Silicon Valley is full of Geeks
What is it like in your city?
I live in Silicon Valley and it is a little bit crazy. I don’t know if there are other places like this in the world, because my other point of reference is Wales where people end the day at 4 or 5 and go straight to the pub. I know they are nothing like this. But then Hong Kong and Tokyo are a bit crazy too, and not like this. Silicon Valley’s word is Geeky. There are girl geeks here too.
Silicon Valley is like a mad scientist’s haven, everyone here is obsessed with creating or funding a new innovation or providing a service (PR, consulting, accounting, coffee houses, entrepreneur launchpads) that is the oil to keep innovation engine running. There are engineers who spend their days dreaming of owning their own start-ups, lots of emerging companies who want to make it big. It’s the only place I know where is possible to meet entrepreneurs as young as Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, or even younger, like Mark Levie at Box.net. If you’re not working in these companies, you’re writing about them in VentureBeat, TechCrunch or ValleyWag.
We have a ton of venture capital companies here: Sequoia Capital, Garage Technology Ventures, GRP Ventures, Elevation Ventures (where Bono of U2 is a Managing Director). It’s so real that I have shaken hands with Kawasaki once at a movie theater event, met wild eyed Levie briefly, and yes, worked at hi-tech PR firm supporting an emerging VC funding start-up. I have friends who own tech start-ups, dodged the Google IPO or have experienced a start-up acquisition. It’s that real.
Housing prices can go as far as the millions, in my area, the average housing price is $2,343, 246. Renting is cheaper than buying, a concept that profoundly confuses my Taiwanese family abroad.
It’s practically Darwinian the way we are filtering out folks who aren’t necessarily interested in this innovation madness and all this blinding brilliance. To stand out, it appears that you have to either attend Stanford to shortly quit like Page and Brin, get an MBA, learn a technical skill like Photoshop or javascript, OR tweet like mad @SocialMediaClub.
New products start with E, like the WD e-Book or i as in iPod and iPhone.
It’s the only place I know where people will turn down an impromptu invitation to dinner because they are on leave from Google to work their side hustle, or promise to teach you to be rich. Unless, your obsession IS food and you’re cooking the latest celebrity chef dinner.
If you live in Silicon Valley, is there something else you would add?
Is it like this elsewhere? What drives the engine of young professionals in your city?
