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Comment by codecaine | Hacker News Reader

I've never been to Silicon valley, in fact I've never been to the US but I personally feel that this picture the author draws of "old" SV is very idealized. This rant contains high amounts of nostalgia and therefore does not seem to be entirely rational. I would love to know if SV used to be like O'Neill describes it in his article.

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I live in SV for two years now (moved from NY, and from Ukraine before that). You can send a cold e-mail to almost anyone here asking for advice, and if you're polite, sound intelligent, and have sensible expectations, nine times out of ten you'll get a meeting. I'm talking about people whose bank accounts are as large as budgets of some small countries. These folks do it because they genuinely love the startup world and want to help out. This sort of openness is unheard of in the finance world in NY, for example.

Some people are inaccessible (you likely won't get a meeting with Steve Jobs by sending a cold email), but it's an exception rather than the rule. I also suspect it has more to do with his schedule than his attitude (unlike other parts of the world).

That being said, people will be people, and there's plenty of VIP-type nonsense going on here. The thing is, you can't think of these things in absolutes - you have to compare with the rest of the world, and SV is by far the most open place I've ever seen. That being said, I'd really like the culture of disrespect for the respectable here to get even stronger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kirzr6lnSs&feature=playe...

Great video

I'm just saying from my experience, when I came here I was able to easily connect with other top execs at events around the bay. The main point is that Steve Jobs & Wozniak, Sergey and Larry, these guys were all accessible at some point and participated in the community. Jobs doesn't exactly participate in events anymore, yet many highly successful people show up at events of all types. That sort of contribution to the community from more "successful" individuals is exactly how SV was built.

I should also add that I'm not suggesting that exclusive events are alone the source of the problem. They can even be useful in some cases. I'm simply stating that exclusive events are not useful when you are trying to build a community of any type (in Facebook's case it's a community of developers).

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