It's a crazy time. The markets are in frenzy, hyperventilating and goingnowhere as investors try to decide whether this is a market correction ormaybe the beginning of a recession. The world is fixated on Microsoft farmore than that company deserves or even wants. I think what's needed rightnow is a return to fundamentals, to a focus on where real value is beingadded in high technology and who is doing the adding. Let me give you anexample.

While on a plane to San Diego this week, I met a man I had dinner with three yearsbefore. Back then he was a Symbolic Systems major at Stanford Universityand the son of a doctor from New Jersey. As part of a membership pledgedrive at WNET-TV in New York, the father had bought for his son dinner withme at the restaurant of his choice. We dove into big steaks at theSundance Mine Company restaurant right across the street from Stanford.And we talked about his career to come in the computer industry.

Tom Isakovich — my dinner companion that night in 1997 — was a tall kidwho reminded me of actor Noah Wylie from ER. His machine of choice was theApple Macintosh and his goal was to start a computer animation companyafter graduation. He gave me the URL for his dorm room Web site with itsanimation portfolio. I was amazed at how zippy the animations ran until Iremembered each dorm network connection clocked at 100 megabits-per-second. No wonder he was filling my ISDN line. And that was it: a couple e-mailslater and we lost touch until meeting this week over peanuts on SouthwestAirlines.

Tom Isakovich didn't start a computer animation company. He didn't evenreturn to Stanford for the next academic year after I met him. Instead hethrew himself into a marketing job at Network Computer, Oracle's ill-fatedspin-off that was intended to replace all our PCs with little networkcomputers, which we now call thin clients. Network Computer eventuallymorphed into Liberate, a company that dominates the Asian and European TVset-top box markets and is a bonafide Silicon Valley megasuccess.

But Tom Isakovich didn't ride from NC to Liberate. Instead he started hisown mass storage company called Synapsys to build high-speed fiber-attachedRAID arrays for his beloved Macintosh. It wasn't an animation company, butit solved one of the animator's great headaches — getting enough diskstorage that was fast enough to store major video files at full speedwithout dropping frames. That first product garnered a MacWeek front pagestory and even a few orders.

At this point we might wonder what it takes to start a RAID company likeIsakovich's. In a venture capital frenzied time like today it might take alot of money and staff just because VCs like to see companies with lots ofmoney and staff to deplete the founder's equity and make the VCs morepowerful. But Tom Isakovich didn't have any venture capital and probablydidn't even know where to look for it. Instead, he had $50,000 raised fromfriends and family. That's what it actually takes to start a RAID company.

But Tom Isakovich didn't stop there. He saw the real mass storageopportunity lay in a new technology called Storage Area Networks. SANs, asthey are called, are network-attached arrays of large disk drives thatprovide the largest, fastest disk service available today. The big ideabehind a SAN is to interconnect all the workstations, servers, andmainframes in an organization with the SAN providing high speed storagenetworking while leaving the LAN free for bursty communication traffic likee-mail and Web service. SANs scream at speeds up to eight times that ofthe fastest SCSI arrays and SANS allow the interconnetion of thousands ofdevices over 10,000 meters of fiber rather than seven or 14 SCSI devicesover a few meters of cable. We're no longer talking about gigabytes oreven terabytes of data: SANs can store PETABYTES, which is a word I'dnever even heard of, but means 1000 terabytes. That's a LOT of data. Allthe big mass storage companies are into SANS, which typically start around$150,000 and rise into the millions. EMC is the biggest player with around25,000 customers. Tom Isakovich's modest goal is to do to EMC whatMicrosoft once did to IBM, and he just might succeed.

So Synapsys became TrueSAN Networks and Tom Isakovich became the madman ofFibre Channel SANs. He had to be, because until 1999, Tom Isakovich, lateof Stanford's Theta Delta Chi fraternity, was TrueSAN Network's onlyemployee. He may have been designing and selling $150,000 disk subsystems,but Isakovich certainly wasn't building, installing, or supporting them.That work was all contracted out. And in a world where Internet companiescost millions to found and seem never to be profitable, TrueSAN Networkswas almost instantly profitable, still working from that $50,000 friendsand family investment. And Tom Isakovich was buying a 1999 Acura NSXsports car.

Things have changed since then. TrueSAN raised $1 million this Februaryand will probably raise another million soon. The company doesn't actuallyneed the money, but having it in the bank provides piece of mind and allowssomewhat faster growth. TrueSAN now has about 20 employees and stilldoesn't make anything, but the SANs it sells are the fastest in theindustry and priced at a third of the competition. Still there is plentyof room for profit in those prices, which makes one wonder how much profitEMC makes on its SANs. It must be obscene.

TrueSAN is on its way. An IPO is likely later this year or next, but ithas to happen by 2002 or Isakovich won't achieve his goal of beatingMichael Dell's IPO age record. Dell was 24 when his computer company wentpublic in 1988 and Tom Isakovich is still only 22. I have suits older thanthat.

So there is still plenty of opportunity for smart people to start SiliconValley companies with little or no money down. Big name VCs don't get allthe best deals. Not all successful startups have to target the Internet oreven software, though much of TrueSAN's added value does come in the formof custom software. And no matter what's happening on Wall Street, thereis plenty of opportunity for a kid to grow his company 25-50 percent PERMONTH. Finally, if you aren't impressed enough withIsakovich-the-dropout's success in computers, maybe you'd like to invest inhis other business, a high tech hedge fund - UpFunds.com. Who needs sleep?