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3

The Hungry Programmers

Max found Tim Spencer's house perched at a summit in the hills separating the suburban sprawl of the San Francisco Peninsula from the quiet, undeveloped towns clinging to the Pacific coast. But "house" was too small a word. It was a villa, six thousand square feet sprawling across a fifty-acre plot overlooking the sleepy coastal town of Half Moon Bay. Max passed through the entranceway columns to the double front doors and entered the cavernous living room, where a curved wall of windows stretched from floor to ceiling.

It was a year after his parole, and Max had come to San Francisco to start over. Tim and some of his friends from Idaho had been renting the house they called "Hungry Manor," the name a reference to their first enterprise when they'd migrated to the Bay Area a year earlier. They'd planned to bootstrap into the Silicon Valley economy by forming a computer consulting business called the Hungry Programmers—will code for food. Instead, the valley quickly metabolized the geeks into full-time employment, and the Hungry Programmers morphed into an unofficial club for Tim's friends from Meridian High and the University of Idaho, two dozen in all. Hungry Manor was the group's party house and home to five of them. Max would be the sixth.

Max walked into Hungry Manor with few belongings but lots of baggage, not least a deep bitterness over his treatment by the justice system. In