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San Francisco isn't Silicon Valley. It has never been the center of the tech world, and to whatever extent it's tech-heavy now that's less than 20 years old. Th
by 1_2__3 10y ago
San Francisco isn't Silicon Valley. It has never been the center of the tech world, and to whatever extent it's tech-heavy now that's less than 20 years old. These pictures act like SF was churning out silicon and code starting in the 1980s (based on the age of the pictures) which isn't even close to true or accurate.
Even during the last dot com bust it was mostly just marketing companies in sf - all the tech was south of Menlo Park.
I actually really hate that people try to retcpn SF into this visionary of technology and futurism. Almost all of that was and remains in the South Bay, as much as SF startup peeps hate to admit it.
- mhurron 10y ago> These pictures act like SF was churning out silicon and code starting in the 1980s (based on the age of the pictures) Looking at the cars I would guess most of those pictures are somewhere in the 40's/50's.
- kozikow 10y ago> San Francisco isn't Silicon Valley. It has never been the center of the tech world, and to whatever extent it's tech-heavy now that's less than 20 years old. I moved to Mountain View to found a startup a few months ago. When I think about the "chat over coffee" type of meetings go, I would say that there may be slightly more of them in San Francisco than South Bay. It feels like San Francisco starts to outweigh Silicon Valley. I didn't do precise calculation, but estimation based on my gut feelings would say that ratio of "Seed stage" startups between SF and South bay is 2/1.
- gumby 10y ago> ratio of "Seed stage" startups between SF and South bay is 2/1. The density of tech startups in SF is much lower, more like New York. Most of them are just retail companies (shops) or food services. Yes, Pinterest, uber, lift, twitter have serious tech problems to solve involving scale, but companies like that are in the minority. And businesses where people develop new technologies are more common in the Valley. Living in the city and commuting to the Valley was already the norm when I got here in the early 80s.
- bluejekyll 10y agoLet me add to that list for you (in no particular order), Optimizely, Salesforce.com, Heroku, Medium, Square, Docker, CoreOS, AirBNB, OpenTable, Yelp, Mesosphere, Instacart, a whole bunch of drone startups and many more...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gumby 10y agoWell sure but you're making my point. Silicon Valley has non-tech businesses too like Survey Monkey which is about as high tech as Yelp, i.e. not much higher tech than a Cheesecake Factory (who has a lot of computerized supply chain). The point isn't to have a pissing match. I'm simply pointing out that the heavyweight tech region is the San Francisco Bay area but within it the tech influence is unevenly distributed which should hardly be remarkable. It's easier to find marketing, PR, non-B2B sales folks, web designers, ruby developers etc in SF than down here. It's way easier to find people down here who understand interrupt latency on 32-bit arm cores, oddities of device physics below .14 nm, B2B BD folks and the like. Does one diminish the other? No. Reporters from outside of course go to SF to report because, frankly, what's to see in Palo Alto? I have lived in Palo Alto for decades and yes, apart from the work (which is awesome) it's dull compared to SF, or even to many places lamer than SF.
- nostrademons 10y agoI think part of the point is that tech startups aren't founded upon chats over coffee, they're founded by a couple guys working on a project nobody else thinks is important in a garage. Completely anecdotally, that still seems to happen more often in the South Bay than in SF, if only because there are more garages. There are probably more startups being founded in SF, but there's more tech being developed in the South Bay.
- 1_2__3 10y agoLong-term companies in the south bay that have no (or virtually no) SF tech presence. Just off the top of my head: Google/Alphabet, Facebook, Oracle, Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, Intel, AMD, Applied Materials, Apple, Yahoo, Tesla, Palantir, and so on and so on. Yes there are lots of kids in SF trying to get their website turned into the next unicorn. That does not make SF the "center of the tech world", it makes it the "center of the SF tech startup world".
- explainthisth 10y agoI know people at the first two companies who work in SF. Not sure about the rest of the list.
- azinman2 10y agoI don't know about the rest, but google has a large office in SF and many, many people wanting positions in it (even if just a few days a week).
- bluejekyll 10y agoGoogle has a large office space just down the street here in SF. Yahoo has/had a huge office in SF. Then on top of that, there are ton of buses going from SF down the peninsula, which recognizes that choice of many to live in SF.
- blueski 10y agoUnless you count the hundreds of engineers and multiple offices Google has in SF.
- stormbrew 10y agoI would suggest that it's just a misunderstanding of "San Francisco" vs. the "San Francisco Bay Area," but then I'd expect pictures of other bay area places. I'm not even really sure what these pictures are trying to say, anyways. I don't live in SF, but I've been there a lot, and these pictures don't look much more different from current reality than most large cities between mid-20th century and early 21st. If anything, it may be distinctly less different looking than most.
- frik 10y ago> 1980s (based on the age of the pictures) What? The pictures are clearly older, from 1950-1960s(maybe early 1970s) timeframe. Certainly not 1980s. Look at the cars, the fashion clothes.
- djrogers 10y agoWhich makes the GP's point - picture from the 80's and 90's would be "before" photos as well.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoThe center might be 40 miles south, but a lot of those programmers (esp founders, execs and senior engineers) sure love to live in SF proper.
- kkylin 10y agoSouth Bay has changed a lot too. Even when my family moved there in the late 70s / early 80s, there were still a few orchards left here and there. Almost all condos and town houses now. (Wish I have some pictures to share...)
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoI'd love to go back in time to circa 1980 and drive down ECR from Palo Alto to downtown San Jose. Back when there were blue collar jobs in Santa Clara County.
- twblalock 10y ago> Back when there were blue collar jobs in Santa Clara County. There still are. If you don't think there are blue-collar jobs in Santa Clara county, please explain why restaurants, stores, construction companies, plumbing companies, etc. are able to exist.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoI was thinking more of the businesses here that no longer exist. http://wx4.org/to/foam/sp/spins/spins_san_jose_opt.pdf http://wx4.org/to/foam/sp/spins/spins_san_jose_opt.pdf Not so much the churn of retail that most large cities (suburban sprawls in this case) have.
- kkylin 10y agoNot sure this is what you meant by "blue collar," but I was just thinking this morning about driving by the NeXT logo in Fremont, the stretch of Mission connecting 680 to 880. I believe they actually built the cube there, but I could be wrong. (I'm sure someone reading this can confirm or deny that.) Not sure if anyone still assembles computers in the Bay Area anymore.
- sbov 10y agoThis is very common on this forum. Bay Area = SF. In any given topic about the "Bay Area" you can tell they are usually talking about SF, and use very sloppy language and often randomly switch between the two names, sometimes in the same sentence.
- tossaway1 10y agoThat's because people outside the bay area don't care about the distinction. People don't generally differentiate between Boston and Cambridge either. Is that sloppy? I'd say it's just understood that references to a city are often, maybe usually, referring to the surrounding region as well.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kafkaesq 10y agoSan Francisco isn't Silicon Valley. But it's definitely part of it, now. It got annexed a long time ago.
- 010a 10y ago"Those are some nice pictures you got there. It'd be a real shame if I started a useless argument just to prove how right I am rather than simply enjoy them." - HackerNews