Do you have what it takes?

On a shuttle bus transporting the would-be Jeff Bezoses from a satellite parking lot to the center of campus, I sat next to an entrepreneur from Philadelphia who, when asked about his hometown, launched into a good-humored but jaded diatribe about the lack of Internet-savvy there. "You have to sit around explaining an affiliate program to people, and how it is they make money," he said incredulously. "Everyone asks, 'Why would Amazon pay you to sell books for them?'" The local venture capitalists -- while scarce -- are slightly better informed, according to my seatmate, though they are reluctant to invest in a Philadelphia start-up until Silicon Valley venture capitalists give it their stamp of approval by offering to lead the first round of funding. "They'll follow, as long as you find another investor to lead. It's crazy."

At registration, held inside the college's gymnasium, I was handed a name tag bearing the red-and-blue Bootcamp for Startups logo, with the word "Bootcamp" done up in a stenciled, faux-military font. Inside the plastic badge-holder, behind the name tag, was a bright yellow card. At technology trade shows, usually these cards serve as some kind of incentive to get you to stop by a particular company's booth; instinctively, I throw them away.

This one, however, was not a promotion. It was titled "Schmooze Codes," and it explained how to label your name tag so that people you encountered at the conference would be able to instantly see what kind of business you were starting and what stage you were at. (I had never seen this before, and I go to a fair number of conferences.) For example, if you were looking for early-stage "seed" funding and had an Internet portal idea, you would write S-IP in the upper right corner of your badge "in bold block letters about 1/2 inch high." If you were already fully funded and had a semiconductor company (there were not many of these people in attendance), you would write F-HW. One guy's name tag looked like a rack of Scrabble tiles: S-IC IB IS IT IP SW OT, indicating that his business was in seven different industries (including "other"). I decided that either he was incredibly unfocused, or he had the next Microsoft on his hands.

Inside the Knight Auditorium, the conference was already under way. The space felt like an austere New England meeting house, with a U-shaped balcony, tall windows lining the two long walls and a slightly raised stage at the front. The lighting was jarringly inappropriate -- yellow and green beams shone upward against the wall behind the speakers. It gave the stage a "Wizard of Oz" -- as in, "the great and powerful Oz has spoken" -- kind of vibe.

Onstage, Guy Kawasaki, Garage.com's chairman and the former "chief evangelist" at Apple Computer, was introducing the first panel, titled "Basic Training." It started out well. Kawasaki is one of the high-tech world's more engaging presenters, and on this particular morning he was as impish, chipper and energetic as ever.

Introducing Richard Testa, a senior partner at the Boston law firm of Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault (he was the only member of the panel wearing a tie), Kawasaki recounted having lunch with Testa when he was in the middle of starting Garage.com. "I was in a T-shirt and jeans," Kawasaki said, "and Dick was wearing a nice shirt with French cuffs and cuff links -- he looked very important, very powerful." Kawasaki pulled a pair of cuff links out of his pocket and held them up. "I just want to show you that I have cuff links now," he said, to laughter from the audience, "and I'm working on the shirt."

The subtext of that comment seemed to set a fitting tone for the day. In the old economy, it was the well-dressed lawyers with their flashy cuff links and single-needle-stitched shirts who garnered respect and envy in a town like Boston. In the new economy, it's the start-ups that have the power -- of world-changing new ideas, of capital, of incredible growth. Kawasaki, long a cheerleader for this new economy, wants to be its Kevin Bacon (as in the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon"): Entrepreneurs will go through Kawasaki and Garage.com to find deep-pocketed investors, and investors will go through the company to find brilliant entrepreneurs. The cuff link joke seemed to say that Kawasaki and his new company -- which recently opened its first branch office in Boston -- were the new matchmakers, the new power brokers in town, and the start-ups in Garage.com's database were the new center of gravity.

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