Silicon Valley Diary: Meta, Stanford, the HP Garage and Waymo

Some of my favourite moments in San Francisco happened away from the conference halls: a visit to Meta's campus, a tour of Stanford with an old co-founder, a stop at the garage where Silicon Valley began, a Waymo ride that broke my trust, and the first poker game of my life. This is my diary of all five.

It is part of a four-post series about my three weeks in San Francisco.

A visit to Meta

Early in the trip, we were lucky enough to be invited by someone working at Meta to visit the Menlo Park campus as guests. It is a campus with history of its own: before Facebook moved in, in 2011, it belonged to Sun Microsystems.

Two things made me smile. First, the meeting rooms. Many of them are named after references from the Silicon Valley TV show, the HBO satire of startup life. If you have watched it, you will appreciate how wonderfully self-aware that is: the company the show loved to parody, naming its rooms after the show.

Second, the food. There are buffet-style restaurants serving different cuisines, plus dessert bars dotted around, and it is all free for employees. Not just main meals, either. It is a small, thoughtful thing on top of what they are building, and you can feel how much it shapes the rhythm of the day.

A tour of Stanford

We also got a tour of Stanford University, thanks to Kavindya Thennakoon. Kavindya was one of my co-founders in a startup I started during my undergrad. That startup, unfortunately, failed.

The friendship clearly did not. There is something lovely about walking around one of the most famous universities in the world with someone who was there when you were just starting to figure out how to build things. One of my startups did work out, by the way. That story is in How I Built My Startup.

Stanford is also where Silicon Valley's origin story begins, which made the next stop even better.

The garage where it all started

The HP garage sits at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, and the plaque outside calls it the birthplace of "Silicon Valley", the world's first high-technology region.

The story on the plaque is wonderful. Frederick Terman, a Stanford professor, encouraged students to start their own electronics companies locally instead of joining established firms in the East. The first two to follow that advice were William Hewlett and David Packard, who in 1938 began developing their first product, an audio oscillator, in this very garage.

My favourite detail came later: one of their first big customers was Walt Disney Studios, which bought eight of those oscillators to help test the sound for Fantasia. A garage, two friends, one product, and a cartoon studio as an early customer. That is the whole of Silicon Valley in one sentence.

Standing there, it is hard not to think about how small every beginning is. Everything else came later.

The Waymo that broke my trust

Getting around, we rode in plenty of Waymo cars, and there is no way to prepare for the first time one pulls up with nobody inside. You tap "Start ride", sit back, and watch the steering wheel turn all by itself.

My short rides were excellent. Smooth, careful, almost boringly correct. Exactly what you want from a car.

Then came a longer ride. We were travelling along a main road and everything was fine. All of a sudden, at the very last moment, the car decided to turn right onto a side street, and it turned onto the wrong side of that street. It drove down the street on the wrong side, did a U-turn, came back, and rejoined the main road as if nothing had happened.

Nobody was hurt. But sitting in the back seat, that last-minute decision undid a lot of goodwill very quickly. And once you start watching, you notice more: on several occasions I saw Waymos stuck at junctions, unable to make a decision and looping in place, while drivers behind them honked to nudge them along.

As someone who builds AI systems for a living, I find this oddly familiar. Getting a system to work in the common case is hard. Getting it to behave well in the rare, messy, last-second cases is the real job, and it is where trust is won or lost. That gap is what From Model to Product is about, and a big part of why I wrote my book.

Would I ride a Waymo again? Absolutely. I am still amazed it exists. I just will not be napping in the back seat any time soon.

My first poker game

I played poker for the first time in my life at MongoDB's Poker Night on 9 October, and it was the most perfectly organised event of the whole of SF Tech Week: well thought out, well funded and very nicely run from start to finish. A grand ballroom, proper poker tables with dealers, good food, and even a photo booth.

I sat down knowing nothing and left understanding the basics: the blinds, the betting rounds, and the very important skill of keeping a straight face.

Did I win? No. Did I lose? Also no. I did not want to lose all my chips, so I got out while I still had a respectable stack in front of me. I am calling that a good deal. Apparently I am not much of a gambler, which is good to know.

I once wrote about how FedEx was famously kept alive by a weekend at a blackjack table, in How to Raise Startup Funds at a Poker Table. After this night, I can confirm I am not the person to repeat that experiment. Knowing when to fold, and when not to go all in, turns out to be a skill worth having at the table and in business.

The city or the Valley?

Having seen both, I have to admit I prefer Silicon Valley to downtown San Francisco. Downtown is a busy, modern city. The Valley is quiet, calm and green, a modern area where you could genuinely picture bringing your family. It is chill in the best way.

Which one would you choose: the city or the Valley?

Frequently asked questions

Where is the HP garage? The HP garage is at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California. A plaque outside marks it as the birthplace of Silicon Valley and a California Registered Historical Landmark.

Why is the HP garage called the birthplace of Silicon Valley? Encouraged by Stanford professor Frederick Terman, William Hewlett and David Packard began developing their first product, an audio oscillator, there in 1938, starting the company that became Hewlett-Packard.

Is Waymo safe to ride in San Francisco? I can only speak for my own rides in October 2026: the short ones were smooth, but one long ride made a last-minute turn onto the wrong side of a street before correcting itself with a U-turn. Waymo publishes its own safety information on its website.

Do Waymo cars get stuck? I saw it happen several times in San Francisco: cars hesitating at junctions, unable to decide, until drivers behind them honked.

More from my San Francisco trip

• SF Tech Week 2026: are San Francisco founders superhuman?: the question I flew there to answer, and the city itself
• Moats, money and a US presence: what San Francisco's founders and investors taught me
• TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: lessons from Startup Battlefield: gut organoids, scam-baiting AI and a Hollywood moment