How small a world is Silicon Valley?

The tech community is pretty small and Silicon Valley is even smaller. As a general rule, in any business, it is a bad idea to burn bridges. It's too small a world to do so and you are ultimately bound to bump into the people you wronged.

I was surprised because before moving to SV I spent the last six years working in Bangalore, and I cannot imagine this happening there unless someone proactively went digging for background info.

SV is a very small world in my experience.

Back when I lived there, it indeed was very common.