Quote:
Originally Posted by Chisouthside
Yeah there's plenty of tech companies in SF and plenty of workers travel both way between SF and Silicon Valley, but SF is def not silicon valley. Silicon valley has a particular history, cultural and geographic feel specific to the South Bay. I would say the epi center of SV is located in the area where North Side San Jose, Cupertino, Santa Clara, Mountain View and Sunnyvale meet.
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SF is definitely part of "Silicon Valley" when using the term to refer to the Bay Area's tech industry as a whole...which is a thing that many people have been doing, for decades.
But if you want to use the definition that roughly conflates "Silicon Valley" with the "Santa Clara Valley", then yes you can say that SF is not part of "Silicon Valley".
But by that logic, a massive chunk of the Bay Area's tech industry, including a lot of stuff that people typically think of when they think of "silicon valley" (youtube and twitter, for example), is also excluded from "Silicon Valley".
The tech industry is spread all over the place, with the majority located along the peninsula stretching between SJ and SF, as well as within the two cities themselves.
To help make my point, here's a list from Wikipedia of Bay Area tech companies based somewhere other than the Santa Clara Valley/county/south bay (as of 2020):
AMAX Information Technologies – Fremont
Antec – Fremont
Asus – Fremont
Digidesign – Daly City
Dust Networks – Hayward
Fitbit – San Francisco
Jawbone – San Francisco
Keysight - Santa Rosa
Lam Research (331) – Fremont
Logitech – Newark
Monster Cable Products – Brisbane
Silicon Graphics – Fremont (acquired by Rackable Systems)
Synnex (130) – Fremont
THX – San Rafael
Capcom U.S.A. - San Francisco
Dolby Laboratories – San Francisco
Electronic Arts – Redwood City
Industrial Light & Magic – San Francisco
Kerner Optical – San Rafael
Lucasfilm Animation – San Rafael (Lucas Valley)
Niantic – San Francisco
Pandora Radio – Oakland
Philo – San Francisco
Pixar – Emeryville
Roblox – San Mateo
Sega of America – San Francisco
Skywalker Sound – San Rafael (Lucas Valley)
Sony Interactive Entertainment (PlayStation) – San Mateo
Ubisoft – San Francisco
Zynga – San Francisco
Airbnb – San Francisco
Ask.com – Oakland
Box – Redwood City
Craigslist – San Francisco
DoorDash - San Francisco
Dropbox - San Francisco
Ebates – San Francisco
Evernote - Redwood City
Meta (46) – Menlo Park
Glassdoor - Mill Valley
Instacart – San Francisco
Lyft – San Francisco
Pinterest – San Francisco
Poshmark - Redwood City
Salesforce.com (190) – San Francisco
Slack Technologies – San Francisco
Poll Everywhere - San Francisco
Postmates - San Francisco
SurveyMonkey – San Mateo
Tripping.com – San Francisco
Twitch – San Francisco
Twitter – San Francisco
Uber (228) – San Francisco
Wikimedia Foundation – San Francisco
Workday – Pleasanton
Yelp – San Francisco
YouTube – San Bruno - subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.
Zendesk - San Francisco
Zoosk – San Francisco
Bleacher Report – San Francisco
MobiTV – Emeryville
TubeMogul – Emeryville
AppDynamics – San Francisco
Autodesk – San Rafael
Box - Redwood City
DocuSign - San Francisco
Dropbox - San Francisco
Genesys – Daly City
GitHub - San Francisco
Neo4j – San Mateo
NetSuite – San Mateo
New Relic – San Francisco
North Beach Games - San Rafael[3]
Piggybackr – San Francisco
Pivotal Software – San Francisco
Pyze – Redwood City
Splunk – San Francisco
Sybase – Dublin
So if someone were to refer to these companies as being part of "Silicon Valley"...would you correct them? Speaking for myself at least, as a lifelong Bay Area resident, I wouldn't.