Think Manhattan except car ownership is an almost must-have. This depends a lot on where you live. People outside the SF Bay Area tend to use "The Valley" rath

Think Manhattan except car ownership is an almost must-have. This depends a lot on where you live. People outside the SF Bay Area tend to use "The Valley" rather indiscriminately, I've found. If you actually mean in Silicon Valley itself, then it's difficult to get around without a car (although not impossible, especially if you have a bike and both live and work within sane biking distance of a light rail station). But our current dotcom boom is different from the 1999 boom in one significant respect--a much higher proportion of the action is happening in San Francisco. If you can manage to live in SF itself, Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley, Daly City, or arguably even certain neighborhoods in cities on the peninsula, you may be able to get along very well without a car. I have several friends who don't have any issue without one. (I live in Santa Clara and could actually probably manage without a car given my specific neighborhood--even though I go into an office in San Francisco once or twice a week--but I wouldn't enjoy it.) The costs certainly are insane, which is really the biggest problem I have here; I'm a middle-aged guy who still lives a lot like a college student: renting an apartment with a roommate. My roommate's job is moving farther east and our already-expensive apartment is likely to have another rent increase in the fall, which may leave me stuck between moving with him to a likely-cheaper abode with a much more inconvenient commute (a 30-minute drive to get to a train station which is farther away from SF than the one I go to now) or trying to find a one-bedroom place that I can afford on my own. But, as much as I grumble about SOCIAL GAMIFICATION SOCIAL BADGE SOCIAL SOCIAL SOCIAL everywhere, I think the "groupthink" out here gets... hmm. I'm not sure whether it's overstated, or whether people tend to underestimate whatever groupthink exists in their locales, or maybe some of both. But it's actually not that difficult to find companies out here whose business plans are more inspiring than "give away shit for free, connect to every social network everywhere and hope Facebook or Twitter buys us." Austin would probably be a very good choice for a startup. If I were leery of the SF Bay Area, though, I don't think I'd be any less leery of NYC unless I had a really specific reason to pick it. It's the only metro area running essentially neck and neck with us for living costs.