WIRED:Showing a New Yorker around brings home the great culture difference between two places, writes DANNY O'BRIEN

I’VE BEEN showing a colleague around Silicon Valley; he’s from New York, here on business. I joked at the beginning of the week that I’d have to give him a crash course in cultural differences, given that he was from so far away. It turned out to be more true than I thought.

First of all, he was surprised that we got meetings with as many people as we did. All of them were at the level of wealth or fame that would make them largely inaccessible in New York or London. In the end, we largely just e-mailed the people we wanted to speak to, and asked. All of them replied in person, though some passed the e-mail on to an organiser who sorted out the meetings. In at least two cases, it was having an assistant that was the novelty for the important person concerned. “I got one last month. I just realised I wasn’t very good at planning meetings,” said one angel investor, almost embarrassed.

One of the assumptions people have about the technological business world is that there would be a flurry of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) – confidentiality agreements you sign before even discussing an idea with a fellow techie.

Actually, one of the meta-analyses we talked about was how NDAs were almost uncouth. The general feeling was that NDAs don’t work; they merely indicate just how gossip-worthy what you were about to be told might be.

Everyone I spoke to was happy to talk about their future plans, their opinions on Silicon Valley and each other in a way that I think contrasted with the carefully traded estimations of a more convoluted social scene.

Where did we meet? No matter how big the name, we met in cafes, in homes, in public co-working spaces. We met people in incredibly fancy investors’ offices, only to run out to a nice lunch place nearby (and then spend the next hour or so sitting in their high-tech conference room, checking e-mail while we waited for another appointment). At one meeting we slumped together on a giant sofa. At another, the general counsel of a household name and I hunched over coffees in an unfeasibly over-chic nook of their cafeteria.

At the beginning of the week, I fretted mildly about what to wear. When I last visited New York, I signally failed to look as natty as anyone in even the most informal of breakfast meetings. Would my one good suit last the week? By Friday, my New York colleague and I were struggling to look as casual as our hosts.

There were subtler notes too, which I only spotted after a decade here. It might have been projecting, but I began noticing that others seemed as averse to early morning meetings as I am. Early morning meetings were subtly rescheduled after a “busy trip” or an “unfortunate scheduling error”.

In mid-week, I read a piece about an average day in the life of Michael Arrington, Silicon Valley’s all-seeing business blogger, which rather confirmed my hunch.

In it, he describes collapsing asleep at 9am and waking at 4am, after working until “I’d pass out”. This, from a guy in charge of a company with 25 employees, makes me feel a lot better about those late nights, and late appointments.

People talk fast here, and in a different way to New York fast. New Yorkers make their speed out of snappy comebacks. Here, the sentences are slow-building, but complex, and draw on hard sciences more than wisecracks. Mathematics, economics, computer science of course, all get pulled in to do work as metaphor factories or to justify suddenly delivered radical ideas.

Still, it wasn’t all high intellect. I also got to see the incredible velocity of gossip here. Bare rumours on Monday were aging anecdotes by Friday. Of course, I did my own bit of propagating – a social nicety that is the same wherever you go. But it was clear we were all watching the same websites, talking about the same people. Even though I barely knew these high-flyers, there was a democratic (or bland) unity of topic choice.

It made me realise, once again, how much I like the culture here. I love New York, but only as an observer. I like watching it buzz, spit and spark.

Dragging my poor guest along with me, I realised how alien it was, but also how alien I had become, as I explained casual asides with 10-minute long anthropological histories.

We got meetings; we talked to dozens of smart people. It seemed very accessible to me. But surely everyone thinks this about their own back yard. I can imagine how terrifying it would be to be an outsider, suddenly meeting these millionaires and gamblers, hackers and professors of computer science. We weren’t looking for investors, but this is the path a young hopeful entrepreneur would walk.

If you’re not one of these creatures, how would you even know how to start talking to them? The very fact that it did not seem strange shows how far I am from understanding how strange and foreign it truly is.