FLNR

There are, as many have observed, two American economies. Whereas huge swaths of the country remain hobbled by scarce credit, depressed home prices, and high levels of unemployment, the technology hubs in Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York City are booming. “If you’re where the start-ups are, you’d never think there was a recession,” says Yael Hochberg, an economist who teaches classes on venture capital and entrepreneurship at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. To young people who can write software code, the question of the moment is not whether or not they will be able to find jobs. It is, says Hochberg, “Do you want to raise $200,000 to start a company, or do you want to go work at Groupon?”

As the rest of the country worries about the slow pace of economic recovery, the tech world frets about whether there’s a new start-up bubble. “The global economic meltdown had very little impact on our universe,” says Brad Feld, a Boulder venture capitalist and a co-founder of TechStars. Four years ago, Feld made an angel investment in Zynga, a company that makes online video games for Facebook users. Today, Zynga trades on the Nasdaq and is worth more than $9 billion. Facebook itself is expected to be worth as much as $100 billion when it goes public later this year.