Something culturally strange is happening in San Francisco. I'm not talking about the "let your freak flag fly," live-and-let-live vibe for which the city is famous. I'm talking the growing cultural rift between the city and Silicon Valley, despite the obvious geographic overlap. If you drew a Venn Diagram between San Francisco hipsters and people who work in and around the Web industry it'd look like a more shoved-together version of the MasterCard logo. While many of the largest technology companies of the last few decades'--like Apple, Cisco, Oracle, eBay, Yahoo, Google--were based on the peninsula, Web 2.0 has unabashedly been centered in San Francisco. Go to any hipster, grungy bar in San Francisco. Ask the first five hoodie-wearing people you see what they do, and you can be sure at least two say they work for a startup. And if your next question was "How big are you guys?" no one would flinch... and each of them would try to pad the answer. Big is good in startup land. Getting big, fast is what separates startups from small businesses. Doing that over-and-over again, decade-after-decade is what separates the Valley from nearly anywhere else. And yet, when it comes to the non-Web, brick-and-mortar retail business in San Francisco an ugly, self-righteous, vitriolic hate is emerging against anything successful enough to have more than one or two locations.
INTERNATIONAL RECTIFIER INTERNATIONAL GAME TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES (IBM) INTERDIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS INTEL
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