Originally Posted by
sinoflyer
my perception is that the center of gravity is still closer to San Jose. Some of the higher profile companies and their HQs: Google (Mountain View), Apple (Cupertino), Yahoo (Sunnyvale), AMD (Sunnyvale), Nvidia (Santa Clara), Intel (Santa Clara), Adobe (San Jose), Western Digital (San Jose)...
but also Hewlett-Packard (Palo Alto), Facebook (Menlo Park), Oracle (Redwood Shores), not to mention smaller/newer but hardly tiny companies like Uber (SF) and Twitter (SF).
Originally Posted by
flyerbaby19
Though I agree the biggest wealth belt is MP/PA down to Saratoga / Los Gatos.
The biggest wealth spike is a bit north of that - Hillsborough, Woodside, Portola Valley, Atherton, Los Altos Hills, etc. is where most of the deep VC pockets live.
Originally Posted by
cerealmarketer
But if you live South of the Dumbarton on either side it's more convenient to hit up SJC and plenty of ways service will grow there. Kind of like Orange County vs LAX but without the curfew.
It amused me to read
Originally Posted by
flyerbaby19
And from MV, SFO and SJC I think are equidistant by car. Easier to get to SFO with Caltrain/Bart versus VTA/Bus to SJC (I think...) although Uber is probably easier than public transit if we're talking wealthy MV google yuppies
...because I instinctively agreed with it, but then I looked it up and SFO is 2.5x further than SJC from Mountain View. But I still feel like you need to go further south before it feels like a huge comparative burden to trek up to SFO.
I definitely agree that SJC makes sense for a local West Coast focus city a la AS and WN though. I think WN provides huge value for being the only carrier that essentially provides full pairwise coverage on QSF to QLA. When I'm eating most of the day to fly TCON or overwater, the extra distance to SFO is negligible, but for a day trip to LA, being able to fly SJC-BUR (or whatever pair suits that trip) is quite valuable.