At first glance, Sonoma seems like a quirky town, a tourist magnet in the heart of Northern California’s stunningly beautiful wine country 45 miles north of San Francisco.

You can stop in at a diner surrounded by vineyards and overshadowed by emerald-green ridges and get a grilled chicken sandwich with sloppy special sauce and vegetables that will be featured on the Food Network show Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. But entrepreneurs in this town of 9,000—and anecdotally at least, they seem to be everywhere--may be onto something. You don’t have to be situated in a big city to have global ambitions.

Take Vode Lighting.

Housed in a metal building about a mile away from Sonoma’s movie set of a town square, Vode looks like one of those businesses that could be anywhere. And that’s kind of the point.

Tom Warton, George Mieling, and Scott Yu started Vode in 2005 to provide unique lighting solutions to businesses and public buildings—targeted to architects. “What we do is make an architectural modular lighting system using energy-efficient light sources. We call it a kind of lighting Lego set for designers,” Warton says.

That meant that from the beginning, its markets were far beyond the small town where they chose to locate. And despite the recession, business has taken off.

“We went black in the first 12 months,” says Warton, the company’s president. Vode will be “well into” $5 million to $10 million in revenue this year.

And it’s based on a business model thoroughly rooted in the global economy. Its headquarters in Sonoma houses lighting components, which are shipped to projects all over the world. Vode has had customers throughout the United States and has supplied lighting to the Harley-Davidson Museum and to clients in Saudi Arabia. Design work is done in Sonoma, while manufacturing takes place in China at a factory run by an American citizen.

Even Vode’s principals are international in nature. Warton, a native of Marin County, moved to Sonoma 18 years ago because he couldn’t afford a house in pricey San Francisco. He convinced his cousin, Meiling, an Austrian who had been living in Boston running a company, to move to Sonoma. Yu is from Taiwan and speaks fluent Cantonese and Mandarin. A friend of Warton’s, Yu convinced Warton they should start their own industrial-lighting company.

So there are practical reasons for Vode’s location. But there are other reasons this small town is going global. You can see it on a rainy day at the Basque Café, one of several eateries surrounding Sonoma’s town square that draws the business crowd of Sonoma the way the Times Diner draws New York’s movers and shakers.

That’s where, on a rainy Tuesday in early spring, Chip Roberson begins his day with a group of fellow entrepreneurs and creative types, including a pair of Hollywood screenwriters, Kathi Gori and Alan Bergman. Migrate across the square and the former mayor, Ken Brown, a bearded and longhaired man wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the slogan "Sonoma Punk Rock" stops by to chat during a business meeting at the El Dorado Kitchen.

You can have a dinner with a group of local businesspeople at a restaurant laid-back enough to let Roberson bring a magnum of a locally grown, only in Sonoma, Cabernet Sauvignon.

Technology and new business models have made it possible to go global from a small town. And that is bringing with it a revolution in both business and living, making a town like Sonoma as attractive to business in its way as San Francisco, New York, or Chicago.

“I can find the best global talent, and it might be some guy sitting in his home or he might be in a small consulting practice,” says Christine Mason McCaull, Roberson’s business partner. “But I’m just really excited about what it means for the full human to go back to a living and a life that works.”