Jared Kim has just finished lunch at a Thai place in San Francisco's dotcom district. The check paid, he steps out onto the sidewalk of busy Brannan Street, pauses, and says, "I just hope there's no 9/11 in the next week." Kim has been promised a first round of funding for his latest startup, WeGame.com, a sort of YouTube for videogamers (see slideshow). Everybody's giving him a thumbs-up, and the papers are supposed to be signed within a week, but Kim is nervous anyway. A major terrorist attack killing thousands of innocent people could scuttle the deal.

Only someone with a teenage mind-set could personalize fears of a mass tragedy with such an offhand, casual form of solipsism. Kim is 19, an age when narrow self-absorption is tolerated (barely). Moreover, terrorism aside, he has little reason to worry about funding. If anything, it's easier than ever to find money for a startup, particularly one like his—a small, Web-based company with relatively low launch costs. Despite the credit crunch on the East Coast, there's plenty of money sloshing around Silicon Valley these days. Venture capital firms have more than they can invest: About $20 billion was raised in the first nine months of 2007. And while the vetting process remains intact for companies seeking significant backing, investors are also making lots of low-stakes bets on small companies without performing the same sort of intense due diligence. In January, Bay Partners created a $300 million fund, its 11th, a slice of which is set aside for 20 to 30 investments of up to $250,000 each.

That doesn't sound like much, but the ever-decreasing cost of computing power, bandwidth, and servers means that new companies—especially those based on the Web—don't require as much capital. "The same website that cost $5 million in 1995 to scale up to peak costs $250,000 today," says David Siminoff, a general partner at the Menlo Park, California, venture capital firm Venrock Associates. Because of these factors, Silicon Valley has hundreds of new companies, with names like Meebo, Hive7, and Eurekster, plus a universe of startups still in the development stage, like Kim's WeGame.

Plenty of them are helmed by post-adolescents. Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith were both 19 when they started a company as college students—at schools 2,500 miles apart. They communicated between the University of Southern California and Duke University via instant messaging. Their business, Box.net, allows computer users to store and share files and manage them remotely. Levie, now 22, says it's hard to imagine a company like theirs being launched during the first dotcom boom, especially from a dorm room. They'd have had to rent space and fill it with powerful servers. Instead, they rented servers over the internet.

"In terms of getting off the ground, our costs were reduced to next to nothing," Levie says. "We didn't need office space until year two." (Like most of these ventures, Box.net still isn't profitable.) Another entrepreneur, Arjun Mehta, recently got venture capital funding for his Santa Clara-based startup, PlaySpan, a marketplace for buying and selling virtual goods from online role-playing games like Urbaniacs. Mehta is in the sixth grade.