The billion dollar brains who keep our digital identities in touch

You’re in your 20s and you’ve built a successful internet business out of your coding skills, drive and imagination.

Someone is so impressed they offer to buy it from you for a mind boggling $1 billion, a sum way beyond the wildest dreams of most mortals.

At a stroke you could live in luxury for the rest of your life, provide for your children’s every need and still donate vast sums to worthy causes.

What would you do?

If you were Mark Zuckerberg and the business was Facebook, you’d say no.

Such extreme decisions fill the pages of a brilliant behind-the-scenes look at Silicon Valley businesses by the famous tech journalist Sarah Lacy.

The Facebook Story is a guide to the start-ups, the founders and the egos behind the innovative social networks and online communities that have fundamentally changed the way people communicate.

It’s Geekville alright with tales of all-night coding sessions, dressed down business meetings and bottom-up applications that supplanted the original web establishment.

Lacy, who writes for Business Week, TechCrunch and Yahoo! Finance, spent 18 months researching the book and interviewing such pioneers as Max Levchin and Marc Andreessen as well as Zuckerberg.

It has taken a tenacious journalist to get the visionaries, executives and venture capitalists to open up on how the Valley community turned pipe dreams into megabucks reality.

The result is a compelling book full of great insight and very human anecdotes.

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