Buck's of Woodside (Locally known as: Buck's) is a restaurant in

Woodside, California Woodside is a incorporated town in San Mateo County, California, United States, on the San Francisco Peninsula. It has a council–manager system of government. The population of the town was 5,309 at the 2020 census. The town's population ha ...

, that has gained fame as a meeting place for venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs. Like nearby Sand Hill Road, Buck's has become a fixture of

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

About

Jamis MacNiven left his career in construction to open the restaurant in 1991. Unhappy with local restaurants, MacNiven decided to create his own. By 1995, when the

dot-com boom The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Intern ...

began, word of mouth spread that Buck's was a hotspot for Silicon Valley's most powerful. The restaurant is close to both Sand Hill Road—home to the majority of Silicon Valley's venture capitalists—and

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

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and

Tesla Motors Tesla, Inc. ( or ) is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, it designs, manufactures and sells battery electric vehicles (BEVs), stationary battery energy storage devices from hom ...

are among the companies whose entrepreneurs held early meetings at Buck's. "Breakfast at Buck's" is the title of the introduction of the book, ''The Startup Game: Inside the Partnership between Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs'', by venture capitalist Bill Draper. In 2003, ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...

'' magazine named Buck's one of its top business restaurants. The interior of Buck's features colorful decor, including cowboy boots, a talking buffalo head, a model of the

Statue of Liberty The Statue of Liberty (''Liberty Enlightening the World''; ) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, within New York City. The copper-clad statue, a gift to the United States from the people of French Thir ...

holding an Ice cream Sunday, and a stuffed alligator. According to MacNiven,

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder o ...

is one of the few

icons who never set foot in his restaurant; MacNiven and the

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

co-founder had a falling out in the 1980s after Jobs hired him to remodel his house. Buck's nevertheless has a rare photo of Jobs, wearing a set of Groucho glasses, on display. When the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

hit in the spring of

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, and the resulting restaurant shut-down, Jamis MacNiven decided to retire. In August 2020 Buck's was re-opened by his sons (Dylan, Tyler & Rowan MacNiven) who now run it.

References

External links

*{{Official website, buckswoodside.com Woodside, California Culture of Silicon Valley 1991 establishments in California Restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area Tourist attractions in Silicon Valley

About

Further reading

References

External links