Silicon Valley Culture

Silicon Valley is a culture that is unique from the rest of the world, here’s what I’m seeing

GEOGRAPHY

• SF is where the startups are at and many events.

• Investors are in the Palo Alto region.

• Santa Clara (south bay) has many larger established tech companies.

• Silicon Valley is different than SF, although many conflate the two: SV is technically in the south bay, which is Santa Clara county, and yes it's literally a valley.

• Those that use the term Peninsula (often Palo Alto to Daly City) may come across as understanding the distinct regions and may sound more experienced vs bucketing the Peninsula as south bay.

• The SF bay area is literally designed like a tech stack: in South Bay, in Santa Clara county is where chips, servers, hardware, networking and data centers started many decades ago.

• The Peninsula has many larger software companies, social networks, database companies, and then at the northern tip in SF is the fledgling startups, and HQ for large cloud companies.

• From south to north, it generally goes from HW to middleware to application layer.

• On 101, the main freeway from Silicon Valley, through the Peninsula, and into SF, I estimate 80% of the billboards are about AI. the ads roughly mirror the tech stack. I observe more chip/inference/GPU ads in south bay, and more dev app ads in SF.

BUSINESS ETIQUETTE AND DRESS

• If you bring a physical business card to a tech event, you may give off a negative signal, most are using LinkedIn, email, phone bumps, WhatsApp, digital.

• Dress code is casual but there are nuances. In startup, you can go casual, tech casual, or smart casual, sometimes business casual. In big tech, it leans business casual and smart casual, and for some tech roles, tech casual. You can ask AI about those specific dress types.

• If in doubt, dress Smart casual, which often includes a blazer/coat/sweater, so you can dress it up or down.

COMMUNITY

• There’s hundreds of in person AI events, hackathons, conferences, meetups, and salons each month in Silicon Valley, the Cerebral Valley website is a great place to see that list.

• There are dozens of hacker houses (private homes, mansions), accelerators, and coworking spaces to join, visit, or live out of, each with their own cultures.
  

WEATHER

• Temperature swings greatly from south bay to SF, which could be a difference of 20-30F in a single one hour drive, so Smart casual gives you that flexibility to remove a layer.

• It's best to bring sunglasses and a sweater in SF, as the weather can alter quickly.

• The weather is fantastic, on the peninsula the average is about 70F (21C) in some cities, basically only 3 seasons, we don't get a real winter.

PEOPLE AND CULTURE

• I estimate that only 15% of Bay Area tech workers are actually born here, nearly everyone else is a transplant.

• Immigrants are common, many cultures are intermixed, however it's not representative of the rest of the world as they tend to think like innovators, and come from the top tier backgrounds.

• Restaurants are representative of cultures.

• Lost of fresh veg, fruits, seafood, meats, and wine which are from this region.

• The best food is in SF, however the calm quiet clean suburbs are on the Peninsula, South Bay, or parts of East Bay, or North Bay.
  

COST OF LIVING

• Cost of living is insane, I estimate $365K is needed for a family of four, and some say that's too low, so $1K a day is your burn. Sure, less if you're single and share a dwelling.

• Condo ownership seem to be underwhelming, home ownership is quickly pricing up.
  

The map of the bay looks like a mermaid facing left. Now you can’t unsee it, a park ranger told me this one time decades ago, it always stuck with me. original image source via Reddit.

This is my original writing, voice, and insights, although I use AI to copyedit.