Member-only story
Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad
The region was a hub for innovation long before tech bros showed up
In the late 2000s, at a party in the Mission District of San Francisco, I was discussing Silicon Valley with a guy who worked for a technology company. When I revealed that I lived in Mountain View, he asked me where that was.
A few years prior, I once collected guests from San Francisco International Airport and drove them south on the 101 freeway to Mountain View. The 101 is a sea of blacktop flanked by walls of concrete. “This is Silicon Valley!” I said proudly. “But where is everything?” my guests asked, confused. Silicon Valley doesn’t have the sights of San Francisco: no Golden Gate Bridge, no Palace of Fine Arts, no Presidio, usually not even a view of the bay. Silicon Valley is just one big, very spread out office park embedded in the sprawling suburbia of greater San Jose.
If you hunt for them, you might find the nondescript office complexes of companies like Intel, Google, Facebook, and Cisco Systems. In the last few years, companies have started to construct interesting buildings, like Apple Park (the doughnut), or Nvidia Endeavor, the spaceship-like, triangle-themed building that I currently work in.
Mountain View is in the northern part of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco South Bay, right…
