Living for a few years in the Bay Area, I didn't really end up with the same impression, though that could be my fault. My biggest impression was that the Bay Area wants to be extremely wealthy, but feels slightly inadequate about it. There was a constant palpable rivalry with both NYC and Southern California, a rivalry that was mostly one-directional. And on the Peninsula, in particular, there was a strangely obvious class structure. In particular the startup scene around Stanford was super-weird. I didn't know the Googlers (wrong years), but the kids I knew ranged from "comfortably upper-middle-class" to "extremely wealthy". Mostly my peers were their employees, not in the founder social group; the founder social group had a remarkable ability to raise "friends & family" money despite having no product (the most recent raised $750,000 from a company in China owned by an uncle, to develop mobile games). The demographics are so unbalanced that Stanford actually will give an automatic full-ride scholarship to any accepted student whose family makes under $100,000/yr, since not many admitted students qualify for it anyway.
Overall I don't really miss it, though I did like eating VC food and drinking VC beer at the ubiquitous lavish parties. But the culture might be even weirder than NYC, in terms of what it promotes.
> Mostly my peers were their employees, not in the founder social group; the founder social group had a remarkable ability to raise "friends & family" money despite having no product
Wow, that kinda hit me. I grew up a relatively poor, at times in the lower-middle class. I took a weird path to college and graduated very late. $750k doesn't seem like a huge amount of money to me anymore, but perspectives change.
I did a thought experiment...had I graduated high school, went straight to college and graduated and decided to do a startup...at that point (22 year old me), how many steps out in my family would I have to go for their entire net worths could combine into $750,000 at that time. Not free money available for investment, I mean every penny everybody had.
I gave up when I hit second cousins.
Things are better these days, if I were 22 today and fresh faced out of school and wanted to start a company, I could probably run the same experiment and hit $750k before I ran out of siblings (they live comfortable middle-class lives for the most part), but again, that's not money available for investment. That's the entirety of their assets.
Having family who could pitch in that much runway without it bankrupting them is something I could never have conceived of at that age. When I was 22, $750k may as well have been a hundred trillion dollars for all the relationship it had to my life.
My second real job was with a bootstrapped startup that was the result of 4 founders maxing out their credit cards. I think their combined startup capital worked out to around $40k.
I'm old enough now where I've handled much more money than that, and I have a good sense how much of a business that buys...it's surprisingly less than you think. But given a fat seed like that I bet I could have recruited a few other poor 22 year old looking for work grads for pennies into some startup and written a vastly different story of my life.
Great comment! Often I'll read "start-upy" articles about starting ventures and the flip kind of attitude towards guidelines like "and now it's time to ask friends and family for funding!" I can't fathom, nor do I know many people who I would consider sane, who would take money from their friends or family to start the kinds of businesses that are discussed on HN. If you end up with the next Google, then I guess it's all gravy but since insider giants like pg himself are constantly talking about the ridiculous odds startups face, you could literally destroy lives doing this.
But, I never considered that this viewpoint was a hallmark of the middle class. It never struck me that these people were never actually talking to me, but maybe to a different, more affluent class of people, in a very specific part of the world.
There was a constant palpable rivalry with both NYC and Southern California
Living in the Bay area, I can't say I relate all that much. You hear about New York in the context of food and finance, and about LA in the context of fashion and Hollywood. But not really in terms of a competition of some kind. Maybe it's a peninsula thing.
The upper-middle class isn't nearly as preoccupied with location. You don't really identify with a place if you can't afford to buy a house there. (Or, if you do, you're a sucker.) The NYC envy of the Silicon Valley elite is mostly a phenomenon of the VC/MBA circle. (I've never heard of L.A. envy. Maybe in the '80s or '90s it was strong, but I can't imagine anyone having that now.)
>Stanford actually will give an automatic full-ride scholarship to any accepted student whose family makes under $100,000/yr, since not many admitted students qualify for it anyway.
From what I understand, this is now common practice not only at Stanford but at many of the top private schools.
In particular the startup scene around Stanford was super-weird.
That's very interesting. Would you elaborate a bit more about this? What was it like, beyond the fact that those people have connections that most people don't?
I guess that's the main part, the Stanford founders I met (mostly second-hand, via friends who did work for them) seemed to have access to connections and surprisingly large amounts of "friends & family" seed funding. Maybe they were doing a ton of work behind the scenes to get it, but from my perspective it seemed like some pretty surprising piles of money accessible to pretty unproven companies (piles of money much larger than YC gives). My friends got decent pay out of it (even if below-market), so I'm not particularly bitter about it, but it was sort of an eye-opening "wow, people have friends/family who can kick in $750k just like that?" kind of moment.
Also quite different compared to the vibe around other vaguely nearby universities: Santa Clara University, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, Cal Poly SLO, etc. They all come across as more "working class", socially, which contrary to what I might've thought some years ago, seems to correlate against being startuppy. The working-class Cal-Poly/Santa-Clara/etc kids seemed mainly interested in getting a stable job with a big tech company, while the upper-class-background Stanford kids were all into startups.
The datapoint in your last paragraph fits well with the pro-social safety net sentiment that is sometimes expressed here: It is much easier to take the risk of creating a startup if you have a guaranteed safety net.
Kids from a genuinely rich family - as in, pitching in 750k is not a problem rich - are more likely to feel safe enough to take startup-related risks.
Overall I don't really miss it, though I did like eating VC food and drinking VC beer at the ubiquitous lavish parties. But the culture might be even weirder than NYC, in terms of what it promotes.