Please look over the applications in your mobile and services you commonly use. Is it coincidence that almost all ones are Silicon Valley companies? It might most probably not. I have visited San Francisco twice. Bay Area has a really extraordinary environment. So to say, here is the champions league of tech people. You can eavesdrop big data or machine learning talks when you wait in line at Starbucks. Nerd developers tend to visit headquarters of these companies instead of historical places when they are visiting San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve created a guide for tech people who are going to visit San Francisco and want to visit giant Silicon Valley companies.
Down town
Companies located at down town are close to each other and on a line. We can walk to complete this part of trip.
Jack Dorsey is founder of both Twitter and Square Inc. He is currently pursuing CEO duty in these companies. The both company are neighbors in cross of Market St and 10th St. Thereafter, Uber is next to Twitter on Market St.
Next destination will be Brannan St. Street is 1.5 km away from Twitter. Airbnb will be the first destination here. It is located at 888 Brannan. Pinterest, Dropbox, Docker and GitHub are located in this street, too. This route is 2 km and walking lasts almost half hour.
We deflect our route from Brannan St to 2nd St. Cross of 2nd street and Harrison St hosts MOOC giants. Both Udemy and Udacity are located here. The distance between GitHub and Udemy is half km.
I had breakfast at Cafe Centro here. It is in the South Park.
Thereafter, we turn back to 2nd St. LinkedIn is located at 2nd St.
We will turn right to Howard St when we see LinkedIn. Fremont St comes after 1st in this way. We turn left to Fremont St. Both Facebook and Instagram have offices in this street building 181 but here is not its headquarter. HQ of FB and Instagram is in suburb. We turn back to Howard St and go until crossroad of Steuart and Howard. We will see the neighbor Google and Mozilla offices when we turn right. Similar to Facebook, Google’s headquarter is in suburb.
Suburb
We have completed down town part of our trip by walk. However, this part of the trip is far and wide and we have to use a car. If you prefer to use public transportation, you might catch Caltrain. Caltrain station is close to Lyft, GitHub and Docker.
You should have a breakfast at Philz Cafe if you are going to use Caltrain.
Facebook and Whatsapp is in Menlo Park. Stanford University is in Palo Alto. Finally, Google headquarter Googleplex is in Mountain View. These are 3 different caltrain stations.
Googleplex is free to visit by guests. Android sculptures are everywhere.
Moreover, you can use Google bicycles to tour the campus.
Visiting Stanford University is a must for SF trip.
There is a pretty church in the Stanford campus. It is closed at 5 pm. I can arrive there at 5 pm. Luckily, responsible lady showed understanding and let me to get in when I say that I have flied 12 hours to go there.
Yahoo and Apple headquarters are in this route but I finish my time and I could not go there yet.
So, this is not a typical trip. None of visiting points are historical places or panoramas. You might not even see logos for some companies but seeing where these technologies developed makes you feel different. Links in this post will direct you to Google Maps street view. I hope you to enjoy your SF trip.
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