Cities and Ambition (2008)
Living for a few years in the Bay Area, I didn't really end up with the same impression, though that could be my fault. My biggest impression was that the Bay Area <i>wants</i> to be extremely wealthy, but feels slightly inadequate about it. There was a constant palpable rivalry with both NYC and Southern California, a rivalry that was mostly one-directional. And on the Peninsula, in particular, there was a strangely obvious class structure. In particular the startup scene around Stanford was super-weird. I didn't know the Googlers (wrong years), but the kids I knew ranged from "comfortably upper-middle-class" to "extremely wealthy". Mostly my peers were their employees, not in the founder social group; the founder social group had a remarkable ability to raise "friends & family" money despite having no product (the most recent raised $750,000 from a company in China owned by an uncle, to develop mobile games).  The demographics are so unbalanced that Stanford actually will give an automatic full-ride scholarship to any accepted student whose family makes under $100,000/yr, since not many admitted students qualify for it anyway.<p>Overall I don't really miss it, though I did like eating VC food and drinking VC beer at the ubiquitous lavish parties. But the culture might be even weirder than NYC, in terms of what it promotes.