Breakfast is back... at least in Silicon Valley.

I arrived here in Silicon Valley in 1999.  Dot.Com boom roaring all around me.  This was the time of “Breakfast at Buck’s”.  Literally.  There’s TV evidence to back me up!  I was followed around for three weeks for a BBC Documentary (titled something like USA.com) with a scene in the finished product filmed as I had a meeting at a table in Buck’s.  I remember domains-guru Andrew Naylor and I driving up there for breakfast at the table right behind the CNBC anchors as they broadcast “Power Lunch” from Buck’s.



It wasn’t just Buck’s.  Meetings would be prefaced with “let’s get together for breakfast”.  Hard to remember where… Hobee’s, Stack’s, Crossroads, all sorts of places up and down the peninsula.

That all sort of died out during the crash.  Sure we can grab coffee.  Lunch never really went away.  Drinks is a perennial.  But breakfast meetings don’t really seem to have been on my radar screen so much.  There were the Silicon Valley tech-breakfasts where a dozen or so entrepreneurs got to banter with a couple of VCs, but that was it.

But breakfast is now back.  This morning I was at Chris McCann’s “startup waffles”, There’s Sean Murphy’s bootstrapper’s breakfast, which I haven’t been to yet but will attend next week.  I seem to be getting more breakfast meetings with folks booked into the calendar (three this week).  And, in April/May when my brother gets back to California look for our breakfast themed-networking event which will have a uniquely British flavour to it.  We’ve had it planned for a while, and look forward to kicking it off.

I can over-pattern-match and come up with some wild speculation to explain this unscientifically observed trend:  startups have been in creative burst mode for the last few years as the innovation cycle has kicked in again; the creatives work late and sleep late; breakfast sucks; but companies are now getting traction so now it’s time to get to work again; with so few hours in the day - a bit like the dot.com boom times - the only thing left is breakfast.  Bah! Might as well do something with those first hours of the day once I have the kiddoes off to school…