[New York Times] Indeed, San Francisco cafes have emerged as the new office of choice for many small start-ups. Atlas Cafe, also in the eclectic Mission District, is one, and Coffee to the People in the Haight is another. But Ritual, located between a heating repair shop and a video store, is perhaps the most popular. And Ritual is a bastion of capitalist fervor.

Perhaps this is a newer trend in San Fransicso, but Delicious Monster been using Zoka Coffee for an office since 1995.

Interesting trends going on with startups:

• They don’t need to buy their own infrastructure - they leverage Amazon Web Services. EC2, S3 and SimpleDB.
• Salesforce.com seems to the CRM of choice these days.
• Hosting is done offsite (Dreamhost, MediaTemple, etc)
• (Apparently) you don’t need office space, just use a coffee shop.

Anyways - it’s interesting to watch.