Loser Chic In the new economy, losers are winners and failures are fawned over (well, sometimes). Is business failure the new cool?

It began in high-tech. Twenty- and thirtysomethings startingtheir own companies and making millions. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs,Peter Norton, to name just a few. Silicon Valley of the 1980s waslike the California gold rush of the late 1840s. Anyone who couldwrite a few lines of code or put together a computer in the garagetried his luck.

But like the gold rush, while a few struck it rich, the vastmajority went bust. "For all the great success stories to comeout of Silicon Valley, it has spawned many, many morefailures," says David Needle, a columnist for Techweekmagazine who has covered the high-tech industry since 1981.

Even in failure, however, all that entrepreneurial effortdidn't go to waste. It engendered an attitude that has spreadthroughout the rest of the country: If you're going to take theentrepreneurial plunge, do it while you're young. Success ismore glorious, and failure, if it happens, holds less sting.