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Comment by dcurtis | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that San Francisco is only mentioned in passing. This list seems to me like the old view of Silicon Valley. (Or, maybe, if you had to describe the valley geographically.)

It feels like the new Silicon Valley is in San Francisco, and that its heart is in Soma (or the Mission).

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SF is primarily a hub of Web-based companies - consumer applications. Though there are many big players down in Palo Alto/Mountain View. Also, startup doesn't mean only web-based startup. There are thousands of hardware and enterprise software companies down in San Jose/Santa Clara.

Here is the stack geographically, that works quite well with stack of software.

San Fran: Web based apps

Palo Alto/Mountain View/Cupertino: Web based + Desktop based software

Santa Clara: Enterprise + Desktop based software + EDA software + Hardware

San Jose: Hardware

Since the biggest employer in San Jose is Adobe, the "hardware" moniker may not be the best.

Adobe's a big employer, but Cisco is the largest private-sector employer in San Jose, at least according to the city's numbers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California#Top_Employ...

Wow, was I off! Thanks for the correction.

Milpitas/Fremont: clean tech

Kinda ironic, since that's right next to the city dump.

People who live with filth can be super clean to compensate.

The reason I made it about Silicon Valley in the literal sense (rather than the sense in which "Silicon Valley" means the intersection of startup and Bay Area) was simply to keep it a manageable length.

Could San Francisco be close, but not the Valley?

I grew up in the Bay Area, back during the late 90's early 2000s you had multimedia gulch in the SOMA but there was definitely a gap between SF and about the Oracle campus in Belmont. I, personally, always considered Oracle the southernmost end of Silicon Valley (I still do). But even then you had a bunch of startups in the Foster City area. EA was over there for some time.

SF is definitely happening right now. Its interesting I worked for TechTV back when it and SEGA were the two main companies in the building that Zynga just rented (TechTV and Sega had portions of floors its insane that Zynga needs the whole damn thing) but for my money its not part of Silicon Valley.

Also my personal addition to the list is Bucks of Woodside

http://www.scpr.org/news/2010/08/01/checking-a-tech-bellweat...

Silicon Valley is becoming the San Francisco Bay Area. There are many startups in SF, East Bay (last year's startup school was at Cal), North Bay, Peninsula, etc.

For people outside of SV/SF, this is definitely the prevailing mindset. I've been all over the country the past 6 months meeting startups and developers and unless you've been there or lived there, Silicon Valley == Bay Area.

I liked this essay specifically because it wasn't about San Francisco. Living on the east coast and never having been to California, I've heard a lot about San Francisco but not a lot about the valley itself. Mostly, my impression is that the valley is Stanford plus suburban sprawl and a lot of tech companies. This was an interesting perspective.

But, but, but -- SF isn't a valley. If you want to claim a new term, let's say Startuptopia, to mean "the place where I think stuff is happening," then fine. That's your twisted prerogative.

Don't become someone who lives in SF with no viable transportation who pretends anything south of SFO doesn't exist or is meaningless because of the unfamiliarity.

The article is exactly as advertised (alternative title: "The Top 9 Things You Can't Afford To Miss In Silicon Valley!")

The terminology bothered me too, when I first came here:

http://carlos.bueno.org/images/valley-geography.jpg

As someone who grew up in San Jose, the map on the right is definitely wrong. In Bay Area geography, "The Peninsula" starts at the SF city limits, but ends with Mountain View and Los Altos (inclusive). Basically, the 650 area code.

I also would not think of anything north of Menlo Park as "Silicon Valley".

I must say, though, that I'm always a bit amused at the people who get bent out of shape at the mismatch between literal geographic terms in the Bay Area and the actual physical geography, as if it's only Californians that do that. San Francisco isn't part of The Peninsula in the same way that Brooklyn isn't part of Long Island.

I would think that people would be more bothered by all the north/south freeways that intersect each other at right angles.

I would think that people would be more bothered by all the north/south freeways that intersect each other at right angles.

No, I'm more concerned about the part of I-80 West up near Vallejo which is also labelled I-580 East, and vice versa.

Totally. I would be careful not to equate density of startups with success of startups, but the two biggest startups since Facebook (Twitter and Zynga) are both SF-based.

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