Not everything is so cool in Silicon Valley
Spending some time at Mountain View and Menlo Park with Spanish friends working at Google and Stanford hits you about the reality of this famous technological mecca.
Puedes leer este artículo también en español en Eldiario.es/Andalucia.
I open my eyes and look at my cell phone: “It’s five in the morning again!” I think. It’s the second day in the United States, and jet lag strikes me again. I leave my bedroom and see a light in the living room. It’s Manolo, our designer, who is working on his laptop. I look at him, and he looks back at me. I think that trying to console himself expires: “I’m using time wisely …”
I take a look at the WhatsApp and see several messages in the group that we’ve created for the trip: Manolo and I are not alone in our time disorder. The 12-hour direct flight from Barcelona and the nine hours difference between Spain and California are still weighing.
In Commite Inc. we are 18 people, but only eight of us make up the American expedition. The rest is working at our headquarters downtown in Seville or wherever they want because if there is something that characterizes our company is distributed work. The mentality of face-to-face seems from another era, if not from another planet.
We are divided into two groups: one half is hosted at the moment in Mountain View and the other half in Menlo Park. For us to understand: the firsts are staying in Google-Land and the second in Facebook-Land. Traditionally or geographically speaking, Silicon Valley occupies the southeastern half of the San Francisco Bay. However, the brutal apogee of the technology companies in the area has made the “Silicon Valley concept” grows, also encompassing now the city of San Francisco and surrounding areas such as San Mateo or Berkeley.
First advice: do not go over with the perfume.
Andrés Monge, a childhood friend of Carlos, our COO, was waiting for us in Mountain View. When Andrés finished his degree in Computer Science at the University of Seville (US), he participated in a competitive program called Jóvenes con Futuro. The selection process lasted for months, during which time he was working with us at Commite Inc. In the end, he managed to overcome all the phases and ended up as a developer in a startup called Entytle here in Silicon Valley. He’s been several months in the USA already, and during this time he had managed to gain the confidence of his bosses to such an extent that when he heard that they needed an external product design studio, he put us in touch. We ended up working together again, making Entytle one of our main Projects.
Andrés feels happy. The work he does as a developer here is a high level, but he recognizes that living in this place is a bit hard. After all, beyond San Francisco, there are almost only family residential neighborhoods, universities, and companies. A lot of companies. The distances are enormous, and there is hardly life on the streets, but there is no doubt that it’s a tremendous professional opportunity. There will be time to return to Spain (because he plans to return).
In Menlo Park, our host is Javi de la Rosa, a researcher at Stanford University who also studied Computer Science at the University of Seville. From Seville, he went to Western University in Ontario and from there to Stanford. He’s been far from home so long that he almost lost his account. He’s a friend of Juan Pablo López, one of our developers, from their time together on the campus of Reina Mercedes in Seville, and when we arrived, he welcomed us all with open arms and the best of his smiles.
It was eleven o’clock at night when we showed up, and the first thing that he told us after the rigor questions of ‘How-was-the-trip’ was: “Hey, do you guys use perfume?”. Seeing our puzzled faces, he clarified that here in San Francisco, wearing too much perfume is a bit frowned. It’s good advice, a hidden tip they call it. He knows that we have several meetings ahead and just wanted to warn us that the point of overwhelm that people seem to feel here in front of the excess of perfume is so much that at Stanford and in some companies apparently even exist restrictive “odor policies.”
Then I put my Chanel N.5 in the bottom of my suitcase and go out to dinner, or try to because in these neighborhoods find something decent to eat after eleven o’clock can be quite an odyssey, and of course, having dinner at six thirty p.m. is something that we are still not used to. An intense week awaits us.
