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By Root 6860 0

named Trilogy, down in Texas, but he didn’t think he would fit in. “One of Trilogy’s subsidiaries put ads out in the paper saying that they were looking for the top tech students, and that they’d give them two hundred thousand dollars and a BMW,” Myers said, shaking his head in disbelief. In another of his interviews, a recruiter asked him to solve a programming problem, and he made a stupid mistake and the recruiter pushed the answer back across the table to him, saying that his “solution” accomplished nothing. As he remembers the moment, Myers blushes. “I was so nervous. I thought, Hmm, that sucks!” The way he says that, though, makes it hard to believe that he really was nervous, or maybe what Nolan Myers calls nervous the rest of us call a tiny flutter in the stomach. Myers doesn’t seem like the sort to get flustered. He’s the kind of person you would call the night before the big test in seventh grade when nothing made sense and you had begun to panic.

I like Nolan Myers. He will, I am convinced, be very good at whatever career he chooses. I say those two things even though I have spent no more than ninety minutes in his presence. We met only once, on a sunny afternoon just before his graduation at the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square. He was wearing sneakers and khakis and a polo shirt in a dark-green pattern. He had a big backpack, which he plopped on the floor beneath the table. I bought him an orange juice. He fished around in his wallet and came up with a dollar to try to repay me, which I refused. We sat by the window. Previously, we had talked for perhaps three minutes on the phone, setting up the interview. Then I e-mailed him, asking him how I would recognize him at Au Bon Pain. He sent me the following message, with what I’m convinced — again, on the basis of almost no evidence — to be typical Myers panache: “22ish, five foot seven, straight brown hair, very good-looking.:).” I have never talked to his father, his mother, or his little brother, or any of his professors. I have never seen him ecstatic or angry or depressed. I know nothing of his personal habits, his tastes, or his quirks. I cannot even tell you why I feel the way I do about him. He’s good-looking and smart and articulate and funny, but not so good-looking and smart and articulate and funny that there is some obvious explanation for the conclusions I’ve drawn about him. I just like him, and I’m impressed by him, and if I were an employer looking for bright young college graduates, I’d hire him in a heartbeat.

I heard about Nolan Myers from Hadi Partovi, an executive with Tellme, a highly touted Silicon Valley startup offering Internet access through the telephone. If you were a computer-science major at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, or the University of Waterloo this spring, looking for a job in software, Tellme was probably at the top of your list. Partovi and I talked in the conference room at Tellme’s offices, just off the soaring, open floor where all the firm’s programmers and marketers and executives sit, some of them with bunk beds built over their desks. (Tellme recently moved into an old printing plant — a low-slung office building with a huge warehouse attached — and, in accordance with new-economy logic, promptly turned the old offices into a warehouse and the old warehouse into offices.) Partovi is a handsome man of twenty-seven, with olive skin and short curly black hair, and throughout our entire interview he sat with his chair tilted precariously at a forty-five-degree angle. At the end of a long riff about how hard it is to find high-quality people, he blurted out one name: Nolan Myers. Then, from memory, he rattled off Myers’s telephone number. He very much wanted Myers to come to Tellme.

Partovi had met Myers in January of Myers’s senior year, during a recruiting trip to Harvard. “It was a heinous day,” Partovi remembers. “I started at seven and went until nine. I’d walk one person out and walk the other in.” The first fifteen minutes of every interview he spent talking about Tellme — its strategy, its goals, and its business.