Back in 1979, when I moved from Louisiana to the Bay Area in California, I was asked a lot of strange questions, such as if I knew anyone in the Ku Klux Klan. People seemed to think that every white person from the south hated blacks and that we were all a bunch of fiery rednecks.

I didn’t understand this, even at a young age, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I had been around black people all my life, including being raised by a black nanny, and second, the kids in Moraga, California sured seemed a whole hell of a lot more homogenous than where I came from. If anyone should be asked about racial integration, it was them, not me.

Over the past quarter-century, locales all over the world have tried to ape the success of Silicon Valley. There’s been Silicon _________ of all kinds, like Prairie, Gulch, Swamp, etc. But the secret sauce of Santa Clara Valley, which I suppose is a combination of Stanford, venture capital, and about half a century of momentum/inertia, seems to keep 94301 in the pink.

I’m in Georgia at the moment, and this morning I went into a well-reviewed coffee shop to get some drinks for the family. The guy mentioned it was a shared workspace, and he just rented out the corner. While he made the drinks, I wandered around the place, curious to see what it was like.