Down Memory Lane

Senor Jalapeno - 1 star
SJC, Terminal C

French Meadow Organic Bakery - 2 stars
MSP

I used to fly to San Jose a lot when visiting my office, for cost reasons, but sometime around 2005-2006 it became cheaper to fly in and out of San Francisco, which is closer to the office anyway. This week, though, I bought a ticket at the last minute and it was cheaper to return from San Jose, so this morning I made the drive down 101 through Silicon Valley for the first time in what seemed like years.

The drive was a bit like looking at the striated walls of the Grand Canyon or anyplace else that you can see the layers of geological history, because for me it is a reverse-chronological tour through my career in the technology industry. I pulled out of our gleaming, glass complex in San Mateo just north of Highway 92, which used to belong to Siebel. Heading south on 101, I first passed the dirty-white Bay View building in the low(er)-rent part of San Mateo, where my company spent the last five years, growing from less than half of one floor (developers spread across the open space in the middle, sales and marketing sharing offices along the wall, Marcus's print of a New Yorker cartoon entitled "Making the big sale," showing a salesman in a suit sitting down with the customer, a dog, for a meal of dog food) to filling three floors and bursting at the seams. 10 minutes later there was the Redwood City apartment building where John R. and I shared a dingy two-bedroom apartment with his poker-playing college friend for three years during our frequent trips to California. Then unincorporated Menlo Park, on the Bay side of 101, where we founded the company in 2001 in the extra space of Ken's friend's (now-folded) startup, going out to eat in the taquerias where the jukebox only played Mexican pop music; real tacos, just beef on corn tortillas with nothing more than onions, hot sauce, and lime juice remain one of the few things I miss from my meat-eating days.

Continuing south, there is the Shoreline Boulevard exit in Mountain View for Ariba's old headquarters, across the street from Silicon Graphics, where we used to sneak into the cafeteria for lunch. That was where I got my first intoxicating taste of the startup life, although by that time Ariba already had 500 employees and more money than it knew what to do with. Then at the south end of Moffett Field the freeway passes right by the new glass towers we moved to in 2001, right when our stock had fallen by 98% and we had to lay off half the company. I filled up the gas tank on Mathilda Avenue in Sunnyvale, just past the Hobee's where I think Marcus and I first tried to convince Ken to start a company with us - arguably one of the most important days in my company's history.

Then just a few miles further south, in Santa Clara, you pass the nondescript, blue-and-beige headquarters of Intel, my first client after I moved from McKinsey's New York office to the San Francisco office back in 1999. The first times that I made that drive down to Intel, arguably the most important company in the history of Silicon Valley (although some might argue for HP or Cisco, or perhaps someday Google), I felt like I was at the center of the world, and the business world was full of possibility. Now when I make that drive, it's the memories that I think about, not the future.

My usual lunch at SJC used to be a tuna sandwich from Noah's, but since I've given up seafood I got a veggie burrito from Senor Jalapeno instead, which was perfectly serviceable and undistinguished, except for the salsa, which was nicely garlicky. On my layover I went to French Meadow, which I have previously rated as my favorite airport restaurant anywhere in the world (although the Wolfgang Puck Cafe in Cincinnati is a close competitor - nothing at all like the Wolfgang Puck in Concourse B of O'Hare, which is absolutely disgusting). This time I had a bowl of Thai Vegetable Curry soup, which didn't seem particularly Thai (or curry, for that matter), but was full of vegetables and was reassuringly spicy in a hot-and-sour sort of way.