In 1998 I graduated from Oak Grove High School. My four years there were spent as a proud Eagle. I was involved with theater and cheerleading. My senior year I was the Oak Grove High Eagle mascot. After hanging up my costume, and graduating, I moved to Los Angeles. When I left San Jose I knew I wanted to be in a big city, and LA held that appeal for me. So in 1999 I decided to attend the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise. FIDM is a school where generally everyone can get in, as long as your check clears. Be that as it may, I was proud to have graduated from the two-year program with an Associates Degree in Graphic Design, in spring of 2000.

Los Angeles was quickly losing appeal to me. I was making friends, but the city itself seemed to be as shallow as I had been warned it would be. Some friends that I had met while at FIDM attended USC, which was just a few blocks away. They would invite me to parties and events on campus, and I was like a kid in a candy store. I remember being there and thinking to myself how amazing it would be if I were able to go to this school. I felt the same way when some other friends had taken to be the UCLA campus, and it was there that I decided my dream was to attend either school. My grandfather would rather me go to his alma mater, USC. After a few years living in Los Angeles I realized that the beautiful weather could not hide the dark shade of the Angelino’s. The big city life and appeal it once offered was gone, and I wanted to go back to the Bay Area.

I was 21 years old and felt like the world was my playground. Being raised in the Bay Area, San Francisco seems like the place to be if you want to have a good time with life. So I decided to move to the city and begin my life with my Associates from FIDM. Soon after moving to San Francisco, I made the huge life decision to come out of the closet to my friends and family. Fortunately enough, it went very smoothly and without much turmoil. I was happy to find my parents so accepting of me. It wasn’t that I was afraid they would disown me, I know they love me. The thing was that I was raised Jehovah’s Witness. But by that point in my life, both my parents had decided to not follow the religion any longer.

San Francisco was s much different from Los Angeles. It held that same big city lifestyle that I had always wanted, but it was different for me because it was the Bay Area life I had grew up in. Now that I was out of the closet going to the Castro seemed to be a lot easier. I no longer had to pretend or sneak around. Pretty soon I was making all sorts of friends in the thriving San Francisco gay community. I had also started two jobs while in the city. I worked at Nordstrom Rack in downtown and also for American Design International Group. I had been working at Nordstrom for a while before I got my second design job. Though I will never forget my first day at the ADI group. The date was September 11, 2001.

San Francisco changed after that day. I am pretty sure the entire world has changed after that day. But the world did not change the way I changed. I had made some friends I am not too proud of and started experimenting with recreational drugs. Our drug of choice was crystal meth. Any chance I had to get loaded I would take. It was not long before I knew my life was being smoked away, and I knew I needed to leave San Francisco. So I quite crystal cold turkey and moved back to home, back to the Silicon Valley.

I moved into an apartment on fifth and San Salvador in downtown San Jose. I had to quit my jobs in the city, but I quickly applied for a job at a Kinko’s in Los Gatos and started working there soon after. When I moved back to San Jose I needed to make friends who were not into drugs or the lifestyle I had left in the city. Living across the street from San Jose State really helped to put my life in perspective. I would look outside at the school and students, and ask myself when I was going to get my shit together. I remembered how much I loved the theater in high school, and how many great people I had met. So I started doing musical theater again at Foothill College. I can honestly say that musical theater saved me from a life of drugs. After a year of doing Community Theater in the valley, I wanted more. I saw that a Kinko’s in Manhattan New York was hiring for the position that I held in Los Gatos. So I called them up, and was offered the job.

It was my third major city and I loved it. New York city held the best parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco combined in one great skyline. But the lights of Broadway did not have that same glow for me as it did for so many others. I was a moth, but NYC was not the flame I was drawn to. After only five months it dawned on me that if I wanted to make it anywhere I needed to further my education. New York city inspired me to finish what I had started dreaming four years before. I knew I loved the theater and wanted to be a part of the industry. I also knew that I needed to be realistic, and running away to be on Broadway was not the smartest decision for me. I mean California does not have Broadway, but I was going to make it work for me.

Once again I moved back to the Silicon Valley. I guess the reason I came back here after moving away each time, was because I felt secure. I grew up here, my family was still here, and I know this place more than anywhere else in the world.

After moving back I enrolled in De Anza College in hopes of transferring to San Jose State. I completed my GE courses at De Anza and in the fall of 2007 I transferred to SJSU. San Jose State was where I found my talent reached far beyond singing and acting on the stage. I had the great opportunity to work on set design for three productions at school; designing the sets for Death of a Salesman, Urinetown the Musical, and Mummified Deer. All of these productions helped me to become a serious set designer and member of the Bay Area theater industry. They also all helped me to further my education after San Jose State.

I graduated with a BA in Theater Arts from San Jose State in the spring of 2009. In fall of 2009 I moved back to Los Angeles to attend UCLA and their MFA program for Theatrical Set Design. I was living the dream that several years before seemed to be a far off fantasy. After a quarter at UCLA I was not as happy as I thought I would have been when I imagined myself there when I was twenty-one. I had to make one of the hardest and most adult decisions I have ever had to make. I had only spent one quarter in the MFA program before withdrawing myself entirely. I was not happy there, and I wanted to be happy while in the industry. So again I moved back home to San Jose.

As soon as I moved back to the Silicon Valley I knew that was where I wanted to be all along. I had wondered all over the country to find myself back in the same place each time, and it wasn’t until one of my dreams came true that I realized what I really wanted. And that was to be in the Bay Area producing great theater.

I am currently working for the well-known Bay Area theater company Theater Works. They are well known for producing new works from playwrights as well as Tony winning musical and plays. I have recently designed the set for the San Francisco sketch comedy group Killing My Lobster, for their production of Goes to Church. And I will be designing their props for the production of Goes undercover. I am now living in Palo Alto designing sets for local Bay Area Theater productions. After living in three of the biggest cities in the country, I have to say that I like the Silicon Valley best. I like being able to come home to a clean neighborhood and find a parking space.

I’m not the kind of person to sit around and wait for things to happen. Instead, I make things happen, and that is exactly what I did in this case. In August 2006, after months of planning, I moved to San Jose, the so-called heart of the Silicon Valley.

When I arrived in San Jose, it felt foreign and frightening to me. It was foreign, because it wasn’t my home. It was frightening, because I felt misplaced. I was a girl from a small town in Sweden who had to learn how to not just live, but also enjoy life in one of the largest cities in the U.S.

Coming from Stenungsund, Sweden I had a certain vision of the Bay Area.  But as far as the Silicon Valley goes, though it is part of the Bay Area, I didn’t really know what to expect. I only knew what I had seen on TV and read in newspapers, both of which had lead me to think of the Silicon Valley as the world’s most famous gathering point for technology addicts.

I have always been resistant to new technology. I’ve never really trusted it, nor have I relied heavily on it. Therefore, I was a bit worried that I was going to get sucked into the addiction and not be able to eventually return to my semi low-tech lifestyle in Sweden without feeling empty inside. I was worried I would crave technology so bad once I returned home that I wouldn’t be able to appreciate nature and simple living the same way I had done in the past.

Back home walking around my neighborhood is a way of life.  I walked everywhere and since I have no car here in the Bay Area, I walked.  Walking is one habit I never lost and one thing I really love.  Technology makes it very easy to do everything all at once.

But today, nearly four years after I arrived here, I have learned that the Silicon Valley is so much more than simply a place for technology addicts. Most importantly, this is a place where people can truly be who they are. I feel I don’t have to think twice before releasing my personality into the valley. As the queer woman that I am, I feel safe displaying my queerness to the public here.

Not everyone will agree with the way I live my life, but I still feel there is a great support network for people like me in this community. Perhaps that is related to the fact that the Silicon Valley is a neighbor of San Francisco, the so-called gay capital of the U.S. and possibly even the world. Quite frankly, I don’t care what the reasons are. What matters is that I feel accepted here, because that is all that it takes for me to call the Silicon Valley my home.

As I am nearing the end of this journey, I feel like a new person. Intellectually, I have grown so much during the past four years. And when the day comes when I am returning to Sweden, I will not only bring with me a four-year degree, but I will also bring an improved personality. Though one can see the traces of the old me, I am no longer the same person I was four years ago. I am wiser now, and as much as I want to solely attribute this growth to SJSU, I know I owe this positive change to the Silicon Valley as well.

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. They gathered with other Vietnamese there and tried to stick together to remember the culture.  My dad and my mom worked night and day; my dad was a janitor while attending a college in Oklahoma.   After college, my father worked at AT&T, but he felt that he wanted something more than being under a corporation.  My parents heard that a lot of Vietnamese families were moving to San José, so they sold everything and moved, just like that.  When they got to California, Dad opened up his first business which was a liquor store.  But I’ll just say this, it was 1989… and my dad didn’t know anything about earthquake insurance.  It was quite a big earthquake and it created a lot of debt that we had to dig our way out of.

What I understand of small businesses, especially in Silicon Valley, small business owners are usually immigrants Vietnamese or Mexican descent who open up food places or small shops just to make ends meet.  I’ve been working with my family since I was 12 years old.  My family works 24/7 in our liquor store, gas station and convenience store.  I appreciate what my parents gave me.  I got an education out of it.  I got a good life.

I also do PR for a shoe company called PLSTK Design; we manufacture our own shoes.  I’m part of a couple of clothing companies and consult with other clothing designers as well.  I’m kind of a Jack of all trades, not a king of any because I gotta taste all the things in the world as they come.  There is a need for certain individuals to come together with other people who sharpen them.  Iron sharpens iron.  San José specifically has that movement there’s no name to it, there’s no way of defining the people in it.  I just call it progress. Creativity.  Art.  There’s no need to define it.  A lot of people think it’s hard to believe that I find a lot of my friends that are into the arts or other creative realms locally.  Most artists tend to move out to LA if they’re doing film or New York if they’re doing theatre or fashion, but there’s a lot of talent here that is just undiscovered by the denizens of the city.  When it comes to music or art or any realm of artistic creativity, it’s here, it’s just that the community has yet to unify.  I stay here because I can see it happening, because I’ve been a part of this creative movement I’d rather stay until it manifests itself.  I can go anywhere, but why do I need to move somewhere else when I am true to myself here.

I’ve always been a poet; I mean every young budding poet begins their work as an adolescent, writing love poetry—rhyming couplets and all that corny stuff.  I didn’t get serious about my work until 2001 when I hit a low point in my life. After high school, I was feeling unfulfilled because I wasn’t motivated and just wanted to get away from my parents. So, I went to Academy of Art and spent a year in San Fran—studying advertizing of all things!  I got heavily into drugs, which was more of an escape than anything.  But, I felt like I was cheating myself of my true worth.  When I came back to San Jose from San Francisco, Cafecito open mic was a godsend because it allowed me to write whatever I felt and read openly to an audience.

A lot of my writing stems from my background as a Vietnamese American growing up in San José and being around so many different types of Asian ethnicities and large Hispanic culture.  There is openness about race, gender and sexual preference in the Bay Area that isn’t found elsewhere.  When I write about my Vietnamese background, I often write about my time in Oklahoma where I experienced  a lot of racism that, at the time, seemed subtle but looking back on it now, it was full blown.  I feel like I need to break stereotypes and address stereotypes of my upbringing through my poetry.  My work consists of whatever happens in the community, whatever happens to the underdog, those who are unspoken for, those who go against the majority.

A lot of people say I write specifically Vietnamese poetry, if that’s the case, so be it.  One of the poets that impresses me the most is Pablo Neruda—and he wrote TONS of love poems.  He is called a love poet.  He wrote what he was passionate about and what made him respond the most.  My poetry focuses on my family and their choices, growing up and my experiences as an American.  My writing can be attributed to their sacrifices, their story. Especially in the Asian culture they don’t speak about emotions or the past or especially things that are painful.  You might think this is insignificant, but it’s important to me.  If I don’t write anything else, so be it.

It’s partially cultural but I am not satisfied unless I have something that I can say is my own.  It’s not somebody else’s ideas but it’s my own in life.  I can be proud to say that my poetry is mine alone.  The way I write, the way I create or recite my work has affected a lot of people’s lives, and I have been humbled by that.  People have come up to me and said “You have changed the way I see writing.  You have changed the way I see myself.” That keeps me going—it don’t pay me—but it fulfills me spiritually.  It’s one of the reasons that I want to be a teacher, the ability to change people’s lives.

Technology has been a big part of my life where I have been able to reach more people with a broader scope than I can with a pen and paper.  If I had to go back to pen and paper I would but I had to move with the times.  In the literal sense, Silicon Valley is the place of networking, advancement of technology and innovation.  In that same turn, it’s about personal development—people learning to be open, slowly breaking their way through the walls of their lives.  That same quality of what Silicon Valley is: it’s progress… sure, that’s what silicon valley is, it’s humanity.  It’s people learning to be better and learning live life again.  And I think it’s any city any damn in city in America. If people can advance themselves then that’s what Silicon Valley is.  It’s not the technology, it’s the humanity.

When you grow up as a kid in Bombay, you’re career options are engineer or a doctor. I never wanted to become a doctor, as much as I like helping people, I can’t do blood. I had no idea what I was getting into when I chose engineering.

The real reason I came to Silicon Valley is–it’s the real land of opportunity. In India, because of the population and the competition, you’re always struggling for you’re basic needs in the life pyramid. In the Silicon Valley, you can go do you’re hobbies and passions and stuff. You can earn enough to go beyond you’re basic needs. It’s really hard to get that in India.

Here you have all of you’re basic necessities, you can follow whatever you like, there’s perfect weather and hot chicks. Silicon Valley has it’s own vibe. You’re cost of living in San Jose is higher than New York or Miami. This neighborhood is the most expensive in the U.S. That speaks a lot by itself. Also being so close to San Francisco and Berkeley, I think San Francisco is the most beautiful city in the world and it’s only 40 miles from here. If you want Burning Man, just hop on a plane to Vegas, Nevada, it’s only a few hours from here. Silicon Valley has money, outdoors and good weather–and the blondes.

The Silicon Valley is filled with Indian entrepreneurs and all these Indian guys who made it big. They’re living the American Dream, that’s how we look at it, that’s our motivation getting through those two years to obtain a Masters.

What pulls me here, for one is the American Dream that exists on every corner, and I think it’s the weather. The weather out here is very similar to Bombay, it never snows, it’s hot.

I think it’s the people of Silicon Valley, I mean where else in the world are you neighbors with guys who invented stuff which you use every day in your life. Just knowing that you can be neighbors with people like Steve Jobs and John Chambers, just being close to them, is an experience in itself. These guys invented the most basic, most complicated things that people can’t live without.  These innovations were invented in startups and garages in Silicon Valley. If ever there was a survey that asked how has one place helped the world the most, I think Silicon Valley would top that list.

Silicon Valley harbors innovation, and innovation is the only measure by which you see the human species progressing. The internet was developed by two graduates studying right here at Stanford in Silicon Valley–that’s a special feeling. I go to Stanford twice a week.

It’s that special feeling and the diversity of people from all over, in their respected fields hanging out in one place, doing stuff together, basically doing good for the world and in the process making some money and living a good life. I mean, you should ask yourself why would you not want to live in Silicon Valley.

For me it’s not really what brought me here, it’s what keeps me here.

I don’t know if it’s the California flavor, or the intoxication Silicon Valley gives you, but everyone who comes here becomes part of Silicon Valley. It touches you very quickly, and for those that it doesn’t, they probably get out of here very quickly as well.

The work culture you feel in Silicon Valley is amazing. In India, a manager is like God, and people tend to suck up to him. None of all that nonsense is in Silicon Valley, the whole corporate culture is not all about money incentives, it’s about technology and innovation and how we can change the world. That’s what the talks are about at Cisco, even though they mention numbers for the stock holders, it’s never about the banks in New York. Cisco is about how we can improve the world. I feel apart of Cisco, I’m accepted, and I can do something that can potentially help people in the area and the world.

So many attempts have been made to create tech parks or so called Silicon Valleys. There is no place that comes close to what Silicon Valley is. There are places in the U.S. that have a high concentration in geeks, and other places with stinky rich people, but Silicon Valley is a place where you have both. You need that potent mixture of nerds and rich people who have an understanding of business to get that spark in start ups. It’s a cycle, a loop, the more this happens, the more rich people and nerds get attracted to Silicon Valley, and it keeps growing exponentially. Why would you ever want to leave a place like this?

80% of the companies of the startups in Silicon Valley, the founders are immigrants or first generation kids. International students have many issues with their visas. They have to get a work visa that binds them to a particular company. There’s a limited quota and a lottery system. Even if they get promoted in their own company, the visa becomes void after three years; and if they don’t get through, or they want to switch companies, they have to go back and start the process all again.

I feel that Silicon Valley definitely needs to have a start up visa for students. Just let kids be on there own, not bound to a particular company because that kills innovation. Picture yourself in their shoes: you can’t leave a company or you risk becoming an illegal immigrant, and companies don’t want to hire you because they have to sponsor your visa. It’s like catch-22.

There’s a bill being tabled in Congress right now just for the Silicon Valley, concerning international students, but it only applies to those whose address is between Gilroy to Palo Alto. For me, Silicon Valley would be the whole Bay Area.

There are some pretty fundamental differences between where I grew up and Silicon Valley. Growing up in Florida is unlike growing up in any other part of the country, just because Florida is such a strange, bizarre place. People tend to run away from things to go to Florida. There’s kind of a desperation, and the Buccaneers are the football team because there’s a pirate mentality. Not everything is quite as it seems and there’s always a bit of very subtle low-level desperation. Now, in the Midwest, there’s a kind of earnest, basic, common-sense mentality of “get ‘er done,” but there’s a kind of working ethos that I always respected and admired, because you grow up and work around farms. You go home, and there’ a cow walking across your backyard, because you live in the northwestern part of Appalachia.  It’s a working environment without a lot of tolerance for ephemeral thinking. Well, Silicon Valley is all about consensual hallucination. I mean, the Internet is a thing that we chose to imbue with some value because we contribute to it. It’s not a thing until we perform it, through our writing, and our responding, so one thing that I love about Silicon Valley is that it’s so much about ideas of place rather than a place. You know, there was a discussion a few years ago about putting up road signs, “Welcome to Silicon Valley,” but nobody could decide, you know “where is it?” So the idea is that it is a desire for place rather than a place that constructs desire. And that always fascinated me.

When I came here in ’98 the dot com boom was just exploding. The image I had of Silicon Valley when I came here was, going into an over-crowded restaurant, waiting for way too long to get in, so I had to go across the street to Borders and I’m flipping through this magazine that says Dow 40,000 and I’m walking back and I’m listening to all the conversation and I hear everyone talking about money. This place was awash with money. Then I go into my class the next day, and all my students are behind their computers because we’re doing web design, and every once in a while I look at what they’re doing, and a few of them are looking at their stocks because some of them work for Silicon Valley businesses that are just blowing up and making money, and there’s this sense that anything can happen. Now, that’s changed a lot, but it’s not quite gone away, so that also marks Silicon Valley—the sense that we can really build the future here.

A memory that has always stuck with me about Silicon Valley during the dot com boom was when I showed up and I was walking from the Light rail to campus, I remember there were four security guards per square foot than any other place. Someone who hasn’t been here for a while might see that as sort of an odd illustration, but San Jose used to be a really kind of a dumpy, scary, sad low-level place. There were a couple of towers, but mostly it was just this long stretch of boredom and sadness and economic ennui. And so some of the money rolls in, and people are used to San Jose being viewed as strangely scary, and so there was a lot of private security, because there were a lot of businesses starting up who wanted their people to get where they were going and wanted them to have a sense of “okay, everything’s going to be okay,” and I will for the rest of my time here never forget how many different badges I saw of people walking about, working for different private security companies, and thinking how odd that was.

Well now, that went away and lot of the “this is new, and we need to have new rules,” that sense of “we’re on the cusp of this new world,” has really kind of been sunk beneath the reality that there are all sorts of Silicon Valleys and other ways of trying to create the online world all around the world, and we’re not the only place for that so the sense that this is unique and special has—not gone away, but shrunk a tiny bit.

Another change obviously is the sense that someone could be a multimillionaire by selling business.com as a domain name. Literally, the domain name business.com got some guy seven million dollars. Well that went away. And the sense that you really don’t have to work that hard, just have an idea on a napkin and find an angel investor who will say, “sure, I will give you multiple millions of dollars for that idea.” Well now, so many people lost so much money during the dot com bust, and were left with the unhappy reality that making money in Silicon Valley is really very much like making money anywhere else. You have to have a product, and you have to be able to see your plan through. And so the grown ups have come in. And those very lucky kids who made all there millions of dollars, they’re all living in Paris right now.

The idea that I could get a job here says a lot about Silicon Valley because I was a masters and Ph.D. candidate who had never taken a course in Internet Communication because it did not exist. I became an Assistant Professor of Communications studies specializing in Internet Communication having never taken a course in the topic. Well, that may sound terribly fraudulent, except there weren’t a lot of courses on the topic. So, what did I have? Well, I had my ability to sell the vision of what I could do. And that to me is Silicon Valley.

In the early 1980’s, an abundance of Vietnamese immigrants had fled to the Silicon Valley. They were referred to as “Boat People.” The Boat People I encountered didn’t know any English, but worked very hard and were very disciplined. During the 80’s, I became supervisor at Wells Fargo. Many of the Vietnamese immigrants had enrolled at San Jose State. Through work experience programs, they were sent to Wells Fargo and were interviewed by me. Also, the high schools had work experience programs. All of the school counselors knew me, and would send me high school students for interviews as well.

While at the Alameda Wells Fargo, I befriended my co-workers, and we experienced local different restaurants. Japantown was right near Wells Fargo on Alameda, so we would go to Happi House or Ginza House for dinner, or stop by the Manju shop for rice candies. Happi House eventually became a Japanese alternative fast-food chain, but the one we went to on Fifth and Taylor was the first. I later introduced Happi House to my visiting family members. We’d always get the teriyaki chicken, beef rice, and chicken salad with the crispy rice noodles, then go to the Flea Market on Berryessa. To this day, Happi House has become a must stop for my family when they come to town.

My friends and I also bonded through sports and games. I became a San Francisco Giants fan after my friends had expressed their interest in the team, so we began to attend the games and spring training. We also spent our leisurely time at Bingo. I had played Bingo in Salinas through church and other fundraisers, so I already had interest in it; it was fun and familiar. I played at Raiders Bingo near Montmorecy. They had games on Thursday and Friday nights and Sundays during the day time. I’d pay $40 for 36 games, and would be there for about four hours. Sometimes I would win $250 in one game at Raiders. Back then, that was the highest paid amount, unlike today where you can win $1,000. I’d also play at Saint Francis Cabrini- churches always held Bingo fundraisers. I never won at Saint Francis Cabrini; the papers there were too hard to win off of.

In 1975, I bought my first house. It was a brand new, three bedroom, one story home on Braham and Mereddian Lane. It cost $35,000 and the monthly payment was $264. Even by the housing standards back then, it was an affordable home. Ten years later, I sold the Braham house for $139,000 and bought a bigger house on Montmorecy. It was brand new, and cost $180,000.  It was a two story, four bedroom house, with a pool and hot tub. Both of these home were in the Almaden Valley, but it wasn’t the “rich” Almaden Valley. Still, both homes were in nice locations and had curb appeal. My second home on Montmorecy used to be a walnut orchard, but the trees were cut down to make room for the new homes. I had two walnut trees in my backyard near the pool. It was all that was left of the orchard.

While living in San Jose, I saw the city change at a rapid pace. A lot of new freeways were built from 1974-1980. There was always a lot of traffic because of the construction. Lightrail was constructed in the 1970’s, then was further expanded in the 1990’s. I took the Braham route to get to and from work. Monterey Road used to be the only way to travel to and from Salinas. Monterey Road used to be filled with rows of apricot, plum, and cherry trees, but they were all cut down for housing developments.

I also grew up around the time of World War II, when Nazi idealism seemed to be everywhere. I recalled a time when a German woman had come up to my mother and said I was the “perfect child.” In 1962 when I was eighteen years old, I met my husband who was in the Seabees. He was stationed in the Philippines where he worked as an electrician for the US Navy. After my husband’s tour was finished, he came back to the Bay Area, where we began a family and he began work at a small electrical company. Through hard work, he was able to become a valuable employee. In 1995 he became the sole owner of the electrical company, where he spent many years as the general foreman of the company. My children grew up in this area and I am thankful for the environment they were able to grow in. San Jose was a safe place and growing rapidly. Families began to move in and the orchards receded.  Then the Tech boom happened and it was as if the Silicon Valley grew up over night. Since this change, I have noticed more opportunities arising as a direct result. My husband retired in 2005, and my sons become co-owners of the company. Because the Silicon Valley has grown into such an important corporate area for all sorts of industries, my family’s company has been greatly affected. The company is the foundation of my family and has given us the opportunities we enjoy today. At the time when IBM was at his peak, my family was able to move forward along with the company and become one of the top five companies in the Bay Area. Without the Tech Boom, my family’s company would still be a small family-owned affair that struggled along with many of the companies similar to ours.

I believe that the Silicon Valley is one of the best areas to have a family. My granddaughters are first generation college students and it makes me very proud. I look back on all that my family has experienced and know if we had been anywhere else, these opportunities would not have come our way. The Silicon Valley is an amazing place with both its historical significance as well as the potential for future importance. Some of the greatest minds have come from the Silicon Valley.

Another aspect of the Silicon Valley that I have noticed, especially in San Jose/Campbell area is the change in diversity. When I first came to San Jose, the community was mostly white and European immigrants who were middle class farmers. As the years past and the communities began to develop, more and more diverse cultures began to filter in and live in the area. I think this helped to expand the Silicon Valley and also aided in the Tech boom that happened years later. After the computer industry expanded, it seemed to take over the Silicon Valley. More and more people came to experience the opportunities this industry provided. This made the area even more diverse. Places that were once filled with middle class farmers were then changed into suburban areas with every culture living in the neighborhood. When you look at the Silicon Valley in a global perspective, the orchards that once defined it are never really seen. The computer defined the area and provided more opportunities than ever. As cliché as it sounds, the Silicon Valley is as much a part of me as my own heritage.

For the last 50 years and for the next 50 years, Silicon Valley will be the center of global innovation.  There’s something special about all of the specific things that came together to facilitate the environment here.  Even though we have tech titans rise and fall, and rise again sometimes, think Steve Jobs, we have an unending flood of the “next big thing’s” coming out of dorm rooms, coffee shops or even board rooms.  Some point to the amazing level of education in the area: Stanford, Berkeley, USF, SJSU, UCSC and Santa Clara – not to mention the smaller private schools.  Some point to the amazing amount of capital available on Sand Hill Road. Some point to the concentration of high tech companies: Seagate, Genentech, HP, Intel, Cisco, Apple, eBay, Oracle and Google.   And some point at the new IT companies that are causing a stir internationally; twitter, facebook, and the tech crunch 50. Some would point to NASA and Moffett Field.  I would say that the magic of Silicon Valley comes from a unique blend of all of the above.  With a pinch of Fry’s Electronics, and the wines of Napa Valley to flavor.

There is something that keeps bringing people here to start companies, and there is something that keeps people creating here that doesn’t seem to happen quite as big and quite as well as anywhere else.  To me, on start-up number five, I can’t think of a better place to start a company.  And all this is true, in spite of California being a horrible state to do business in. To me the Silicon Valley is about what can be tomorrow.  Today’s don’t mean as much here, because tomorrow is what most people are working for. I guess that means that entertainers have Hollywood, politicians have Washington DC and entrepreneurs have Silicon Valley.

I can remember so many vivid parts of my first company here in the valley.  Even more vivid than what I had for lunch last week.  The smell of the boardroom of my first VC pitch.  How sweet the Danish at my first meeting at Wilson Sonsini.  The smell of pizza mixed with coke at 4am trying to fix that last errant piece of code.  The sound of the plastic protective wrapper coming off of your lucky pitch shirt fresh off the dry cleaners magic machine and rushing to get it on before throwing yourself into the car to race to a pitch. The empty feeling of getting a 40 million dollar valuation pulled the day after you received the term sheet.  And to think that all of those came from just my first company.

The best part of Silicon Valley, is that no matter what happened the last time, next time can be different.  At no point in my childhood did I expect to be a businessman, my plan was to go into politics.  The draw of this place ultimately tore me from school in Chico, Ca with dreams of my first company. Now as I come to return to the Bay after working in two separate large metropolitan areas, I can tell you honestly that they don’t have that extra ingredient that makes Silicon Valley the epicenter of innovation…..

When I came out here, Highway 9 was the only way to get from here to Santa Cruz. If you wanted to get to Cupertino from the Peninsula, you had to take a two lane country road – Saratoga Sunnyvale – out into the orchards. I remember when they were building 280. They tethered bulldozers to cables, so they could work the steep side slopes, on up through Palo Alto.

Hind sight is 20-20, as they say. I could have bought a two acre parcel, off La Honda Grade, over looking the Stanford campus back then. I thought $48,000 was a lot of money at the time. My wife and I bought a tract home in ’73 in the Evergreen area of San Jose. I was still commuting to Palo Alto at the time. People would say: The eastside, why do you want to live there. One of my wife’s friends asked her: Why would a nice girl like you want to live on the eastside.

When I was working in Palo Alto, off of east Embarcadero, we shared part of the building with a company called Go Power. They would test all sorts of humongous engines using water brake dynamometers. They built this special dynamometer for a 600 horsepower Cummins diesel engine they were trying to see if the could stall it out. Strapped down, this thing was wide open – full throttle. It made some much heat that the exhaust –accidentally angled toward the sewer – made so much steam that manhole covers were pushed up all the way down Embarcadero.

I remember asking the real estate agent about the parcel next to the one she was showing me, in the hills above San Jose. This was ’75, and we were still living in Evergreen. Moving into the “country” was my idea. I took my wife up to see the four acres, for the first time, at night, which wasn’t the best. She really thought I was taking her to the end of the world. The property had a house that we lived in until I built what we live in now. At one time, it was a tiny little single-horse barn built out of cinder blocks. The bathroom and bedroom and kitchen all had different floor heights, because it was put together in such a piecemeal way. Even before the county of Santa Clara would even look at the building plans for the house I had to get an easement from the land developer who owned the thirty acres bordering our property. In order to build the road, I had to sign an agreement with him, saying that if he were to ever build on his land, he could widen the road by another ten feet from the shoulder, taking out the cottage.

I hired an architect from Santa Cruz who had designed a couple “pole houses” in the area. The idea is that, in an earthquake, everything moves. It’s supposed to sway with the force. In ’89 it did just that. I didn’t want to try framing, so I hired out framers. It took them no time to do it – not a wasted bit of movement in their work. I also had a drywaller hang and tape everything. Everything else, including drilling the holes in the ground for the poles, and placing all the ceiling beams, I did by myself with the help of neighbors. In ’89 the chimney for the stove was knocked, all twenty feet of it, down, all over the living room floor.

We don’t live that far out in the hills, but just far enough out where people who need to get rid of stolen cars can drive a few minutes and feel like they are “way out there.”  A little after the house was finished, some people pushed a van, stolen from the lot of Sunnyvale Ford, off the side of Mt. Hamilton road. It literally had less than fifty miles on the odometer. They drove it up there and rolled it over the edge – let it go straight down the neighbor’s hillside – straight inline with their kitchen window. The only thing that kept it from going right through their house was a pine tree. Then people will also just torch them.

Our private road goes on through the thirty acres. Another property, that borders the lower corner of ours, has access to use it. Somewhere before ’89 the owner was renting out shacks, horse barns, and RV trailers down there. They were making drugs. Cooking meth. The owner knew about it, he was getting something out of it too. So, he ended up kicking some of these people out, then kept their stuff – like a television, and some stereo equipment . To make a long story short. Three of these guys came back to break in and get there stuff back. They were so high on drugs they missed the turn off, kept driving up Mt. Hamilton, and crashed not too far from where the van was dumped. Anyways, the CHP is up there dealing the accident. One of the guys makes it down the hill, walks through our road, and is standing in our turn- around, with a sawed off shotgun. At the time we left the keys in the ignition. I walked out there, looked at him, he waved the shotgun at me. I went back inside. He drove my car down to the property below us, stole a television, then drove back out our road. The whole time I’m on the phone with 911. Yelling at them. It was a gray Oldsmobile. They kept repeating green Oldsmobile. We keep going back and forth, as I’m watching them go right down the road. The CHP drove right past them. 2000 miles later, and rod through the block, they dumped it in front of a house on Byrd Avenue.

The weirdest thing I remember at the airport, was the morning after 9/11 at work, and there was no noise at all, no airplanes taking off, no buses, no cars, all I saw were policemen everywhere and the only thing I could hear was myself breathing. Riding your bike in at 5 in the morning – I parked a ways away – and there was no noise and it was dark and all I could hear was me breathing. Or the day the body fell out of the plane – I wasn’t there that day – but some stow away in Europe was running from the police and he got out on the ramp and he jumped into the plane on the wheel well and the plane took off and the wheels went up and he got crushed, and the body thawed and fell out of the plane overnight when it was parked here. We made up some jokes about that. One time I saw a plane come back after a bird hit it, it had a hole right in the fuselage, they were pretty far out and had a bird strike and it went right through the front of the plane and put a hole in it and they had to come back.

1963 we moved to Califonia, out from Illinois to California, there was nothing but orchards and there wasn’t a Silicon Valley. I was about 8 or 9. When we came from Illinois it took us about 2 months, we camped along the way and we went to Yellowstone and different parks; we saw a lot of the country. I remember when we came out here there were a lot of people coming out to California, my grandpa used to talk to everyone on the way and it seemed like everyone was going to California, it was like a mini gold rush – or it seemed that way at least.

My dad didn’t have a job when we came here, he quit the job he had in Illinois and he was planning on finding a job when we got here. The first job he found was at General Motors, and he eventually ended up at IBM. There wasn’t as much back then; well there were more manufacturing jobs then, and a lot of orchards. In remember I think in 1974 or 75, around when I graduated high school they had the gas rationing, that was kind of weird you had to sit in line to get gas, I think we were in a recession then. I remember in 1970 or in the early 70s they started building a bunch of homes and tearing out the orchards and the bay area exploded, I mean population wise, houses going up and chimneys everywhere.

The valley’s a great place to live i’ve always liked it here. Cause there’s so much to do and it’s very diverse, it’s diverse in a lot of ways and I like that. A lot of different types of people and a lot of different types of land. The beach is close, the Sierras are close, the wine country and Monterey bay. I used to like all the orchards too. I think in 1978 or so they sprayed melathion over the whole valley, it’s like a poison to kill the fruit flies, helicopters would come fly over your house at night time and spray poison to kill the fruit flies, it was the weirdest thing. It was just kind of strange. But now they don’t have to worry about that because there’s no orchards left.