I just spent two days in San Francisco participating in a vendor¹’s “Customer Advisory Board” and conference. My previous trip to Silicon Valley felt like a Turkish bazaar: crowded, bustling, beautiful, frustrating and above all, mercenary². This visit felt like Rome just before the fall – or more generously, Marie Antionette’s France: decadent beyond any reasonable aesthetic or commercial justification. Leather, oil-rubbed wood, speakeasy in the library, alcohol everywhere, amazing food, dressed for the court, and conspicuously non-mercenary. Constant talk of changing the world and fostering happiness and love, and never stooping to compete or haggle or weigh costs and benefits. And all built amidst the old warehouses and factories of the industries that died decades ago.

It was a great two days: my hosts were wonderful and gracious and EXTREMELY generous. They seemed genuinely interested in talking and hearing feedback and I don’t fear for them technically, but that money and that environment must change people.

1: Oh how they’d hate that word.

2: In the “primarily concerned with making money” sense, not the “professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army” sense.