October 2010Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glanceit doesn't seem there's anything to see. It's not the sort of placethat has conspicuous monuments. But if you look, there are subtlesigns you're in a place that's different from other places.1. StanfordUniversityStanford is a strange place. Structurally it is to an ordinaryuniversity what suburbia is to a city. It's enormously spread out,and feels surprisingly empty much of the time. But notice theweather. It's probably perfect. And notice the beautiful mountainsto the west. And though you can't see it, cosmopolitan San Franciscois 40 minutes to the north. That combination is much of the reasonSilicon Valley grew up around this university and not some otherone.2. UniversityAveA surprising amount of the work of the Valley is done in the cafeson or just off University Ave in Palo Alto. If you visit on aweekday between 10 and 5, you'll often see founders pitchinginvestors. In case you can't tell, the founders are the ones leaningforward eagerly, and the investors are the ones sitting back withslightly pained expressions.3. The LuckyOfficeThe office at 165 University Ave was Google's first. Then it wasPaypal's. (Now it's Wepay's.) The interesting thing about it isthe location. It's a smart move to put a startup in a place withrestaurants and people walking around instead of in an office park,because then the people who work there want to stay there, insteadof fleeing as soon as conventional working hours end. They go outfor dinner together, talk about ideas, and then come back andimplement them.It's important to realize that Google's current location in anoffice park is not where they started; it's just where they wereforced to move when they needed more space. Facebook was tillrecently across the street, till they too had to move because theyneeded more space.4. OldPalo AltoPalo Alto was not originally a suburb. For the first 100 years orso of its existence, it was a college town out in the countryside.Then in the mid 1950s it was engulfed in a wave of suburbia thatraced down the peninsula. But Palo Alto north of Oregon expresswaystill feels noticeably different from the area around it. It's oneof the nicest places in the Valley. The buildings are old (thoughincreasingly they are being torn down and replaced with genericMcMansions) and the trees are tall. But houses are veryexpensive—around $1000 per square foot. This is post-exitSilicon Valley.5. SandHill RoadIt's interesting to see the VCs' offices on the north side of SandHill Road precisely because they're so boringly uniform. Thebuildings are all more or less the same, their exteriors expressvery little, and they are arranged in a confusing maze. (I've beenvisiting them for years and I still occasionally get lost.) It'snot a coincidence. These buildings are a pretty accurate reflectionof the VC business.If you go on a weekday you may see groups of founders there to meetVCs. But mostly you won't see anyone; bustling is the last wordyou'd use to describe the atmos. Visiting Sand Hill Road remindsyou that the opposite of "down and dirty" would be "up and clean."6. CastroStreetIt's a tossup whether Castro Street or University Ave should beconsidered the heart of the Valley now. University Ave would havebeen 10 years ago. But Palo Alto is getting expensive. Increasinglystartups are located in Mountain View, and Palo Alto is a placethey come to meet investors. Palo Alto has a lot of differentcafes, but there is one that clearly dominates in Mountain View:RedRock.7. GoogleGoogle spread out from its first building in Mountain View to a lot of the surrounding ones. But because thebuildings were built at different times by different people,the place doesn't have the sterile, walled-off feel that a typicallarge company's headquarters have. It definitely has a flavor ofits own though. You sense there is something afoot. The generalatmos is vaguely utopian; there are lots of Priuses, and people wholook like they drive them.You can't get into Google unless you know someone there. It's verymuch worth seeing inside if you can, though. Ditto for Facebook,at the end of California Ave in Palo Alto, though there is nothingto see outside.8. SkylineDriveSkyline Drive runs along the crest of the Santa Cruz mountains. Onone side is the Valley, and on the other is the sea—whichbecause it's cold and foggy and has few harbors, plays surprisinglylittle role in the lives of people in the Valley, considering howclose it is. Along some parts of Skyline the dominant trees arehuge redwoods, and in others they're live oaks. Redwoods mean thoseare the parts where the fog off the coast comes in at night; redwoodscondense rain out of fog. The MROSD manages a collection of great walking trails offSkyline.9. 280Silicon Valley has two highways running the length of it: 101, whichis pretty ugly, and 280, which is one of the more beautiful highwaysin the world. I always take 280 when I have a choice. Notice thelong narrow lake to the west? That's the San Andreas Fault. Itruns along the base of the hills, then heads uphill through PortolaValley. One of the MROSD trails runs right alongthe fault. A string of rich neighborhoods runs along thefoothills to the west of 280: Woodside, Portola Valley, Los AltosHills, Saratoga, Los Gatos.SLAC goes right under 280 a little bit south of Sand Hill Road. And a couple miles south of that is the Valley's equivalent of the "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign: The Dish.NotesI skipped the ComputerHistory Museum because this is a list of where to see the Valleyitself, not where to see artifacts from it. I also skipped SanJose. San Jose calls itself the capital of Silicon Valley, butwhen people in the Valley use the phrase "the city," they mean SanFrancisco. San Jose is a dotted line on a map.Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, and Jessica Livingstonfor reading drafts of this.
