Silicon Valley’s Hot Café: Where Digirati Pitch Ideas Over Venezuelan Coffee
Silicon Valley is the tech industry’s epicenter, but what is the epicenter of Silicon Valley?
It might just be Coupa Café in downtown Palo Alto, California.
For the tech community, this café is a meeting place of the who’s who of Silicon Valley, where the likes of the late Steve Jobs of Apple, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin have all been spotted. Up-and-coming startup founders are able to buy their lattes with the digital currency Bitcoin before their pitch sessions with leading industry venture capitalists.
The café is so well known among techies that a cup with the Coupa logo was featured as a prop in the 2010 film The Social Network.
“I remember seeing Mark Zuckerberg sitting here and having meetings and people coming up,” said Eric Sokol, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University.
While Silicon Valley is famous for companies such as Facebook, Twitter and other billion-dollar empires built in cyberspace, some folks in the valley still believe real-world human connections can make a difference.
The Venezuelan-born Jean Paul Coupal founded the café with his mother and sister in 2004 with the hopes of bringing a bit of his homeland to Silicon Valley. The family puts its touch on all aspects of the business — Coupal’s sister and mother personally painted each of the eight cafés.
While the beautifully decorated walls and rich cuisine may be what initially attracted the tech community, the café’s tech focus has kept it in the vanguard of this café-saturated region.
“We want to be part of the technology,” Coupal said.
Now, there are eight Coupa Cafe locations. This one, the original on Ramona Street, is in a building from the 1930s.
“The food’s good, the coffee’s good,” Sokol said. “I wish I had stock, but I don’t in Coupa. And I don’t know, it just has the right atmosphere, the right mix of people. It’s got an energy about it, I guess.”
Café Coupa shows that being at the right place at the right time can change a café’s fate as much as a techie’s life.
