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The billboards in San Francisco off Hwy 80 and Hwy 101 never cease to surprise me. I'll ask my wife, who was a middle school teacher, what a "Datadog" or "Salesforce" is and she never knows (or cares, which is fair enough). The tech culture is so ingrained that even the non-techies are oblivious to how deeply rooted it is.

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I've only been through Silicon Valley a handful of times, and the signage was one of the most striking things for me too. It's just an immediately visible indicator that the place is an outlier. I think, "wow, the density of software industry architects and executives and investors is so high here that it makes more sense to put up a billboard for them than one for consumers."

The only other place where I've seen something similar is in Washington, DC, where you'll get advertisements on the Metro for things like fighter jet engines, apparently aimed at congressional staffers and Defense Department executives.

I remember flying into San Jose airport for the first time and the posters weren't advertising restaurants, hotels, and tourist destinations but enterprise routers and firewalls.

Barracuda!

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