After my grandparents got married, they moved into their house in Arroyo Saratoga, the same house my mother and her siblings were raised, and the house where my grandparents are still living today. My father was born in Mississippi. Later his family moved out to Fremont California. I was born on July 9, 1980 at Kaiser Permanente hospital in San Jose. My parents still live in the same house where my sisters and I grew up, in South San Jose. Read more…

Most of my life I’ve had somewhat of an obsession with the United States of America. I’ve always felt as if I was destined to go there to live my own version of the American dream.  As I got older, my obsession narrowed to the San Francisco Bay Area. To me, the Bay Area was a place where people can be who, they truly are; a place where age, gender, sexuality, ethnic background, and so on doesn’t matter. Therefore, I thought this would be the perfect place for an unconventional soul like me. Read more…

Danny (Dandiggity) Le is a Vietnamese-American shop owner by day, entrepreneur by night and incredibly gifted poet, no matter the time of day.

I was born in Oklahoma in 1981 and didn’t move to Silicon Valley until 1989. My parents came to America with less than a hundred dollars in their pocket, not knowing English or anything.  They could have started in California or Texas, where most Vietnamese are at—but no— we ended up in Oklahoma. Read more…

I’ll let you know secrets about India, I mean, have you ever wondered why there are so many Indians in Silicon Valley? It’s not a freaky coincidence that a hundred thousand students pick engineering as their lane. How does a country mint so many techies and engineer guys? I come from Bombay, in the Indian State of Maharashtra. The state has about 90 million people, in the same size land as Silicon Valley. Ninety-million people, that’s like one-third the population of the U.S. Read more…

I have lived in Silicon Valley since 1998 when I took a job here at San Jose State. I applied for a job in what they call computer mediated communications. But when they said “well, we might get you a job here at San Jose State, come and apply,” I had to kind of realize I never really understood where Silicon Valley was. A lot of people said when they were here interviewing for the position, “I want to be here in Silicon Valley” or “I really love being near the beach,” but California seemed like Mars to me. I grew up in Florida and Georgia and in the Midwest I did my schooling, so Silicon Valley was always a concept that was amorphous and sort of unreal until I came here. Read more…

I moved to San Jose in 1974.  Like everyone else, I moved to the Silicon Valley for work. The differences between Salinas and San Jose were immediately noticeable. San Jose was bigger, had better jobs, better food, better shopping, and night clubs. I ended up transferring from the Salinas Wells Fargo Bank to the bank on Alameda where I worked part-time as a Proof Operator processing checks. Read more…

My mother, a Sicilian immigrant who came to the United States before World War I, moved to the Silicon Valley and worked in Sacramento at the canneries for many years. My mother had a very tough time in this area as my grandmother was Sicilian and my grandfather was Albanian. At that time, it was difficult to be an immigrant because not many people would hire you, especially if you didn’t know very much English, like my grandparents. The canneries were extremely dangerous and she was forced to give up her education in order to help support her family. In 1935, my mother met my father, who was a mechanic at the cannery and after two weeks of “courting” they got married. Read more…

Rocco Chappie is a 36 year serial entrepreneur who just returned to Silicon Valley after time in Los Angeles and in Phoenix. Born to a political family, he was raised in northern California above Sacramento.  While a young man, the center of the known universe was Sacramento, and then Washington DC.  All that changed when he took his first job in technology in South San Jose. Read more…

I first came out here around ’59 to ’61 time frame visiting some friends in Cupertino, after getting out of the Navy. I didn’t actually move out here until probably about ’69. At the time I was working for Ampex as a field engineer, and I would travel around to do work in Chicago, Dallas, and New York, but they would send me out here to do training. Later I went in as a partner in small design company in Palo Alto. Then went out on my own, doing work from my house. Read more…

What do I think about silicon valley? Well it’s where all the jobs are, the high tech jobs are. I work for the airlines, airline employee at San Francisco Airport. I work on the ramp, move bags, luggage, help prep planes. It’s not a high tech job. It’s not a good industry to be in. I like working outside and I guess I like working around the big planes, but I don’t like getting up early in the morning, at 3:30 every morning and it takes me 45 minutes to get to work, I go from 5:00 AM to 1:30 PM, it’s actually not bad as far as commuting goes cause you don’t hit traffic but it is tough getting up that early every morning. Read more…