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Notes -
San Francisco is not, fundamentally, important because of its Michelin stars, ballets, operas, media, literary artifacts, or galleries. It's certainly the best you'll get within 300 miles, but if those things are what you're looking for, you certainly know cities that crush it on all counts. (In state and federal politics it indeed plays a massively outsize role.) No one flies out to San Francisco to see Lohengrin.
What makes the Bay Area Important is tech and capital; without it, San Francisco would be Portland-level in terms of influence. And for tech, until very recently, the epicenter was in Silicon Valley, which is a bit amorphous but I'd call the geography spanning from roughly Stanford on down. Apple, Cupertino. Oracle, Redwood City (some would object this counts, too far north). Cisco, San Jose. Adobe, San Jose. Sun, Santa Clara. Intel, Santa Clara. HP, Palo Alto. Netscape, Mountain View. Yahoo, Sunnyvale. Later on, Google in Mountain View and Facebook in Menlo Park (another relatively northern outpost). Also, pretty much every VC of note has their offices within a mile or so of each other on SHR: it wasn't as if it was San Francisco airdropping money onto nerdy engineers down south. And most of the tech elite live near where they work: Meg Whitman Atherton, Zuck Palo Alto (albeit after a stint across the street from Mission Dolores), Sundar Los Altos Hills. Pac Heights has more names like Getty or Hellman than tech CEOs. Even in terms of schools, the best private school in SF doesn't really hold a candle in prestige compared to those in the South Bay (Harker, Castilleja, even some public schools like Paly or Gunn).
This provided the initial capital and technical skills that underlie San Francisco's nascent technical ecosystem, which only really started in earnest in the late 2000s. SF has a couple of important, successful companies based there (Salesforce, Uber, Twitter, etc.), but the giants only keep relatively small outposts in the city. And, of course, OpenAI and Anthropic are based there, along with a respectable percentage of Google's ML researchers (though most are still expected to take a shuttle down south to MTV three days per week), but it remains to be seen how that will develop.
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