I grew up in Sunnyvale. In a garage on Evelyn Avenue.

Sunnyvale used to be called Murphy, after Martin Murphy Jr., who bought the land in 1850 and farmed wheat on it. The name changed in 1901. Wheat gave way to orchards, orchards brought Libby's cannery in 1906, and for a while that cannery was one of the biggest fruit packers in the world. Then Moffett Field, then Lockheed moved its headquarters here in 1956, and the semiconductor companies followed. Atari made Pong a few miles from where I grew up. Every street name in this town has a story like that, and most people driving El Camino every day never hear it.

The Sunnyvale I know is not the campuses. It is the businesses that serve the people who work at them. The auto shop, the tailor, the med spa, the restaurants on Murphy Avenue. El Camino Real is a strip of family businesses, and Murphy Avenue downtown is a street of them. These are the businesses I grew up around, and the kind I have spent my career helping.

What they need has not changed much since my dad opened his doors. Answer the phone. Do the work right. Ask for the review. The difference now is that the phone is a text at 7pm, the customer found you on a screen, and the review is what the next customer reads before calling. I build the systems that do those three things without the owner having to remember.