The billions of dollars in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's bank account must have inspired so many young technology geeks in the U.S. that they are following the footsteps the Internet mogul took when he was in university.

Like Mr Zuckerberg who spent sleepless nights coding until he perfected the world's most popular social networking site with more than 500 million members and a trillion hits, young American techies are also spending nights and days in front of their PCs in an attempt to beat everyone else to be the next Internet sensation.

New York Magazine described the new Silicon Valley template as: create an app, throw it online to find an audience and improve the quality later. Following that formula could mean rejection or being the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs.

The magazine pointed out that what is happening in Silicon Valley is the opposite in the rest of the U.S. where house prices are beyond the reach of the average American and there is more than enough supply than demand for young, unemployed talents.

The article found it ironic that "while most of the country is in economic darkness, the American Dream is beaming bright in Palo Alto."

"The ongoing cyberspace race between Facebook, Apple, and Google, among others, means computer engineers enjoy more freedom - and power - than ever before. The barriers to entry for web programming are almost nonexistent. Angel investors are blessing start-ups left and right, and launching a software company is cheaper than ever," the magazine observed.

However, before becoming a hit, the techies also sacrifice a lot.

"Pleasure comes with pain. You code for hours, you run the program, it fails, you debug it, run it again, pass out on your keyboard, wake up, code some more."

Some of these young computer experts actually had the opportunity to work with Mr Zuckerberg when they interned at Facebook to rebuild a groups app. Although in awe of the website founder they tested Mr Zuckerberg's debugging ability, and were surprised with the result.

"It took him like two hours to do something that would take one of us who's an engineer like five minutes," NY Mag quoted Ferros Aboukhadijeh, a Stanford student.

Since the tech companies are made up of young minds and workers, the firms approach is very different from traditional corporate set-ups. Facebook holds several times a year 24-hackatons, while Google has a weekly companywide meeting between workers and executives which all kinds of questions are entertained and answered.

Creating the successful YouTube Instant made Mr Aboukhadijeh realize the power in his craft.

"Successful people aren't any different from you and me.... They're not inherently more brilliant. The difference is they had the wisdom to get their hands dirty and be part of the game instead of just observing it," he concluded.

And the game includes accepting failure and the risks of uncertainty which successful Internet icons faced and triumphed over.