I am genuinely curious about the tech start-ups that give you "street-cred" in SF. At most of the places I hang out at they dislike techies and blame on them the rising rent prices, monoculture, in general the cultural demise of the city.

Actually at most parties or bars I have to "hide" that I work in tech, or come to terms with "that guy who works in tech... but hey he's ok, unlike the rest of the lot".

So, I 'm honestly wondering where you guys get high fives for being part of a unicorn around here! (referring mostly to the parent posters)

My time in the party scene was basically '09-11, which was before Techies became The Evil Empire. Back then folks were like "Oh, you work for Google, that's awesome, I love your products." Or even more specifically, "Woah, you worked on [Google doodles|the front page of Google|GFiber], I remember seeing that, tell me more about it." It was starting to change around 2012, but right around then I got a girlfriend, got married, and had a kid, and so I basically only have time to hang out with either my wife's friends (for whom I'm just "X's husband") or the friends I made at Google. I'm vaguely aware that much of SF hates techies (and ironically, a few of my wife's Peace Corps friends are in that bucket, which makes for awkward attempts to mix friends groups), but I don't hang out with those people, nor have I worked for a big tech company for going on 4 years now, so it doesn't affect me much. South Bay - where I go to random meetups - is still very tech friendly because that's basically all people do here.

Interestingly, when I go back home to New England, I get a much warmer reception introducing myself as an ex-Googler than in SF. I still have schoolkids at my high school ask me about what it was like to work on Google Doodles, and I ran into a nice ex-hockey-player on a ferry in Connecticut that asked what I did ("software", without elaboration) and then was like "Oh, that sounds exciting, you must make bank" ("I do okay...").

Anyways, I grew up as a nerd in a small town in the 80s, and whatever hate techies get in SF now is nothing compared to that. The U.S. (and probably the world) has fragmented into a lot of micro-tribes recently that all seem to hate each other, but at least they're tribes where it's not terribly difficult to find others who share your values and appreciate what you do, while in the 80s it was monolithic American culture vs. any individuals unfortunate enough to be different. Techies had a brief moment on top from 1995-2000 and again from 2005-2011 where they were getting rich and the rest of the world was enjoying the products they built, but now that most people take for granted the Internet & mobile world they've built, it's just another corporate industry.

Not in SF/SV but maybe in parties with a lot of unicorn employees?