"Some potential investors encouraged him to head back to the Valley and tee up again. But one day, as he was looking out the window of his spacious three-bedroom house, Flowers had an epiphany: He could launch his company right there in Overland Park. The reason? Sprint had totally wired the town. "What I needed for this company was lots of bandwidth," he says. "And we were sitting on a sea of fiber." For the cost of two 1.5-megabits-per-second T-1 connections in San Francisco, Flowers bought 10 times as much bandwidth and started building his startup, called Kozoru. It doesn't hurt that the cost of living in Overland Park (population 149,000) is about half what it is in Silicon Valley. "I went through $13 million in venture funding with nCircle in 18 months," says Flowers, 34. "Here I have $3 million in funding, and it's going to last a lot longer than that." Flowers says Kozoru, now with 14 employees, expects to have its product completed by mid-2005."