(FORTUNE Magazine) – VINOD KHOSLA often leaves people speechless when he says he retired at 30 to spend more time with his wife. Emigrating from India at 21, he received an MBA from Stanford University at the age of 25, and at 27 became the co-founder and chief executive of Sun Microsystems. It turned out to be one of the fastest- growing companies in the U.S. But Khosla, now 33, just walked off. ''My goal was to get the hard work out of the way so I could relax and do other things,'' he says. Though he still rises at 6 A.M., he now spends the early morning hours puttering in his three-acre orchard and playing with his sheep dogs. Then he has tea with his wife, who is expecting their first child in May. Finally it's off to his office at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the San Francisco venture capital firm that backed Sun Microsystems. ''For fun, I do venture capital in high technology. Incubating five of the FORTUNE 500 is my goal at present,'' Khosla says. ''But I reserve the right without cause, reason, or explanation to change it to breeding five prize roses or being the first person to raise saltwater fish in captivity.'' Khosla is an extreme example of an emerging phenomenon on the U.S. corporate scene: Call these people the new independents. What chiefly distinguishes them is that they don't want to be part of a large industrial corporation, not even one of their own creation. Graduates of the best business schools, they have often seen big companies up close, as consultants, investment bankers, even as employees. They don't like what they saw. So they have started their own businesses, not, like the traditional entrepreneur, because of a passionate commitment to a new product. But because they wanted to achieve independence unencumbered by too many ties to others. Says Ted Gioia, 30, who left McKinsey & Co. last summer to start his own jazz record company: ''Like everyone, I would prefer to have a career that could adapt to my every whim. I founded my own company to have that < flexibility.'' Khosla echoes the theme: ''I would like it said that I always did what I wanted. That I didn't waste my time doing things other people felt I should to meet some set of objectives or to reach status in their eyes. I have achieved freedom.'' How admirable -- and how troubling. FORTUNE interviewed some 18 of the new independents. All met certain criteria: They are between 30 and 40 years old and graduated from five to 15 years ago from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or the University of Chicago business school, where they typically did well. Their records prove them to be creative, talented, and hard working. They are, in short, precisely the sort of people you would expect to find rising to leadership in America's big corporations. A generation ago such people might have gone to work for FORTUNE 500 companies straight out of business school and risen through the ranks. Fifteen years ago they might have joined consulting firms and then stayed on to become senior partners or left to join the executive ranks of some big corporate client. Today they may still go to work for a big company or a consulting outfit, but they soon leave, convinced that corporate America only gets in their way. Edward Hirschland, 39, a 1978 graduate of the University of Chicago business school, exemplifies the trend. He quit his job at Quaker Oats in 1986 after overhauling its Brazilian fish-processing subsidiary, bringing the sub from a loss of $3 million to a $15 million profit. Hirschland wanted to see more of that profit swing in his paycheck. He left Quaker Oats to set up two consulting companies because ''I wanted to get closer to the money. Now I have a chance to make as much as the chairman of a big food company.'' A 34-year- old money manager who now runs his own firm on the West Coast tells much the same story: ''I was making several million net for my company, and they were paying me 5% of it, $110,000. I was overcontrolled and underpaid.'' Big money is a lure, but more for the independence it can buy than for any other reason. Most of the people FORTUNE talked with have already become millionaires, and about half want to push on to a net worth in the tens of millions. It wasn't just the money, though, that rankled in their days with large companies. Most felt that they were not being promoted fast enough, or at least not as fast as their contributions warranted. William Bromley, 37, who left Industrial Valley Bank & Trust Co. in Philadelphia to open First Sterling, a commercial bank in the suburbs, says, ''I figured that by 40 or 50 I'd be advanced to senior management. I'm too impatient for that.'' The independents also complain that their ideas were ground up in the mill of consensus management, thus depriving them of a chance to see how good those ideas were. Craig Harding, 39, founder of the Harding Group, a leveraged- buyout firm in New York City, left General Electric because ''in a big company, you don't have a chance to test your limits, you don't have an opportunity to fail.'' Adds Peter Orr, 40, who left J.R. Norton, a food company, to start his own strawberry-growing concern, Pacific Gold Farms: ''You make a decision and you know your boss is going to review it, so you ape the boss's thinking. Or you decide this is the one you are going to tackle him on. It's a big drain on energy. I love avoiding all that.'' The forces making for discontent tend to be cumulative: The money's lousy, the promotions are slow, so what's the incentive to work long hours for people who don't value what you've got to offer? ''I didn't want to get in the corporate rat race,'' says Khosla, ''and rely on a $200,000-a-year paycheck. Most MBAs will work hard, 20 hours a day, and do the investment banker and consulting routine for social status and advancement, not creative thinking. I wanted to have fun and use my brains.'' The new breed adamantly resists the notion of putting in time just to put in time. One, a New England money manager, turned down a job offer from a New York investment bank because he was unwilling to work 70 hours a week. ''My outstanding skills are that I'm bright, and also very quick,'' he says. ''In eight hours, my quickness gives me the edge. In 14 hours some plodder can catch up. I don't want to stay late because some partner wants something done. I just can't stand that; it would have made my life crazy. I want predictability.'' The independents also dislike a lot of the give and take with others at work and the office politics. John Patience, 40, a director at McKinsey & Co. who left to found a venture capital firm in Deerfield, Illinois, describes the frustrations he felt: ''I spent too much of my time managing my partners' egos. Being Australian, I'm blunt. I'd say, 'Look, this client doesn't buy your act. Why don't you switch to something else?' A lot of my partners' egos were too fragile for that.'' The irony is that until their own ventures are on solid footing, these folks often work longer and harder than they did at big companies. Indeed, for some of them, burnout is a threat. That would not deter the stereotypical entrepreneur, but it does some of the independents, particularly if the effort entails managing others. CONSIDER the short, not altogether happy entrepreneurial career of Norman Goldfarb, 34, a co-founder and former chief executive of Calgene Inc., a pioneer plant biotechnology company. Goldfarb received his MBA from Stanford when he was 24 and was working for an electronics company in Silicon Valley when he read an article about the green revolution. The piece encouraged him to team up with Raymond Valentine, a microbiologist at the University of California at Davis to start Calgene in 1980. ''I liked having control of my destiny,'' Goldfarb says, ''but not of others'. You can't tell your employees of your worries. Five times we didn't have the payroll Thursday for Friday. I couldn't discuss that with anyone. It's lonely at the top. If some glass washer leaves a spot on a piece of glassware and an experiment fails, who is working for whom? I wasn't independent. I was working for the glass washer just as much as he was working for me.'' Getting married in the first year of the startup prompted Goldfarb to groom a successor. ''I accepted that my wife, a Ph.D. candidate in molecular biology, would finish her doctorate at some point and leave the area for another university. When she did, I went with her.'' Goldfarb resigned as CEO in 1985, six months before Calgene went public. He has sold some of his 600,000 shares in the company and put the proceeds into a venture capital firm. Says he: ''I don't have to show up at work at 8 A.M. to set an example for everyone else. I could take the whole year off if I wanted.'' The new independents approach their ventures in other ways that distinguish them from conventional entrepreneurs. Not for them falling in love with a product or an idea. They come at a new business more as an intellectual exercise, of the sort they learned in business school. The challenge: Spot a market niche. In selling to that niche, they then use all the skills they have picked up along the way. ''They're smart,'' says Harvard business school professor Howard Stevenson, who has taught an ever increasing number of students in his popular classes on entrepreneurial management. ''They've learnt about a business on somebody else's nickel, and they have accumulated a substantial equity on their old job so that when they leave, they can buy control of their own business.'' Daniel Rubin, 34, co-founder of Venture West Group, an investment and real estate development company in Tucson, found his market opportunity on the Boston Consulting Group's nickel. Rubin knew, even as a business school student at Harvard, that he wanted to have his own show, just like his father, but he didn't know in what industry. Graduating as a Baker Scholar in the top 5% of the class of 1977, he went to work for BCG. A client of the firm asked him to research some fast-growing cities as potential spots for investment. After spending six months flying around the country visiting 50 cities, Rubin recommended that the client pick Tucson, which was growing at 4% to 5% a year. ''I saw enormous potential in Tucson for any number of industries, but a friend steered me into real estate,'' he says. ''I realized very quickly that no company was going to pay me anywhere near enough to buy multimillion-dollar properties and businesses.'' So he quit his job in Boston and moved to the Arizona city in 1980. With another Harvard MBA, he rented half an office and set himself to studying the real estate business. ''I knocked on doors and learned the business deal by deal,'' he says. ''It was very hard and very slow.'' He and his partner quietly began buying parcels in the decaying downtown area, dubbed ''Wino Wonderland'' by a local paper. Land was cheap. In partnership with Saul Steinberg's Reliance Development Group Inc., the partners built a 23- story office tower, the tallest in Tucson, that is ultimately to be part of a $150 million complex. Venture West now has a staff of ten, owns apartment houses, shopping center developments, and land in Arizona, California, and Colorado, and runs securities portfolios for private clients. Altogether, Rubin and his partner manage $100 million in assets. ''To pass the first million in net worth was a big deal,'' says Rubin, who says he is a multimillionaire. ''After that, I didn't think about it. I like being able to set my own hours. I love to relax on the beach and play tennis -- to me that's as important as work. When I give it up, I feel cheated. Also, I think we come up with some of our best business ideas in off-hours.'' ROBIN ROSE, 36, wasn't scouting a market niche when she started her company, Robin Rose Ice Cream & Chocolate. She had had a falling-out with her boss, Ernest Gallo, and quit. Rose graduated from the University of Chicago in 1974 with an MBA in finance, and was hired by the E.&J. Gallo Winery to be an assistant brand manager for Ripple, one of the first pop wines. She quickly earned one promotion after another. But then Gallo recalled her to company headquarters in Modesto, California, about 300 miles north of her home in Los Angeles. Rose refused to move. Gallo offered to pay for an apartment in Modesto so she could spend weekends at her Marina del Rey condo, but she dug in her heels. ''I wanted what I wanted,'' she says. ''I like the Gary Cooper way. I'll do it on my own terms or I won't do it at all. I am very stubborn.'' She was also tiring of life in a big company: ''The politics were obnoxious. Some of the other marketing men would steal my ideas, and I spent too much time looking over my shoulder to see who was going to plunge a knife in my back. It's very hard to give your heart and soul to the hodgepodge that comes to market because the boss had pillow talk with his wife and decided to change the colors of the package or met someone in Europe who changed the price strategy.'' As a marketer, Rose had been watching the growing demand for designer chocolate candy in Los Angeles. She concluded from her experience in the wine business that what that corner of the world needed was a spectacular liqueur- flavored truffle. Raising $250,000 from family and friends, she leased and renovated a bakery in Venice. Unfortunately, the factory was much too close to the beach and half the chocolate she had bought bloomed, or discolored, in the humidity, inspiring her to grind it up into ice cream to disguise the change. ''Was I Alice in Wonderland!'' she admits now. ''I was so inexperienced.'' Further experimentation with the batch led Rose into the gourmet ice cream business with Raspberry Chocolate Truffle, which turned out to be her best- selling flavor. Once they have amassed enough capital to keep their businesses going, the independents seem to set money down a peg or two on their list of priorities. Says Jim Koch, 38, who left a $250,000 job with the Boston Consulting Group in 1985 to found the Boston Beer Co.: ''To me getting rich is life's great booby prize. My salary is $40,000, but when I get up in the morning, I decide what I'm going to do.'' He started his company because his wife said she would leave him if he didn't quit consulting and spend more time at home. ''We had ^ two little kids,'' Koch says, ''and my wife was probably right. I was frequently traveling Monday through Thursday and I wasn't home enough.'' No one would recommend launching a new business as a way to retrieve a failing marriage, but Koch, whose family had been in the brewing business for five generations -- they owned some small regional breweries -- began to see a way to compete with imported beers. As he watched their popularity grow, he spotted an opening at the expensive end of the market and began to draw up plans for a brewery of his own. His ploy: freshness. To his mind, imported beer, coming all that way, was stale. His lager, locally brewed, would be fresh. He expected to brew a minuscule 800 barrels his first year and be home often enough to save his marriage. He proved right about the market but wrong on the marriage: The week he shipped his first barrel, he and his wife separated. He sold 6,800 barrels his first year; this year Koch expects to ship 50,000 barrels, worth about $10 million, as much as Anheuser-Busch produces in an hour and ten minutes. His Samuel Adams label is rated the best beer in the country by the Great American Beer Festival, an annual beer-tasting competition of American brewers. Koch has decided to defer remarriage to coddle his business. Two or three nights a week he dines out at local bars to chat with his customers. In fact, just about every waking hour goes into the business, he says, except the one night a week and every other weekend that he sees his children. ''My mission is to prove to the American beer drinker that American beer is as good as any in the world. That's worth every hour I can give to it. That's personal gratification.'' He is atypical of the group not only because he is devoted to his product but because he sacrificed his marriage to his business. Most of the new independents have the Ozzie-and-Harriet values you would expect of people who grew up on TV sitcoms. Wives stay at home and raise the children, or maybe work for their husbands. ''I'd give up everything before I said goodbye to my marriage,'' says Khosla, echoing the standard view. Many were drawn to running their own business to free up their time for their families, and they fear divorce far more than any other kind of failure. Their spouses do end up making sacrifices, however. One wife, a schoolteacher, quit her job to work in her husband's investment company as office manager. She didn't need the income -- they are worth some $5 million - -- but did it to have more in common with her husband. ''There aren't enough hours in the day to catch her up on the emotional ups and downs,'' he says. ''This way she's part of the loop and doesn't feel left out.'' Robert Cohn, the co-founder of Octel Communications Corp., a Milpitas, California, maker of voice-processing systems, asked his wife, Martha, to be the office manager during the first 18 months of startup. She put aside the book she was writing, but he believes having her in the office strengthened their marriage. ''We worked easily 100 hours a week then,'' Cohn recalls. ''We'd come home too numb to cook or even eat. We had no feeling in our skin. But we got to see each other in ways most spouses never do, and it gave us even more respect for each other.'' Says Martha, who has since finished her book: ''I didn't mind. I wanted to be part of the adventure.'' Cohn has scaled back to 60 hours a week. He tries to spend weekends with his family -- the Cohns have two children -- because he considers them ''my first priority in life.'' LIKE OTHERS of their age, the new independents are obsessed with the idea of striking the right balance between family life and business (see Executive Life). About a year ago Peter Orr came to the conclusion that ''I was a workaholic. I was doing a lousy job with the family.'' A Baker Scholar from Harvard, he had worked for a decade running a $50 million division of J.R. Norton in Salinas, California. In order to have more time with his wife and children, Orr quit and, with a strawberry farmer as his partner, rounded up enough venture capital to form Pacific Gold Farms. It now produces 2% of the U.S. fresh strawberry crop. Orr's business is seasonal: In spring and summer, he works 12 hours a day, but winter is slow. Says he: ''My girls are 8 and 9, and they want to be with Mom and Dad. In a few years they'll check out. I'm doing a better job as a father now.'' Orr worries, though, about the stress his career change has put on his marriage. ''I gave up a big company car, a super medical plan, a big salary, lots of stuff. And I still go to work every day,'' he says. ''Who am I impacting? My wife. In a sense, you can say what I'm doing is pretty selfish. But I think we're going to make it. We had a profit our first year.'' For all their concern with family, there's little evidence that male independents devote any more time to their children than do men with traditional jobs and less flexible hours. Daniel Rubin says proudly, ''I spend a lot of time taking care of our baby. I often take her for several hours on Saturday or Sunday to give my wife a break.'' William Sullivan, 40, the founder of the Seaboard Investment Corp., a venture capital firm in Atlanta, is firm about his priorities: ''I'll change diapers but I won't drive the kids to the pediatrician.'' Faced with a choice between family and business, he says, ''My wife knows not to ask me to make large compromises while I'm building the business.'' But what happens when Mom is the entrepreneur? ''The only way I'd have time to have kids,'' says Robin Rose, ''is to have twins.'' She married Roy Rose, who showed up one night in 1982 for their first date just as she discovered that the code date on a batch of cream was expiring. Roy promptly stripped down to his undershorts and spent the next seven hours helping her make ice cream. ''I can't figure out how to have children,'' Robin says. ''This is a very hands-on time in the business, and a housekeeper or a grandma or my employees would have to bring up the babies.'' Most of the independents live in large homes -- some in bedroom communities, others in rural areas -- and all have privacy. A few affect Mercedes, others drive Hondas; but few fly first class even when they can afford it. They don't think of themselves as materialistic and say they enjoy comfort but not ostentation. Says Craig Harding: ''I don't need 20 bedrooms. All you do is chase the dust mice.'' In their spare time they entertain their friends, tend to their families, and travel. They fret about societal ills such as the growing gap between rich and poor, but don't do much about such problems. ''My wife's and my response has been to insulate ourselves, I guess,'' says one, who worries there might be a class war in the making if the gap widens. ''The best thing I can do to help is run a good shop myself. We have profit sharing, and that's my contribution. I am not an activist politically.'' NOT ONLY are most of the group apolitical, they use the excuse of not having enough time to escape doing much for their communities. Only a few sit on boards of cultural or charitable institutions in their hometowns. John Patience is on the board of his youngest child's nursery school and coaches his older son's hockey team, but he stands out as an exception. Norman Goldfarb and Vinod Khosla, whose businesses have made them wealthy men, engage in private philanthropy. Goldfarb and his wife send California high school teachers on three-week exchanges with schools in England, Norway, and the Netherlands. ''I'm doing this because the education system is so poor,'' he says. ''We hope this will broaden and sharpen teachers.'' Moreover, Goldfarb thinks he's onto a trend: ''Philanthropy will be the BMW of the 1990s. I predict people will talk about their private philanthropies the way they talked about their real estate investments in the 1970s, and their stocks and children in the 1980s.'' This breed believes in God, but is not churchgoing. Political independents or registered Republicans, they deplore the trade and budget deficits and are eager to pay more taxes to reduce them rather than cut defense or social programs. The upcoming presidential election bores them, which they find slightly worrisome, because they believe the next Administration will enter the 1990s on the tail of a recession. Unfortunately, it has yet to occur to any of them that life might require more from them than the exclusive pursuit of personal freedom. They are bright, energetic, insular, and self-centered. As youngsters, they grew up with the threat of nuclear war. Now they take a detached view of the possibility, as they do of many things. Says one: ''I don't worry about nuclear holocaust because I believe I'm going to burn out fast myself.''