- Office space, the last time I checked was about $2 per square foot. Check: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/off/eby?query=&minAsk...
- University town - the campus libraries are among the best places are awesome. The Berkely gym and the downtown YMCA here are also really excellent.
- The weather is really nice - not as cold and windy as SF, and not as hot as San Jose. It warms up and cools down very gradually here - and usually stays between 15 and 25 degrees Celsius. - The parks and the marina are great. There is pretty good hiking, and the sailing club here will get you sailing (or wind-surfing)! For cheap! (www.cal-sailing.org).
Cons: - It is dirty in places - it doesn't smell though. - There are lots of homeless people here - quite harmless. - Everything shuts down early. Berkeley is a town more than a city. There are two 'night-clubs' - only one is worth any time - the other is a dirty (in a bad way) hole in the ground. Only a couple of bars and restaurants are open late - thankfully they're quite good. Lucky for you, San Francisco is less than half an hour away by public transit. There's a bus that drives back every half an hour all night long.
Non-issues: - "Activism". big deal - some people like to protest - they don't come in your way or bother you. You are invited to participate and the locals can be engaging and opinionated if you talk to them. This is one of the most educated places I've ever lived in - that is a good thing.
Conclusion: - Berkeley is great! You can raise your kids here. You can live in a relatively quite place but live very close to two main cities - Oakland and San Fran - so you can go crazy and then return to relax and work in a quieter place.
Palo Alto is not that bad, except the smug attitude of the people there, and it is so expensive. It doesn't really feel like a town. More like a suburb, with one main avenue (university ave.). Nothing too exiting.
San Francisco is crowded, expensive, and it's a second-rate NYC. But the proximity to everything and everyone again makes up for a lot, especially for cuisine and nightlife. Driving is pain, housing is a pain.
Milpitas is cheap, full of housing, but next to the city dump. It smells in the summer and since there's so much suburban sprawl, you'll drive for half an hour before reaching the highway. Everything closes early too, there's no downtown or nightlife.
Mountain View: tract homes suburban sprawl. Mountain View has one long strip called Castro street that masquerades as a downtown on certain days. Other than that it's just old 60's tract housing style (you'll find this to be the case for almost all of Silicon Valley).
Sunnyvale is like a pseudo commercial zone where all the warehouses and tiny offices are. Imagine playing SimCity and watching your purple zone languishing. That's Sunnyvale. It's definitely cheaper though to live because of this effect. There's a Fry's and Costco here, meaning you don't need to go anywhere else.
Cupertino/Saratoga has one big hit: Apple. There's no downtown, everything closes at 9pm sharp. Cupertino is essentially where everyone commutes back to after working in SF or Sunnyvale. There are an abundance of police officers because of the odd arrangement the city has with the county to generate revenue. Saratoga is up in the hills which is pretty but basically excludes anyone without a seven digit network.
Palo Alto is schizophrenic in that it doesn't know whether it's a farm town, college town, ritzy retreat, or corporate shill. Stanford is here and the surrounding area outside of Stanford is great. Sand Hill Road is right outside, there's a strip that act as the downtown, significantly longer than Castro. But because of Stanford it attracts quite a lot of companies to move here which in turn forces house pricing through the roof. Facebook is based here and they pay their employees an extra $600 to live within a 1 mile radius, meaning your chances are next to nothing to get a nice place. Watch out for East Palo Alto, that's not a place you want to be.
Santa Clara is like the ice cream center of a cake. It slowly melts into either layer but in the mean time it acts as the barrier between the sponge up top and the ghetto area on the bottom. This is where most people go because of the lower housing pricing due to market pressures. It's not a bad area, but then again it's not the sunny disposition you would expect California to be known for. This is also where my stolen car ended up at. Twice.
East San Jose. This isn't meant to be racist: east San Jose is where most of the poor live, there's a huge Mexican and Vietnamese community here. This is also where the low-rent and section-8 apartments are and where most of the illegal immigrants will bus from to find work at Home Depot in other areas. This isn't in any way to degenerate them, but this is just how the city is broken up into. Go more east and near the mountains and you end up at this ritzy and rich community called Silver Creek where they built thousands of big houses. You can drive for an hour here and still not see the main highway.
San Jose itself is huge. In fact, it's bigger than San Francisco, ranking itself as the 3rd biggest city in California. There's a downtown, but it's not as glamorous as say New York nor LA. Plenty of clubs to go to but it's almost always full of cop cars, low riders, scrapers with big wheels, and sound system that's enough to shatter glass. Quite a lot of companies are here though, Adobe for one, and the recent clamor for city living has caused quite a few skyscrapers to go up for loft living and the like. Prepare to pluck down more than $750k for a 900sq ft loft with sky high windows that look directly into a depressing airport. Oh, at least they have the courtesy to shut off the airport after 9pm (apparently everyone sleeps at 9 in Silicon Valley). There's multiple museums though, but they have enough content to last you through maybe 3 weekends.
This turned out more pessimistic than I had originally intended it to be. It's not to say I hate Silicon Valley, but the wide-eyed optimism has worn off. Don't think it's a dreamland, it's just an certain area where lots of people have moved into. The new trend now is to tear down unoccupied commercial zones (caused by the first dot-com boom) and remaking them as condos. Expensive condos. It's only getting more and more people to come in. Traffic is annoying. Stuff is expensive. There's houses everywhere. And most areas lack charm.
So in summation, where would I go?
With a bit more money saved up, I would much prefer Palo Alto, it's by far the best area, a 30 minute drive to the City (that's what we call San Francisco) and close proximity to Mountain View. If I just need a cheap place to stay? Santa Clara. If I want to live the California life? San Francisco. If I have a family? Cupertino. If I really really really want to have a house? Milpitas.
Don't take this post as gospel though. I've only been living here for 15 years and can't say I have truly captured ever nuance of Silicon Valley.
Addendum: Oakland. It's in a renovation stage. What used to be a horrifying place to live at is now being revitalized for business and as a contra to SF. The popular trend amongst my friends and smaller startups is live in SF or Fremont/Union City and rent an office in Oakland. You can find a huge 1500 sq ft open loft/warehouse type office for less than $1.50/sqft. I still wouldn't live in Oakland though.
East Menlo Park is kind of ghetto though.
ps. while the berkeley bowl is somewhat expensive, it has the best damn produce section on the planet. Period.
I'm renting a house a few blocks from Castro St., and I like the whole town quite a lot. It's not San Francisco, and right now, that's probably good--I would go to rock shows three or four times a week if I could walk to the club. I've got work to do right now, and don't need the distraction. Presumably, if you're starting up, you also have work to do.
That said, being around other startups has value, too. The YC guys often get together in the city, and I'd love to go, but I rarely have a car handy (and I hate driving/parking in the city, anyway). If I lived nearby, I'd walk, or catch a bus. But taking the train (which stops running at a ridiculously early hour) from here to there isn't an option. Once things are spinning nicely, I'll probably move to the city, or possibly back to Austin.
The library thing is really key for me, though we're not sure what the situation is elsewhere (Like Stanford, say).
Palo Alto's very expensive, unfortunately. Mountain View might be a good bet. Not crushingly expensive, and has something of a downtown.
Both of them don't really drop off with distance - Davis (near the end of the red line) is as much of a startup center than Central, and Burlington (the northern end of the 128 corridor) is more of one than Weston (though this isn't really fair: Weston is a bedroom community for all the venture capitalists that fund them). They do, however, drop off dramatically if you move laterally: Billerica and Carlisle are rural bedroom communities, dramatically different from the high-tech industries in neighboring Bedford and Burlington.
We were bored to tears in Hayward in terms of having a social life, and usually drove up to Berkeley.
There are quite a few startups in SF and quite a lot tech stuff happens here. Some benefits to moving to Palo Alto, since it can be cheaper their and less distractions.
I'd recommend San Fran as its a lot more exciting than Palo Alto. Living in an exciting area is extremely motivating.