April 23, 2001, 12:35 PM — A word of warning to IT transplants trying to make career contacts in California's Silicon Valley: Too much schmoozing can be hazardous to your health.
"There's a lot of schmoozing that goes on in this valley. And a lot of schmoozing revolves around drinking, since one of the easiest ways to get plugged in is to get involved in the area's night life," says Master Burnett, a senior account executive at Silicon Talent Corp, a San Jose-based job placement firm.
Because the Valley is all about innovation and ideas, schmoozing also revolves around connecting on issues of topical interest in the technology community, Burnett says.
In fact, he adds, there are so many schmooze options that transplants can start schmoozing even before they arrive. Try business contacts or local chapters of alumni associations.
To test Burnett's ideas and offer a newcomers' guide to schmoozing in the Valley, I called all the big-name IT companies in the area -- Cisco Systems Inc., Oracle Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. -- and a couple of venture capital companies. I asked them where their executives like to hang out. Then I mapped out my trip to start south, in downtown San Jose, and finish north, in San Francisco.
Schmooze Central
The most schmooze-intensive area is located between the north and south, in an area that encompasses northern San Jose, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Palo Alto and Redwood Shores, which Oracle put on the map when it built its glass and steel monoliths on a slip of landfill in San Francisco Bay.
In Silicon Central, schmoozing begins with a prebreakfast workout at the Decathlon Club, which is sandwiched between Applied Materials Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Maxim Integrated Products Inc. off the Central Expressway in northern San Jose -- just across Highway 101 from Cisco.
"The pace of this valley is so frenetic that the three-martini lunch has given way to pizza in the office," says Beverly Trefry, Decathlon's marketing director. A Yahoo employee in the women's locker room confirms this, rushing through her workout in lieu of a meal because that's all she could eke out of her 12-hour workday, she says.
For this reason, the Decathlon Club is a social center of sorts. It offers informal classes and gatherings for many a technology worker and low-profile executive. Along with the Decathlon, the Pacific Athletic Club in Redwood Shores and The San Francisco Bay Club also cater to the technology elite.
Schmoozers can follow their workout with breakfast at Buck's Restaurant off Interstate 280 in Woodside. Located one exit north of Sand Hill Road, which hosts the heaviest concentration of venture capital addresses in the Valley, Buck's has a venture-centric menu, with a featured technology start-up and investment gossip that's updated monthly. Jamis MacNiven, the irreverent owner of Buck's Restaurant, calls himself "just the pancake guy." But this pancake guy has been on the cover of many a technology and tourist magazine. His restaurant has also played host to outgoing Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle, banking magnate Warren Buffet and even former President Bill Clinton.
"Netscape was founded here. And so were hundreds of other tech firms. I've collected some of the scribbled napkins. It's like reading tea leaves," says MacNiven.
Venture capital firms are also moving from Sand Hill to downtown Palo Alto. Upon close inspection, I found a wealth of venture capital and technology firms (including Compaq Computer Corp.'s research center) tucked unassumingly into the terra-cotta facades lining University Avenue. And that guy walking briskly from the Garden Court Hotel with four briefcase-toting businessmen around him looks an awful lot like Bill Gates.
For lunch and dinner, tech executives, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists go to Spago, where famous chef Wolfgang Puck serves up European/Asian food. They also frequent Il Fornaio, located on the ground floor of the Garden Court. Here, schmoozers can find executives trying to look casual in very expensively threaded sports coats and khakis.
Schmooze South
Next, it's off to the Lion & Compass in northern San Jose. It's a favorite lunch and dinner haunt for the Cisco crowd and others, with a New York Stock Exchange ticker that rolls across a wall. "This is where Atari was founded," says the bartender. "The CEOs from Cisco, Amdahl, Cypress, Yahoo -- all the hotshots have held gatherings here."
Farther south, schmoozing centers on the San Jose Convention Center, near yet another Il Fornaio (there's also one in San Francisco), which could be called the fast-food chain of the Valley's executive and venture set.
