Welcome to Silicon Valley -- where fortunes are fast, dating's dysfunctional, and computer geeks rule. Meet Paul Armstrong, a late-twenties computer "consultant" who sits in his cubicle at TeraMemory wondering where it all went horribly wrong.

"Well, I wasn't always a nerd. I started out as a liberal-arts type in college -- though I aggressively concealed this on my resume. Hiring managers don't like it. Non-technical outside interests. Bad sign."

Watch him order a latte from the ofÞce coffee cart and poke at his Chinese lunch special while his longtime pal Steve Hall, hacker extraordinaire, accuses him of selling out to The Man.

"When the money dries up, this place will be just like anywhere else. It was never the place, anyway -- that's what The Man will never understand."

Meet The Man himself: Barry Dominic, the þamboyant, lecherous, millionaire founder of TeraMemory. He insists they're poised to revolutionize networking with a cutting-edge technology, appropriately called WHIP.

"Nobody fucks with Barry Dominic."

That's where Liz Toulouse comes in. A Stanford English Lit grad and TeraMemory marketing associate, she accidentally cc's the entire company a snide e-mail about The Man's bad grammar on her very Þrst day....

"If only I'd had any idea. I'd have stayed in school. I'd have changed majors. Gotten a master's. Anything."

Welcome to Silicon Follies, a hilarious dot.comedy of ambition and disillusionment in a land of luck, loss, and sometimes even love.