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Liemandt himself adds to the company's attraction. One of the youngest members of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, he remains a surprisingly down-to-earth guy -- in Daniel's words, "the most unassuming $600 million man you'll ever meet." A baby-faced bachelor, he wears jeans and tennis shoes to work, lives in an apartment without a TV, drives a Saturn, dines at Wendy's, and gets his hair trimmed at Supercuts. In many ways, he's a regular Joe. Yet he's also accomplished what many of the hotshots drawn to Trilogy only dream of doing: He has taken a great idea and turned it into a successful company.

In 1990, a few months shy of graduation, Liemandt dropped out of Stanford to start Trilogy. He and a handful of classmates vowed that they would build a "configurator" that could handle ordering processes for big manufacturers. The configurator would catalog an inventory of parts for, say, a computer or an airplane; then, when someone placed an order, the software would instantly configure the product according to the specifications in that order.

But before Liemandt and his four cofounders could build a big company, they had to build one heck of a configurator. So what if far-more-experienced developers had already spent years trying to build one? Like today's TUers, the company's founders were supremely confident of their ability.

Those early days are now the stuff of legend. Liemandt says that his efforts didn't feel particularly fateful at the time. "It was clueless central," he says. "We built stupid products that didn't work." He and his friends shared a computer, cranked code around the clock, and argued with one another. Eventually they got it right. And Trilogy has emerged as a flagship company of the new economy -- a business success whose story has been featured in the pages of Rolling Stone.

That just-do-it-now spirit still marks life at the company -- and gives Trilogy a recruiting edge against its more established rivals. "You don't have to sit around here earning tenure before you can see a customer," says Daniel. "One of our TUers, a guy from Harvard, is already working on accounts in France. I go out and tell my recruits, 'A kid your age was here for a month and a half, and now he's in Paris. That's Trilogy.' "

Smart, Talented, Interesting, Cool

The entrance to Trilogy University is home to the class photo gallery. The walls by the elevator are plastered with snapshots taken at the picnic on the first day of school, at the softball game between TUers and Trilogians that took place on Liemandt's 30th birthday, during the boat ride to a Tex-Mex restaurant that Trilogy rented out, and during a trip to Vegas that the class recently took. "People ask me, 'How can you hang out all the time with the same people you work with?' " says Joshua Walsky, 22, a Cornell University graduate. "I tell them, 'Well, Trilogy hires people who are smart, talented, interesting, and cool. Those are exactly the sort of people I want to be around.' "

On a small sign posted in the facility, someone has written TU's business hours: 8 a.m. to midnight, Monday through Saturday, and noon to 8 p.m., Sunday. TU has more than its share of inside jokes, but that isn't one of them.

Located in an office building off Capital of Texas Highway in northwest Austin, TU sits just down the hill from company headquarters (which Trilogians call "uptown"). Like many office complexes, the building is divided into sections. But TU is no ordinary office. As in a computer lab, software manuals and compact discs are scattered among IBM ThinkPads. And as in a dorm, each section's space is decorated with bizarre mementos. "The sections are like social units," says Danielle Rios, 28, a section leader. "You bond and learn about Trilogy culture -- how we operate, how we talk, how we party, how we work."

TU is harder than any college course. Indeed, TUers claim that going through it is like cramming a year of college into three months. "At college, you're taking sips from the fountain of knowledge," says Jamie Sidey, 23, one of 26 recruits from the University of Pennsylvania. "Here it comes so fast, it's like a fire hose." Sidey is all but drowning in new ideas and information -- and he loves it. "I had this epiphany recently. A bunch of us were sitting around, and I realized, 'I'm in a room with 14 of the smartest people I've ever met, and we're having this high-level discussion, and none of us thinks it's anything out of the ordinary. This is great!' "

TUers wear what they want, and they set their own hours. They eat catered lunches and dinners in the TU conference room, and they snack out in the TU kitchen, which contains an endless supply of Power Bars, frozen entrees, cereal, and soda. On Friday afternoon, Trilogy throws its own weekly happy hour, called Party on the Patio, or POP.