The Essential Silicon Valley?
rg: The "classic SV" along the south-western corner of the bay (Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park) dates from the old days (the '60s to the late '80s).  Back then, all the VCs lived up north in urban San Francisco, and all the startup employees lived in auto-oriented suburbs down there.Eventually many VCs moved their offices south, but nowadays more and more of the startups are actually in San Francisco.  The SF lifestyle of easy walkability, little dependence on cars, vastly better restaurants, bars, shops, and entertainment, and all the other advantages of a dense city, appeal more to many of the current generation of hackers, and make SF more characteristic of contemporary startups than the old historic corridor located an hour south.One of the interesting sights every morning now in San Francisco are all the private wifi-equipped coaches picking up employees for their free hour ride down to Google, Microsoft SVC, and other mega-employers located on large campuses in SV.  Those employees, like startup founders, increasingly prefer to live in SF (and refuse to commute by car for two hours a day).The "valley advantage" is much the same in both areas, and there's a fair amount of interchange, but the two areas are very different, and they are far enough apart to discourage casual traveling between them.  Lots of people who live down in the suburbs of the old SV don't really feel comfortable anywhere in SF except Moscone Center for WWDC (and may only come up to the city once a year).  Lots of people who live in SF can't imagine living in the upscale suburbs down south where you have to get in a car to go anywhere at all (and they may only go down to Stanford a few times a year).But both are very interesting areas, and both have good people.  For the "classic SV", look in the towns along the western hills from Cupertino up to Menlo Park; for the "contemporary SV" look around SF.