I love the San Francisco Bay Area! Having moved here in 1986 to get my Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, I thought I’d leave at some point. I remember vividly filling out the paperwork to gain California residency (needed for cheaper tuition), and having to check a box that said I “intended to remain in California after getting my degree.” Yeah, right, I thought. Maybe? Who Knows?
Well here I am nearly thirty (!) years later, and I am a Bay Area guy. Which brings me to San Jose. Or San Francisco. Or the two cities around which my post-Berkeley SEO, AdWords, and Social Media life has revolved. Back in the day (1994), my wife and I were a struggling couple, looking for jobs in a tough environment. At that point, the San Jose Mercury News was the paper of record, and the want ads were four inches thick on any given Sunday. I was a Berkeley person, and San Jose seems so distant. But that was where the jobs were, so I took at job in san jose centro at MWMedia, a media company.
San Francisco vs. San Jose: An Intellectual Non-Match Up
I soon learned that San Jose – while much “bigger” than San Francisco in terms of population – simply lives in the visibility shadow of its smaller but older city to the north, San Francisco. Even though there are so many great things to love about San Jose, such as the every san jose dispensary that you can find throughout the city, it doesn’t quite have the same prestige as San Fran. It is one of the puzzles of the Bay Area. San Francisco is crazy, diverse, dynamic, insane… but anything but unnoticeable. But in these cities, you may be likely to see some questionable driving by its residents. Questionable to the point of you thinking that they need to attend some cali traffic schools so they can go over the basics again. But as mind-boggling as this may be to you, it’s what makes the cities so exciting to be part of. Indeed, today’s Silicon Valley jet set has figured out that it’s way more fun to live in San Francisco and “commute” down to Sunnyvale or Mountain View than to live in the South Bay.
While San Jose – is a huge small town. That’s actually it’s charm. It’s very friendly, and it’s actually rather sleepy. It calls itself the Capital of Silicon Valley, but really it’s more like Silicon Valley’s sleepy home town. (Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE SAN JOSE!). There’s great infrastructure, good health care, good legal firms such as GJEL a San Jose Personal Injury Law Firm, and just about everything else you need. Yet it’s still in the shadow.
But…
And as someone who actively teaches both in San Francisco and in Palo Alto, I can tell you that San Jose is not in the same intellectual or educational league. It just does not have the kind of intellectual or cultural landscape that San Francisco does with marvelous institutions like the Bay Area Video Coalition, Berkeley Externsion and many others that provide life-long learning to San Francisco residents (and others who commute up from other parts of the San Francisco Bay Area). To wit, I often get people from San Jose, driving all the way up to San Francisco to take my classes!
Don’t get me wrong. I love San Jose, and I have had plenty of SEO, AdWords, and Social Media Marketing clients from San Jose and other cities in the South Bay. But for whatever reason, the cultural “energy” of the Bay Area is very much in San Francisco. San Jose is, as they say, conspicuous by its absence. Go figure!
