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From: www.itworld.com
The hot places to schmooze in Silicon Valley
April 23, 2001 —
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.
In convention areas like this, it's best to look for tech groups in the surrounding hotels, such as the Hyatt Sainte Claire, the De Anza and the Fairmont. The sounds of schmooze literally echo off the marble floors and pillars of the Fairmont's lounge, which serves generous martinis to a crowd of laptop-using schmoozers.
"This is the biggest office in Silicon Valley," says hotel spokeswoman Lina Broydo. "I like to joke about the irony of watching people socialize in our lounge with a drink in one hand and a laptop mouse in the other." I have attended many schmooze sessions in this lobby, interviewing tech CEOs and such during conferences.
Hands down, though, E&O Trading Company has the biggest martinis in San Jose. "This is definitely the spot for geeks to schmooze," says a spike-haired bartender at E&O as he shakes up another batch of martinis for a group of seven techies standing around a table near the door.
Katie Bloom's, an Irish pub on First Street, and the Mission Ale House, at Santa Clara and First streets (formerly a Netcom On-Line Communications Services Inc. hangout) are the glass-tipping schmooze spots downtown.
At least one person schmoozed it big at the Ale House: "Kendra the bartender met a millionaire from a dot-com, and we never saw her again," says John Saldivar, a developer at nearby storage-area networking vendor Brocade Communications Systems Inc.
But searching for female companionship isn't so easy in the south Valley. The male-to-female ratio at downtown watering holes averaged about 10 to 1 during my visit. Burnett says those who are looking and have deep pockets (as in seven figures) should check out the well-to-do areas of downtown Los Gatos and Saratoga.
Schmooze North
There are plenty of women just 40 miles north in San Francisco. Start with a martini at the Red Room. Having been there many times already, I began with drinks in North Beach. This is where attorneys and upwardly mobile IT professionals hang out at places like Moose's, Fuse and Little City, says Stephan Jon Silverman, formerly a technologist at San Francisco-based Scient Corp. He recently returned to private consulting.
"At Moose's, I picked up some consulting work for a major venture capital firm. I met them cold that night," Silverman says. "And at Little City, I sat in a corner one night reading a book when I heard enough conversation between partners at a consulting company that I could have stolen their client had I wanted to."
After Moose's, our party ended up at Gordon Biersch Brewery in a now-decaying dot-com section of the city, where a lot of schmoozing went on over garlic fries and home brews. This is where some IT geek took my last business card and tried to schmooze me into writing about his company, an enterprise directory optimization software vendor in Scottsdale, Ariz.
The most popular clubs for the young dot-com/dot-bomb and multimedia development crowd include 111 Minna, the Manhattan Lounge, Madame Mercury and Ruby Skye, says Heather Holvey, a spokeswoman for the Argent Hotel, which competes with the nearby W Hotel for the trendy technology and conference crowds.
But for all the partying, the serious money hangs out in San Francisco's financial district. And the best place to find financial executives is up on Nob Hill, where the out-of-town financial executives stay at the Fairmont, the Mark Hopkins Inter-Continental or the Ritz-Carlton.
In fact, high tea at the club floor at the Ritz is an excellent place to hang with other big-ticket schmoozers, wear off a four-day schmooze hangover and think about what to do with that new fistful of business cards. This is why one shouldn't overdo the schmooze; it will all be for naught if schmoozers don't make an intelligent first impression, say Burnett and Silverman.
So maybe it would be a good idea to lay off those martinis just a bit.
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