Almost all the other students in these schools are white and rich, so the ABC students are forced to confront uncomfortable issues of being different at just the point in their lives when teenagers seek comfort in sameness.Despite the challenges, the program claims success. Graduates proceed to science- and math-related careers at a far higher rate than do members of minorities overall.

Probably every industry in the country is staffed with ABC's 9,000 alumni. Singer Tracy Chapman is one, as is William Lewis, a Morgan Stanley managing director, and Francisco Borges, a former treasurer of Connecticut.

One ABC alumnus, ArnoldPrincipal, 28, a stockbroker and financial planner, has been coping with issues of mobility and identity -- or been surrounded by people coping with them on his behalf -- since infancy. That has helped him make it from a crumbling Haiti to an ascendant Wall Street, via Brooklyn, New Canaan High School in Connecticut and Holy Cross in Massachusetts.

And Principal further complicates and enriches his biography by bringing Wall Street to the old neighborhood. His 100-odd clients call him on an `800' number and probably imagine a Park Avenue office suite, but Principal runs Principal Capital Management out of the brick row house that his mother, Myrienne Jasmin, owns in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. That gives him the financial flexibility to chip in toward the repair of a fire-damaged rental property she owns in Crown Heights.

The family was in the vanguard of the great Caribbean migration that transformed so many of Brooklyn's neighborhoods. Arnold Principal is nostalgic for the days when ``you could go to thecorner store without getting shot by a cop'' -- a nearby market, the Milky Way, was the scene of a police shooting last Christmas. But he is probably the least qualified person to judge how safe the streets of his own neighborhood were because he was rarely allowed on them: The Principal children were under strict orders to return home immediately after school.

Principal graduated third in his class from Meyer Levin but was as shy as he was smart. The ABC house in New Canaan helped change that; for participants attending public school, the program establishes dormitories that replicate something of the boarding-school experience.

The personality that emerged from living in two worlds is not the back-slapping bonhomie of so many stock peddlers, but the truly great salesman's trait of genuinely liking people.

Entrepreneurs in residence

IN 1994, Michael Bowles was skulking outside his office at Hughes Electronics in El Segundo, California, whispering on public telephones to potential investors andpleading for financing to start his own cable modem company, writes The New York Times.

``It was pretty discouraging,'' he said. ``None of them knew me, and they had a lot of trepidation about handing over a company to me.''Bowles, 49, finally pieced together the money to move to California's Silicon Valley and start Com21 in Milpitas. In classic Valley style, though, the thrill ended for him the moment the company went public last January. But rather than return to the phone booth, he became one of the high-technology industry's most desired modern commodities: an entrepreneur in residence.

That meant that for six months, Crosspoint Venture Partners in Woodside, California, paid Bowles to scrutinise potential business plans and pick which company he might want to run next--``quite a contrast'' to his situation five years earlier, he said.

``We just sat around and talked about, 'Gee, wouldn't this be a cool business?'' Bowles said. Three months ago, he founded iBeam Broadcasting, an Internet satellitebroadcasting company, with financing from Crossport.Silicon Valley's frantic hunt for the new, cool and profitable has come to rely increasingly on executives like Bowles, who, between jobs, set up shop in venture capital firms and plan their next moves. Several venture capitalists say they regard the arrangement not only as a successful strategy but also as a crucial edge in the scramble for good investments.

The concept isn't new. Since the early 1980s, larger venture capital firms have brought in -- sometimes for as long as two years -- managers they regard as candidates to run a company. The firms introduce these entrepreneurs to potential investors, have them evaluate business plans and draw up their own.Until two years ago, though, competition for such posts was so fierce that they were unpaid. The opportunity alone, said John Mumford, the managing director at Crosspoint, was something entrepreneurs ``would just die to come do.''

But Silicon Valley's arithmetic has shifted the balance of power.Awash in capital, many venture capital firms have more money to invest than can readily be soaked up by new, sure-fire companies. In one measure, Venture Economics, a research firm in Manhattan, said venture capital firms raised $10 billion in 1997; through just the first half of 1998, the firms raised $7 billion.

And in the second quarter, venture capital investments in the Valley alone were $1.24 billion, one-third of all venture funds spent nationally, according to a survey of 721 companies by PricewaterhouseCoopers.As capital has flooded in, the number of start-up deals has so accelerated that venture capital firms have been left begging for people to run the new companies.

Consequently, entrepreneurs in residence have become high,priced chief executives in waiting.