After a 72-hour programming binge, Derek Fugasu and his team of software developers had hit a wall. They had to deliver a working model of a hopelessly botched e-commerce engine in 16 hours, and some team members were beginning to babble.
At 4 a.m., long after the Santa Monica, Calif., bars once favored by upscale Internet workers have locked up, Fugasu dragged himself down the street into the shock-white lighting of an all-night 7-Eleven.
"Gimme all your Red Bull," he said to the clerk, handing over nearly $150 in cash for three cases of the soda. "I need all of it."
Fugasu slammed back a can at the cash register while waiting for change. Back in the office, his team immediately shredded the cases and started guzzling the yellow elixir - a beverage they believe is so packed with caffeine and "other stuff" that they were ready to go another three days straight, no problem.
If Mountain Dew is the drink of geeks and Gatorade the elixir of athletes, then Red Bull has emerged as the beverage of choice for dot-commers fighting for survival.
Hype and Internet rumor have spawned a belief that this pricey Austrian soda of Thai origin is a stimulant more powerful than coffee, more intense than speed, a legalized form of cocaine that draws its strength from a mysterious ingredient - one that fans swear (incorrectly) is testosterone drawn from bull semen.
This is the stuff for staying energized in an economy that is slowly slipping into a coma, a drink so power-packed that it's been banned in high schools and even glows in the dark.
At least that's the buzz.
"When you're under deadline and you have to write several hundred descriptions of products we're selling on the Web site, you need an extra kick," said David Hunter, 36, a producer who used to work for financially troubled Express.com, an online entertainment and electronics shop.
In his office earlier this year, 10 dozen Red Bull cans filled up the windows of his cubicle, providing an aluminum wall of privacy. "I need energy, and I need it now," Hunter said. "I can't slam back a cup of coffee. It'll burn my tongue."
But like a lightly carbonated version of the "new economy" itself, the drink - the first and still most popular of the new energy drinks - is actually more fizz than juice.
The odd thing about this latest high-tech craze is the fact that Red Bull, with 80 milligrams of caffeine per can, doesn't even have the caffeinated punch of a small Starbucks coffee, which can have more than 200 milligrams.
Oh sure, it has a stronger chemical punch than a can of Coca-Cola. But Red Bull's caffeine level falls short of a double scoop of Ben & Jerry's Coffee Heath-Bar Crunch ice cream. There's nearly twice as much in a couple of Excedrin Extra Strength tablets - 130 milligrams - and those will fix a headache at the same time.
As for the vaunted power of its special ingredients - inositol and taurine - researchers dismiss them as just marketing gimmicks.
Taurine, said Martha Stipanuk, professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell University, is a naturally occurring amino acid that is "very common in animal foods, such as meat and eggs, and in the milk of lactating women."
"There is no evidence that humans, even vegans, are lacking in taurine," she said. "It's mainly the caffeine that has the effect."
Red Bull's adherents, however, are too busy fighting for their jobs to consider such scientific sour grapes. Deadlines are approaching. Dot-coms are crashing everywhere. Web programmers are heading back to Kansas in droves and filing for unemployment.
After littering the room with empty Red Bull cans, Fugasu and his re-energized programmers threw themselves back into the task of creating their e-commerce engine - this one destined for a dot-com company that, of course, still hadn't cemented its business model.
As the sun began to rise, a visitor to the office told Fugasu the sobering truth about Red Bull: Coffee has more caffeine.
Facing the prospect of 12 more hours of grueling work fueled only by some watered-down caffeine supplement, Fugasu was at first stunned, then shattered. As the truth sank in, he begged to keep his company anonymous and pleaded: "Don't tell my team."
Red Bull is the brainchild of Austrian entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz, who first tasted the drink in the early 1980s while traveling in Thailand.
In the Far East, the drink is known as Krating Daeng ("red bull" in Thai) and is one of many "health tonics" that are sold in pharmacies and gas stations from Tokyo to Jakarta.
Mateschitz bought the non-Asian rights from the maker, TC Pharmaceuticals, and changed the formula to accommodate Western tastes. His privately held company, Red Bull, launched the drink in Austria in 1987.
The soda began appearing in the United States around 1997, just in time for the dot-com frenzy that turned 80-hour workweeks and all-night programming frenzies into a normal part of high-tech culture.
