Right about now TP is feeling pretty good about himself, the Valley and the IPO market next year.

He’s got good reason to smile, the San Fran/SV scene is starting to pick up again thanks, in large part, to the Google IPO. Of course, if the Google IPO doesn’t happen or their stock tanks it will be a cold and bitter day in San Fran (well, a colder and more bitter day then normal).

I have to say that on my trip to San Fran last week I found the place buzzing more then it has in the last three yearscombined!

While the streets were still empty (picture the Flatiron district with little to no foot traffic strange right? That is what much of San Fran is still like to this day!), an inner circle of people are doing deals and banging on their Crackberries.

People have learned some major lessons from Google, and they are the antithesis of the dot com days that Tony and I both chronicled in Red Herring and Silicon Alley Reporter (how ironic that we are both doing Web log sites now or not). Google lessons:

1. Solve a real problem.

2. Don’t waste money/be cheap.

3. Make money, then figure out how to make more money.

4. Don’t waste money on marketing (when’s the last time you saw a Google commercial or billboard?).

5. Make your customers love you.

6. Never stop innovating.

7. Doing one thing excellent is better then doing eight things good (i.e. Yahoo has dozens of links on their site, but Google main categories are all much, much better: search, image search, discussion groups and news).

8. Don’t waste money (oh did I mention that already?)

Silicon Valley is back . . . with a Kennedy as First Lady and a global twist.

In order to cleanse our system, though, we did have to pay the price of going out of fashion for a while, which was a painful and embarrassing process. New Yorkers in particular rubbed our noses in it. They stopped writing about us, stopped calling us up and asking us to be on television. They wanted to make it very clear that they really never had anything to do with us in the first place.

But what even the New Yorkers may not know is that Silicon Valley is roaring again. (Based on my recent trip to Paris/London/West Berlin, the Europeans sure are surprised to hear the U.S. is doing better.) As we predicted when we launched AO, Nasdaq is appreciably up on the back of strong economic trends and tech company earnings. And 2004 will be a huge tech IPO year with at least 10 blockbusters currently in the pipeline.