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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Mark was born in Ohio on an Air Force base, as his father was in the military. His family moved to Los Gatos when he was four. Mark grew up riding skateboards and playing music in a punk-band, and he has enjoyed a bit more of the Silicon Valley’s counter culture. He is married with [...]

[I lived in] Oakland and San Jose [State] was close, very inexpensive to go to: $53 a semester.   So I came down and moved in with two friends I’d known since high school.  We all took electronic engineering.

Richard Barry is a semi-retired start-up veteran of Silicon Valley who recently moved to Southern California with his wife, Christine. Although he grew up poor in Chicago, his ceramic engineering and MBA degrees from the University of Illinois landed him a job in Mountain View with Fairchild Semiconductor in 1966. After riding the Valley’s wild [...]