On June 21 our friends Giacomo Benvenuti and Wahiba Taouali came to visit us from Austin, Texas. Giacomo is the son of Nicola and Anita, our dear friends from Florence, Italy. Wahiba is married to Giacomo, and she is from Tunisia. Wahiba is an information engineer and Giacomo is a neuro-scientist doing a post doctorate at the University of Texas. They stayed with us for 5 days. I wrote them both this letter on July 4^th because I treasure their visit to us and hope they come again. I also appreciate the fresh energy and perspective they brought to my world!

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July 4, 2019   San Francisco, California

Dear Wahiba and Giacomo,

I decided to write this overly long snail mail after your wonderful visit to San Francisco in late June. I happened to see the enclosed magazine Fast Company at my gym, and thought it might be of interest to you after our visit to Silicon Valley on June 25^th. Their annual list of “The 100 Most Creative People in Business” caught my eye, and sure enough some of the “100” are employees of Apple and Google the two companies whose campuses we visited in June.

During your visit we did some of the usual tourist things like our bay cruise, hiking on Angel Island and lunch in Tiburon. But it was your request to see Silicon Valley that intrigued me. As always it takes visitors from out of town to awaken you to compelling things and points of interest in your own back yard. Lonely Planet has a couple of suggested tours of Silicon Valley, but they want you to spend $400 to be chauffeured around. You put together our tour with stops at Apple, Google and the brain center of the valley, Stanford University in Palo Alto. On our way home we made a late lunch stop at Buck’s in Woodside. I have been eating there for many years, but until your tour I never knew it was a favorite spot for tech folks to meet and make deals. Not my world!

Part of the challenge in thinking about such a tour is what defines Silicon Valley? I suppose you could start with the garage startups of Hewlett and Packard and Steve Jobs. Those sites are houses in Palo Alto and Los Altos. But production facilities and HQ’s have spread from San Jose all the way to San Francisco so loosely speaking that is the “Valley”. It is a far cry from 70 years ago when the area around San Jose was known as the “Valley of Hearts Delights” and was a major fruit production zone.

We drove south 42 miles from our home in the Sunset District of San Francisco to Cupertino for our first stop on the tour: the new Apple Headquarters on Tantau Avenue. This giant circle structure that resembles a big donut or a flying saucer houses 12,000 employees. Inside the donut are 175 acres of land with a pond and multiple landscapes. The only way to see the campus is to have business there or know somebody there. I am still kicking myself that I forgot prior to our visit that a high school classmate, with whom I just reconnected at my 50^th reunion, is the Chief Vision Scientist at Apple. What a title, and certainly someone who could have given us a tour. I still am not sure whether his title means he is responsible for envisioning the future of the company, or whether he is just responsible for designing Apple apps that relate to the human eye? Or maybe both. Next time you come we will get together with him and his wife who also works for Apple. I would love the title of Chief Vision Scientist for the labor movement!

Even if we had gotten inside the big doughnut we still would not have been able to appreciate its immensity. That requires “googling” an aerial view on line. So we stood outside the gates of headquarters in the Apple store where a security guard told us that the facility was recently opened with a private concert by Lady Gaga for employees only. I love Lady Gaga (Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta), but I am not sure how I feel about a private Apple performance.

There was a Labor Dispute at the gates of Apple. A giant banner was displayed with a grim reaper hanging over it: “Stop Hurting Workers, Families and Community” Carpenters Local 405 is in a dispute with Technical Builders, Inc. which is constructing a parking structure for Apple. It was a captivating banner and display, but unfortunately the paid hand biller didn’t know anything about the dispute and couldn’t answer my questions about it. Kinda disappointed in my union brother….

From Cupertino it was a short hop of 9 miles to the Googleplex campus. Google is building a giant new HQ that kind of resembles the Sydney Opera House with its massive shell like structures. The present complex houses 53,000 employees and is situated on the old Silicon Graphics campus. Unlike Apple the campus was very accessible with information booths and friendly Google employees answering questions and pointing out places of interest. We took a great photo in front of that iconic Google sign on one of their main buildings, and we roamed around looking for a bottle of water and found none even in their corporate store. That was kind of inhospitable. However I remembered that Google employees worldwide had conducted a strike at 40 offices with 20,000 employees participating on November 1, 2018 to protest Google’s handing of complaints of sexual harassment. Pretty impressive for employees who have no union representation! Maybe we in traditional labor can learn something from them.

Our final stop before lunch was the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, the brain center of much of the Silicon Valley tech business. We couldn’t find parking so I delivered you guys as close as I could get us to the iconic Hoover Tower, the home of the Hoover Institute, an infamous right-wing think tank! Thankfully your walk around was short, and we went on to our lunch at Buck’s!

I have to thank you both for opening my eyes to a reality that exists right at my doorstep. When you first suggested a visit to the Silicon Valley, I thought what for? Why bother? But then I thought wait a minute I use Google everyday for directions; to search out facts and places, and then of course I use Google Translate to hone my email to Giacomo’s parents in Italian! Google plays a major role in my life. So does Apple. I got an Apple desk computer and an I-phone! Shunning knowledge of Google and Apple would be like a Model T car owner shunning the River Rouge Ford plant in Detroit in the last century. Got to see where this stuff comes from, and who is making it and the actions they are engaged in.

Well, as I said when you were both here, please take the time to read the book The Circle by Dave Eggers. It paints a pretty dark picture of the Valley’s culture and groupthink, and it is kind of contradicted by the recent labor unrest at Google thankfully, but nevertheless worth a read.

Hope you come back soon so you can open our eyes to more realties in our own back yard.

Stay cool and dry in the Texas heat!

Love and hugs,

Peter O

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