You'd think it would be every nerdy country boy's dream. Kord Campbell, a 38-year-old coder from Oklahoma, started a search engine company called Grub back in the day and sold it in early 2003 to a San Francisco-based dotcom called LookSmart for $1.3 million. Suddenly he had money, and he was moving to the very cradle of geekness, the holy shrine of tech, Silicon Valley. "It was like going to the mothership," Campbell says. "You could run into someone in the grocery store and discuss how to install Linux on a PC." Thrill though that must have been for a techie like Campbell, the Valley wound up not quite living up to expectations. Microsoft dumped Look-Smart as a partner, wiping out 70 percent of the dotcom's revenue. And there was the sticker shock "I lived in a 532-square-foot apartment, and the rent was more than my mortgage in Oklahoma," he recalls. In December 2003 he cashed out and headed back to Tornado Alley, wondering whether he'd ever have the same opportunities again.
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