[dakial1]

  |The rooms I did listen in on seemed to be full of people promoting themselves to each other.

This is the image I have from people in SV, every time that I talk with someone from SF/SV tech/startup world I can expect to hear: - Their romanticized accomplishments - Name dropping some SF/SV pop star

It must be very tiring to have social interactions like that all the time...

[Enginerrrd]

That's how my interactions with East Coasters always seemed to go for most of my life. It always seemed strangely artificial and out of place... and also off-putting in the sense that they seemed to be indicating they would look down on people that didn't go to an ivy league school or something. It seemed like a handshake where you get assessed for your social standing in every new interaction. There's definitely plenty of social stratification on the West Coast too, but it seemed more implicit rather than explicit. I suppose the process is a natural one and you could make an argument for either way of going about it, but the East Coast style of it always rubbed me the wrong way.

Frankly though, I can't stand a lot of the attitudes from the SF/SV area either. There's a lot of self-righteousness and self-signed certificates of moral authority in that crowd. I'm not a fan. People are allowed to see the world differently, and for most of the things I believe are right, I won't pretend to be so certain of my the moral absoluteness of my beliefs to insist anyone who disagrees is inherently less intelligent, wrong, or beneath me but that seems to be the status quo in the Bay.