It's a Friday morning on Beaver Street in suburban Pittsburgh's poshest ZIP code -- 15143 -- and the Starbucks is abuzz.

It's an eclectic crowd -- suburban mommies with children and grande coffees in tow, lots of hushed conversations, casually dressed couples, some resembling executives, others bohemians, heads together, probably talking shop.

	Online Map: Where you can find tech execs in Sewickley

Could a hot new tech company be in the works?

It's Sewickley, after all, where an evening stroll for ice cream or a quick caramel Macchiato could easily bring a glimpse of Pittsburgh's "technorati" -- some of the region's high-profile tech executives and investors, all within a nearly 10 square-mile area.

Sure, there are other upscale Pittsburgh neighborhoods -- Fox Chapel, Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, Mt. Lebanon. But it's Sewickley, the Pittsburgh region's own modern and real-world Mayberry, a sort of Palo Alto East, that a generous number of tech types call home.

It's where your neighbor could be your start-up's next investor, or the scientist down the street could be your next company's chief technology officer. It's where a cocktail party is a chance to kick back or make a deal and where you can rub elbows with another enterprising tech executive on golf greens at the Allegheny Valley Country Club.

RedZone Robotics Chief Executive Officer Eric Close knew exactly what he was doing when he moved to Sewickley nearly a year ago.

With its generously appointed old-fashioned homes, inviting wood porches, sidewalks made for little bikes and notoriously safe streets, the town no doubt would be the perfect place for his young family to grow.

But it wouldn't hurt to be close enough to hobnob with some of local technology industry's highest fliers.

"It seems to be where a lot of successful folks live,'' Close said, before adding: "But I wouldn't have moved here if we didn't like the area."

Sewickley is so tech-friendly there's even a so-called "e-drive," East Drive, where several current and former tech entrepreneurs have homes.

The only thing is, East Drive technically isn't in Sewickley but in Edgeworth, the adjacent community, raising what some locals say is sometimes a point of contention.

It turns out the phrase, "I live in Sewickley," is often used loosely.

There's Sewickley, known as "The Village," and the contiguous municipalities, Edgeworth and Osborne, which share the Sewickley ZIP code and whose residents often say they live in Sewickley.

But it's Sewickley Heights that carries the most cachet, where stately homes are purchased on plots of land that begin at five acres, and many residents have the trappings of manor life, with horses and very old bank accounts.

Other wealthy, prominent tech community members who live in this four-borough area include former Fore Systems CEO Tom Gill, FreeMarkets founder and former chairman Glen Meakem, former FreeMarkets executive-turned-venture capitalist Dave Becker, former Haley Systems CEO Mark Juliano, Seec Inc. CEO Shane Tulloch and Akustica Inc. chief and Sewickley-native Jim Rock.

And nestled in an office just off Sewickley's Beaver Street is one of the local tech industry' grand poohbahs, Joel Adams, a successful venture capitalist whom entrepreneurs want to know and who many investors want to be. Ironically, while Adams Capital Management is just a few doors down from the Starbucks, Adams lives in Pine.

Sewickley, say insiders, is posh with a punch. The village's main street gives off a distinctly old world quality, with tidy little shops stocked with upscale goods, from Patagonia outerwear to antique chests to single cuts of top-grade meat at the area's answer to Whole Foods, the Select Food Market.

Besides some of the region's best public and private schools, it also boasts the state's only Rolls Royce car dealer, Ascot Imported Cars on Walnut Street, where a string of high-priced Lotus sports vehicles sits in a parking lot beside another very discreet-looking grocery store.

Residents say the selling point is the urbane, New England-town sense of place the village radiates -- it's one of the few suburbs in the area with a real main street and town square that make walking or biking to destinations simple. Plus, for jet-setting tech executives, the 15-minute traffic-free drive to the airport is an added bonus.

Some refuse to describe Sewickley as a tech haven. They say it's really just the stomping ground for former FreeMarkets executives, led by Meakem, who has made his home in the area since the days when FreeMarkets was just another start-up.

The real techies, they say, live in Shadyside and Squirrel Hill -- bedroom communities to all the innovation and research going on at the nearby universities. But tech executives acknowledge that many of their colleagues, once their companies get under way, moved to Sewickley and its environs.

Take tech notables such as Sean Sebastian, a founder and principal at tech-focused private equity firm, Birchmere Ventures, who makes his home in and has great affection for Sewickley.

The North Side-based Birchmere, in fact, is named after the Sewickley Heights estate of his father-in-law, the former Allegheny Technologies chairman Richard Simmons. Birchmere is well-known for its success as an investor in FreeMarkets, a tech success story of the '90s that went on to be bought by California-based Ariba.

Meakem and his wife bought their first house in the Sewickley area in 1998. "How many places can you live in a house where you can actually walk to things?" he said.

In 2002, Meakem decided he would abandon his village digs for a new estate home in Edgeworth, raising the eyebrows of some local townsfolk and historic preservationists.

It's the stuff of a sudsy soap drama -- to the chagrin of the old guard, new-money businessman thumbs his nose at the local establishment by tearing down a pre-Civil War house built by one of the Sewickley Valley's founding families to replace it with something new.

The new home nevertheless is in 18th century Georgian style, and promises to have hints of George Washington's Mt. Vernon estate when it's finished sometime late next year. Meakem said the original home on his new estate, the Thomas Leet Shields house, would have cost too much to renovate.

Still, the townspeople cringed -- and maybe that's what draws Meakem and his tech brethren to flock to Sewickley (pronounced by natives with two syllables, not three.) Unabashed American dream chasing, status climbing, maybe even a little bit of elitism. Hungry business people craving status, pleasuring in their connections, trading up.

Or, it could just mean that tech has grown up.

The gilded, go-go '90s are done, and with it has gone the image of the typical tech type, shaggy haired, jeans-clad 20-something with nothing but raw ambition and time.

If they weathered the dot.bust in 2001, they have something to show for it, not only experience, and a stash of cash and stocks, but more than likely, a wife and kids. Gone are the hard-charging days of pulling all-nighters and cashing in a few months later.

Touting it as a diverse community where there's a culture of acceptance of new ideas, tech residents say Sewickley is far removed from the exclusive elite conclave of weekend and summer homes for wealthy old families.

"It's not a staid old-money community," said one Sewickleyite who declined to be named and counts among her friends several tech executives and investors. "There are staid old money people there, but there's also an amazing number of active professionals who put their pants on and raise their kids like everyone else," she said.

The Quaker Valley school district, she added, has more economically disadvantaged students than Mt. Lebanon.

Indeed it does. Nearly 11 percent of Quaker Valley's students are classified as low-income -- they qualify for free or reduced-rate lunches or come from homes where the income is below the poverty line. In Mt. Lebanon, the figure is 2.2 percent.

It also houses a greater portion of minorities than its South Hills counterpart and is less affluent, too. Sewickley is 88 percent white compared with Mt. Lebanon's 96 percent, and Mt. Lebanon's median household income is $60,783 vs. $38,598 in the village of Sewickley.

Still, the image holds, and a Sewickley address symbolizes a semblance of arrival. As one technology consultant said, "I think people want to be a part of the establishment here."