(FORTUNE Small Business) – On the face of it, Patrick Sweeney II is the kind of chest-thumping, money-hungry entrepreneur that America has always known and loved. Now 35 years old, he plans to be worth $40 million by the time he's 40. His vehicle to wealth? ServerVault, a 2 1/2-year-old Dulles, Va., company in the turbulent Web-hosting industry. A graduate of the University of Virginia's business school, Sweeney nearly went to Atlanta as a single sculler in the 1996 Olympics, and he exudes confidence. "I've always known I'd make a lot of money," he says.

But something's peculiar about Sweeney's brand of entrepreneurial greed. Yes, he expects to be a multimillionaire, but he wants to create 40 other millionaires at the same time. The best part of getting rich, he says, won't be the freedom, the status, or the fancy toys. It will be proving that "the qualities of integrity and honesty and respect for individuals can be used to build a wildly successful company," he explains. Furthermore, financial success will help him achieve his long-term goal: to contribute more powerfully to the peace process in Ireland, a cause he's already involved with.

Go ahead. Raise your eyebrows at those noble goals. Roll your eyes at the moral significance Sweeney accords his startup. We did too--at first. When experts told us that there was a surge of entrepreneurs who were donning white hats Sweeney-style, we were suspicious. Mixing capitalism and selflessness has always sounded a lot better than it works. Was this a post-Sept. 11 fad, we wondered? A wave of guilty backpedaling after the get-rich-quick dot-com era? Or just wishful thinking?

Surprisingly, the answer to all those possibilities seems to be no. When we started talking to entrepreneurs, we discovered an unexpected streak of earnestness. Money, long a scorecard for competitive entrepreneurs, isn't the key definition of success for many business owners today. Nor is beating out rivals or being the biggest. Those goals still matter--make no mistake--but today's entrepreneurs want their companies to stand for more. "Meaningfulness, not just money, is a key driver. This trend has been on the upswing for the past ten years, and at an accelerating rate," says James Austin, a professor who heads up the Social Enterprise Initiative at Harvard Business School.

It's safe to say that few entrepreneurs of the 1980s and 1990s would have uttered the word "meaningful" in describing their goals. Easy access to credit through the popularization of junk bonds in the 1980s made leverage all the rage. It so facilitated the buying and selling of companies that for the first time entrepreneurs began starting companies with the express purpose of cashing out in a few years rather than building a business that would last. Ivan Boesky, an arbitrageur and a convicted felon, articulated the decade's prevailing attitude toward money in a 1986 commencement address at the University of California at Berkeley's business school. "I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself," he said.

Greed won over another set of boosters in the 1990s: dot-com entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Investors ravenous for outsized stock market returns fueled a wildly buoyant initial public offering market. You know the rest of the story. Startups without profits turned their founders into multimillionaires in record time. College kids dropped out of school to get rich by starting technology companies. By 2000, no one needed to be told he could be greedy and still feel good about himself.

Today avarice has lost its luster, apparently because it's so one-dimensional. Getting rich just doesn't say enough about an entrepreneur's identity--what he stands for, how he wants to be remembered. Sweeney's high-minded standards were shaped in part by the dot-com era's millimeter-deep values. Having watched a friend become a multimillionaire by following unethical business practices, Sweeney is eager to demonstrate that you don't have to lie and cheat to be successful. "I saw so many immoral people make money at the expense of other people or other companies by unethical means. I believe one significant reason ServerVault made it through the challenge of the past 18 months is that we are committed to doing things the right way for the right reasons," he says.

Sweeney's hardly alone in his quest for meaningful work. Plagued by midlife anxieties, baby-boomer entrepreneurs are also seeking a larger purpose. "These guys get a wake-up call. They realize they've sold their soul to the business," says Jim Warner, president of OnCourse International in Boulder, Colo., and a personal coach who has counseled more than 500 CEOs during the past seven years. In Warner's survey of 200 of these business leaders, 70% said they felt driven to achieve financial independence, yet 63% said they were ready for a life change because whatever they're doing now isn't working. They feel disillusioned, bored, or empty, says Warner.

For many, the Sept. 11 disaster crystallized those feelings. As Mike Regan, 47-year-old co-owner of Tranzact Technologies, a logistics information provider in Elmhurst, Ill., says, "You recognize that you could go at any moment. If you did, would you have lived a life that's fulfilled?"

In his search for fulfillment, David Sidman, the 46-year-old CEO of Content Directions, declares personal financial success "totally beside the point." Instead he's out to spread democracy. His 2 1/2-year-old Brooklyn company tracks a new kind of identity tag for digital content. Called a digital object identifier (DOI), the tag is like a bar code that helps customers trace, say, an electronic version of a book as it travels through cyberspace.

"This company," says Sidman, "is about accomplishing great things." Chief great thing: His company will enable information to flow more freely, and that, he says, will make it "more likely that democracy will prevail around the globe." Yes, in his own small way, Sidman may accomplish this, but the important thing is that he has a vision--fantastic or not--that he and his workers can rally around, that gives them purpose and direction. No wonder Ed Goodman, one of Sidman's venture capitalists at Milestone Venture Partners in New York, calls the entrepreneur "messianic."

Not everyone, however, is lucky enough to be able to save the world. Many entrepreneurs are finding satisfaction simply by making people feel better. Eileen Fisher, a clothing designer whose eponymous company sells her apparel in 17 Eileen Fisher stores, in major retailers, and in nearly 1,000 other stores across the country, is an entrepreneur for whom aligning personal meaning with corporate objectives is virtually an art form. A 52-year-old who manages to make her simply cut gray hair and unmade-up face look chic, Fisher has rejected going public and the instant wealth it would bring. "I decided a big bundle of money is not what it's about for me," she says. "I've gotten really interested in the larger purpose of my business."

One aspiration is to serve her employees. Believing that money is a form of energy, Fisher began more than a decade ago returning 10% of her company's earnings to employees each year. A devotee of yoga and meditation, she decided two years back to invest another $400,000 a year in employees by giving $1,000 to each one to spend on services that promote his own wellness--from nutrition counseling to massages to yoga classes. After initial reluctance about using the money, employees now consider it one of their favorite benefits.

Fisher says she's also beginning to see her company as a vehicle of self-expression for her and her employees--a "creative voice in the world." Her company's new mission statement: "To create products and partnerships that promote a natural, simple, joyful life and inspire women to celebrate who they are." Explains Fisher: "We're just getting our arms around this idea, but we want to help women feel good about themselves not just on the outside, but on the inside." The form this service will take is still shaping up. Some possibilities: a stand-alone, for-profit holistic wellness center or free events in Eileen Fisher stores on topics such as yoga and nutrition.

Some entrepreneurs simply take old-fashioned pride in building a lasting business. They gain personal satisfaction in knowing that they're building a company that will provide jobs for their employees for years to come. The fastest avenue to wealth for Rob Kelley and his two partners would have been to accept venture capital funding, ramp up the growth of LiquidHub, their 1 1/2-year-old technology consulting business in Wayne, Pa., and sell it after a few years. But the trio rejected that scenario after witnessing a prior employer's near failure. Hoping to quickly go public or sell out to a larger firm, that company's managers chose to grow revenues at the expense of profits. The gambit flopped, and the managers, says Kelley, destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of employees, having to lay them off as the firm was sold at a fire-sale price.

Rejecting that risky, get-rich-quick approach, Kelley and his partners operate LiquidHub under a stewardship model. That means cautiously managing the company for profitability rather than growth. Kelley believes that it is the best way to protect the jobs of his employees. To help his people understand his philosophy, he displays the company's financials to show everyone how his performance is linked to his job security.

Those may not be revolutionary choices, but they do fly in the face of the all-greed-all-the-time mentality of the past two decades. But will the trend toward responsible entrepreneurship last? Or will it fade when the next go-go era unfolds?

One measure of its sticking power is visible on business school campuses, where the social-enterprise movement is creating a generation of students who believe that for-profit companies can help solve social ills. The top business schools in the country, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Stanford, and Duke, all have programs in social enterprise. Part of the course description for Business Leadership in the Social Sector, at Harvard: "Companies are increasingly integrating into their strategies actions aimed at having a significant positive impact on social problems."

After they graduate, a growing number of these students continue their interest in mixing commerce with a broader social purpose. The Robert Enterprise Development Fund, an organization in San Francisco that invests in nonprofit organizations that operate business ventures employing low-income individuals, maintains an unofficial list of social entrepreneurs on its Website. A decade ago REDF could identify only 20 people who were operating companies that addressed social problems. Today there are more than 67, in 15 states.

Fifteen years after Gordon Gekko declared, "Greed is good," in the movie Wall Street--and one year after real-life entrepreneur Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, co-founder of now-defunct Govworks.com, exulted over the possibility of becoming a billionaire in the film Startup.com--is it possible that greed will take a back seat in entrepreneurs' lives? Probably not. But that can be answered only one person at a time. For now, all we know for sure is that more entrepreneurs seem to be asking the question.