We have a tendency in the world of high technology to equate success almost exclusively with money. We hear stories about the Yahoo executive who bought a country home complete with nine-hole golf course, or the X.com exec who wrecked his (uninsured!) $1 million McLaren F-1 while driving to a meeting with venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, but we rarely hear about these same people's good deeds. There are exceptions, of course, to this focus on materialism. Richard Stahlman's Free Software Foundation never had anything to do with money. Linus Torvalds used to have not much to do with money until Transmeta went public. There are lots of techies toiling away for the love of code, but not many who have had a big success, and then used that success to do some real good in the outside world. Certainly, a badge of success has become endowing university professorships, and overall philanthropy seems to be increasing in the tech community. But we don't hear very often about techies throwing their time and personal energy after their money into these good works. That's what makes Ami Dar so unusual.

Ami was born 39 years ago in Israel, raised in Mexico and Peru, and now lives in New York City. There was a time when he was a paratrooper in the Israeli army, but now Ami is president of Aladdin Knowledge Systems, running U.S. operations for the data security firm that is headquartered in Israel. Aladdin makes software that protects corporations and their data from attack by computer crackers. Aladdin had a role, for example, in ending this week's Anna Kournikova worm attack. Like most tech companies, Aladdin is down from heady stock prices of a year ago, but it is a solid business where institutions and insiders like seem to be buying more shares than they are selling. And Ami, who was sent from Israel to set up the American operation and take the company public, is a big success. But that's not why I know him. In fact, it wasn't until sitting down to write this story that I even knew what Ami did for a living. I just knew him as the head of Idealist.org.

I met Ami Dar several years ago when he and 28 other people each gave WNET-TV in New York $1,000 in exchange for my taking them to lunch. I spent two weeks in the Big Apple doing breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with an odd assortment of mad scientists and would-be entrepreneurs. In one sense, it might have been better for me to have just written a big check to WNET, but then I wouldn't have met so many interesting people. And almost to a person, those 29 New Yorkers were looking for money. From the Hudson River tugboat captain who wanted Larry Ellison to buy him a $31 million sailing ship to the pair of sisters in their late seventies who wanted help funding their Broadway musical, nearly everyone thought I could help them get rich. The exception was Ami Dar, who wanted only to talk about Idealist.org.

I learned the night I met him that Idealist.org rose from Ami's concern that it was too hard for people in real need to find not-for-profit services that met their specific requirements. There were thousands of non-profits already on the World Wide Web back in 1995, but no way for a poor woman sitting at a PC in some public library in central Kentucky to learn which of those organizations could offer family planning services to her. So Idealist.org was launched in the summer of 1996 as a kind of non-profit portal, a search engine for charitable services. The system evolved further when it became clear that most non-profits weren't on the World Wide Web, so Idealist.org expanded to offer a web presence to those organizations, too. Later, when it became clear that Idealist.org was becoming a communication channel supporting the non-profit and charitable world, the system was expanded to support recruiting of both employees and volunteers for participating non-profits. If you want to volunteer some time, Idealist.org will help you find someplace to do good. Volunteer opportunities range from being a nurse at the Community Eye Hospital in Bangladesh to a 4-H club leader in Newark, New Jersey. If your kid is looking for an internship, Idealist.org has listings for 1,127 of them.

Today, Idealist.org supports more than 20,000 service organizations in 152 countries. The system averages 250,000 page views per week. All services are free except for U.S. nonprofits, which pay $20 to $40 to submit job postings. Foreign job postings are free, as are all postings for volunteer positions (there are right now 4,374 of those). New features on the drawing board are support for languages other than English, and support for chat or discussion groups.

Idealist.org is a big success, using the Internet for what it does best, bringing together people with common interests who could never meet another way. Lives are saved and enriched because of this outfit. "If Ami chose to make Idealist.org a private company, venture capitalists would beat a pathto his door," said Rob Stuart, who runs the Technology Project for the Rockefeller Family Fund. "Idealist.org has everything most dot-coms lack — quality content, a committed audience, a 'best in breed' reputation and talented staff. Fortunately for all of us, Ami has chosen to organize idealist as a dot.org."

This would still be an inspiring story if all Ami Dar did was make some office space and bandwidth available to help a good cause, but he does much more than that. Among his many jobs is providing first-level support for the Idealist.org Web site. If you have a problem using the site, the first thing to do is e-mail ami@idealist.org. I doubt that many of the people who do ask for help realize they are contacting a Silicon Alley tycoon. Imagine asking Larry Ellison for help with Oracle 11.

Having known Ami, I find myself wondering — why I don't do more for my community? I give some money, sure, but I haven't given much of myself, not the way Ami Dar does every day. What's wrong with me? What's wrong with any of us? "People everywhere underestimate their power," says Ami. "They have more than they think,"

Maybe it's time to reset some personal priorities. I know it's that time for me.