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After success, young Internet tycoons try again

Max Levchin is not easily distracted from his work. A few years ago, Mr Le vchin, one of the young princes of Silicon Valley, bought his first home, a 12-room Edwardian, for $3.4 million. But Mr Levchin, who made a fortune at age 27 selling PayPal, the online payment service he helped start in 1998, never moved in. He sold it two years later without having slept there for even one night.

Since then, Mr Levchin has moved into his second home, a more expensive one found for him by Nellie Minkova, his girlfriend of eight years who has become his fiancée. But so consumed is he by work on his second company, an Internet start-up focused on sharing photos and videos, that the cartons that contain what Mr Levchin described as "85 per cent of my worldly possessions" are still stacked in his living room, five months after moving day.

Mr Levchin, 32, is typical of a new generation of junior titans in Silicon Valley who might be called the prematurely rich techies worth tens of millions of dollars, sometimes more, at an age when many others are just starting to figure out what to do with their lives.

The Internet has greatly accelerated the wealth creation phenomenon, producing a larger breed of multimillionaires even younger and richer than in the past.

They are happy to be wealthy, of course, but many of these babyfaced technology tycoons often seem indifferent to the buying power of their money, at least at this stage of their lives.

Instead, nearly all of them have chosen to throw themselves back into a start-up, not so much because they want a spectacular new home or a personal jet though many of them do - but because they are in a competition with themselves and one another.

"For most of us, doing it again means surpassing what we've done previously," said Peter A. Thiel, Mr Levchin's partner at PayPal, who also has started a new business, a hedge fund called Clarium Capital. "And that can be a really high bar."

Even among this jittery group of overachievers, Mr Levchin stands out. In part that is because outdoing PayPal may be an all-butimpossible goal.

Mr Levchin acknowledges that he has already earned more money than he could ever spend. But he said he would not consider Slide.com, the photo and video sharing site he founded in 2005 that is still in its start-up phase, a success unless it is ultimately worth, in real dollars, "at least $1.54 billion"- the price eBay paid for PayPal.

After success, young Internet tycoons try again