Community in Silicon Valley

I've been thinking about an essay by Chris Arnade called How to build the perfect city for the last few weeks. To sum it up in my own words: Everybody, everywhere wants the sense of belonging that comes from community.

Where is community in Silicon Valley? I have lived most of my life in Silicon Valley having grown up in a suburb of St. Louis and lived briefly during grad school in Chicago. For as long as I've lived here, Silicon Valley has felt lacking in community. There are pockets of community in the larger Bay Area, but where can you find community in the San Mateo / Santa Clara / Alameda county region? These have always been the areas in which you are more likely to find parents raising kids than the cities. Yet the feeling is different from the feeling of community I can remember from my time in the midwest.

Having spent a few weeks thinking and talking to others about our situation, I've gradually come to what I'm sure for many is the obvious conclusion: Our community in Silicon Valley is built around our coworkers and former coworkers.

Are there other communities? Sure. Not trying to argue that the only communities that exist in Silicon Vally are professional networks. What I am trying to say is that more people who choose to live and work in Silicon Valley are finding more of the fulfillment of their need for community through coworkers and former coworkers than you will find in nearly any other place I have known.

There are benefits and disadvantages to this, of course. Work-life balance simply doesn't exist here the way it does in many other places. Good luck getting parents to volunteer at their kids' schools. Local churches, synagogues, and temples? Not quite the same experience. Yet there is one place in the world that has consistently been at the forefront of innovation for most of the last 100 years.

Here I want to give a nod to Steve Blank , who I believe understands this deeply and has been writing about what it means for many decades at this point. See, for example, this essay about how the natural growth of a startup can lead to a crisis in personal identity and loss of community. I looked carefully for another essay of his in which I would have sworn he described how one day, as you're commuting to work in Silicon Valley, you might come to the realization that you're not actually working for any particular company, but for Silicon Valley as a whole. But this essay on Silicon Valley's pay-it-forward culture is the closest I can find this morning. (Also the proximate source for the image of Steve Jobs and Bob Noyce.)

If you're interested in learning more about the roots of Silicon Valley culture, Tom Wolfe's portrait of Bob Noyce is required reading, as is The HP Way by David Packard. As I read the obits in the San Jose Mercury News these days, I lament the number of WWII vets who were born in the midwest that are passing away, taking with them some of the community-first culture that folks like Bob Noyce transplanted into Silicon Valley.