OK, There's Stuff I Love about the Valley Too...

If you read this blog regularly you probably know all the reasons I love traveling to emerging markets, landing in a new place knowing no one and spending a few weeks digging around, finding some of the greatest entrepreneurs the world has ever heard of.

So you might be wondering how my adjustment back to life as a reporter in Silicon Valley has gone. It's hasn't all been easy. One morning I was fresh back from a particularly inspiring trip to Brazil trying to stretch a coffee-bandaid over my jetlag headache, when I overheard two people in a heated argument. The great debate: Whether or not Farmville was the most important development of our lifetimes. These were professional adults working for startups. I was drained, exhausted and my bank account was running on fumes, but I almost hopped another plane that day.

There's an element of entrepreneurship in the Valley that's about flips and cash outs and playing a game that doesn't interest me. But the longer I've been back, I've been reminded of the things that I love about the Valley, the things that make me never want to leave permanently, and the reason that the Valley will always be an important hub for technology and venture captial no matter where the bulk of economic growth is happening. It's the deeply engtangled, intertwined community of people doing something real. To wit: I just wrote this story for TechCrunch about "mafias," specifically Facebook's surprisingly strong one that's behind some of the more exciting companies in the Valley right now.

This was not a typical blog post. I spent several weeks reporting in and about three days writing it.I hope I'm able to do more stories like this. Like being back in the Valley, being a full-time blogger has been a challenge too. I'm trying to find a way to report the way I have in a lower-volume, old media world and still produce enough content to be relevant for this platform. But after spending two years consumed in one project, it's a nice new challenge.