My view is that people in the bay area are very friendly and it's reasonably easy to make friends (accounting the geek factor ;-). A good start is to check meet

My view is that people in the bay area are very friendly and it's reasonably easy to make friends (accounting the geek factor ;-). A good start is to check meetup.com for groups with similar interest (startups, programming languages, food, etc). If you're into hiking, the Stanford Outing Group is pretty good: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/outing https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/outing They are not affiliated with Stanford anymore and they have user-organized group hikes regularly (sometimes every week) around the bay area.