. 9, 2002. The bust
caused a brief recession and had longer-lasting - but not entirely
negative - impacts on the region's startup economy.

Today the Nasdaq is muddling along at 2,326.35, where it closed
Friday. But despite another recession and a harsh environment for
raising money, the region remains an entrepreneurial mecca.

"Silicon Valley is a state of mind," said Oliver Muoto, 41, who
co-founded a $94 million Internet startup in 1998 that sold at a huge
loss four years later.

"People came out here knowing they would be successful," said Muoto,
who now runs Metablocks, a music software company in Menlo Park. "It
was a time of excess."

Nationwide data provided by the National Venture Capital Association tell part of the story.

In 1999 and 2000, Wall Street invested in 534 venture-backed initial public offerings.

Those IPOs made huge profits for venture capital firms, which plowed
money back into startups. In 2000, at the peak of the bubble, VCs made
nearly 8,000 investments valued at $100.5 billion.

But in recent years, as Wall Street has shown less appetite for IPOs, VCs have made fewer investments in startups.

In 2008 and 2009, the association said, a total of just 18
venture-backed companies went public. So far in 2010, seven companies
have delayed or postponed IPOs, while

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