SAN FRANCISCO, April 25, 2001 | Only a year ago Silicon Valley, the birthplace of the dot-com, was the place to be for wannabe entrepreneurs and 20-something millionaires.

But during the past few months the world has watched Silicon Valley crash and burn. Even the big guys were hurt: Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Oracle all saw their revenue plunge.

The Internet bubble had burst. Once admired by all, the Valley became the scapegoat for the excesses of the past five years, from dot-com failures to the California energy crisis.

Yet for many here the end of an era is a blessing. Real estate prices are down, the freeways are less jammed, and the "real" entrepreneurs back at work.

Listen to Vivek Ranadive, chief executive of TIBCO Software: "The best time in San Francisco is the fall. The tourists go home, the weather is beautiful. Now it is time for the tourists of Silicon Valley to go home. They never should have been there in the first place."

Byron Deeter of Trigo Technologies, a business software company founded in January 2000 at the height of the gold rush, seconds those sentiments.

"We've been able to renegotiate our rent and some of our vendor contracts," Deeter says. If there is one lesson to be learned from the dot-com fiasco, he asserts, "it's that experience does matter.

"We've seen the end of the 25-year-old CEOs," says the 26-year-old, adding that while he co-founded Trigo, he knew it wouldn't be wise to claim the CEO title.

At the prestigious Stanford University business school, Professor Charles Holloway talks about a reality check for his students and valley businesses.

"We are back to basics and back to reality," Holloway says. "If you define Silicon Valley as the Internet bubble, the bubble has been burst, so you can think that Silicon Valley is going to disappear.

"But if you look at Silicon Valley as a set of companies, suppliers and resources that started 20 years ago and has been building ever since, that infrastructure basically is still here."

And for people like Gaurav Dhillon, chief executive of Informatica, a company recently described by Forbes magazine as a potential "next Microsoft" and "Silicon Valley's latest darling," Silicon Valley remains a great center of innovation.

"There is a difference between building a company and flipping a company," Dhillon says. "In the valley you respect companies that were run by builders, not by people who were looking for short-term gains.

"The builders are back. The flippers came and the flippers went, and that's fine," he says. The last recession created some of the Valley's greatest companies, like Cisco Systems (founded in 1986 in the middle of a blow-up in the PC industry), he points out.

His own forecast? "The valley will recover. Like any center of innovation, the valley is resilient.

"Take the City of London, for example. People commute 20 to 30 miles to sit in London and conduct business on the phone all day. It is a paradox, but there is a natural energy to being in a place where things happened and where some of the finest entrepreneurs live."

At Internet infrastructure company Loudcloud, one of the few firms bold enough to defy the dot.com downturn on Wall Street by going public this year, Ben Horowitz remains optimistic.

"Now is a very good time to build a technology company if you don't blow-up in the process," says Horowitz, Loudcloud's chief executive and co-founder (with Marc Andreessen, the man behind Netscape).

"It is a much better environment ... because you don't have to worry about a zillion competitors all with a ton of cash," he says.