A Tour of Silicon Valley

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

I'll ease back in to the blogging routine by pointing to the latest essay by Paul Graham, "Where to See Silicon Valley." As both a programmer and a venture capitalist, he's exactly the kind of guide you'd want for such a tour. Graham describes University Avenue in entertaining fashion below.

A surprising amount of the work of the Valley is done in the cafes on or just off University Ave in Palo Alto. If you visit on a weekday between 10 and 5, you'll often see founders pitching investors. In case you can't tell, the founders are the ones leaning forward eagerly, and the investors are the ones sitting back with slightly pained expressions.
Above each subsection, he links to a Google Map of the location. Graham skips the Computer History Museum because, "this is a list of where to see the Valley itself, not where to see artifacts from it." In the event I find myself in that part of the Golden State any time soon, I'll keep this tour in mind.

-- CAV

2 comments:

kelleyn said...

Thanks for the pointer. Valley blogs are a sinkhole for my time, so I discipline myself to stay off them, and consequently I tend to miss things such as this.

Since I live in San Jose all these things would be well worth doing. I combined two of them recently: I took 280 up to Stanford to hear Craig Biddle speak, and although I got lost on campus I had a marvelous time. It was stunningly beautiful, all the way up and all the way back, and the lecture was inspiring and informative. I look forward to doing something like that again soon.

(The traffic on 280 was relatively mellow at that time of day, too, which helped a lot :-)

Gus Van Horn said...

I'm glad someone will get to use this right away.

I lived in the Bay Area towards the end of my Navy service and regret not taking more time to look around then.