VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT → GLOBAL TECH CAPITAL
How a Stanford dean, a dropped-out Shockley lab, and $1,300 in a Los Altos garage created Apple, Google, and the engine of the modern world — 30 miles south of San Francisco.
HP starts in a Palo Alto garage — the Valley's “birthplace.” Now a museum.
Shockley Semiconductor. Eight engineers quit → Fairchild → Intel.
Jobs & Wozniak build Apple I in Los Altos. Sold for $666.66.
Google in a Menlo Park garage. BackRub → PageRank → verb.
Fairchild (1957) + Intel 4004 (1971). Noyce & Moore's law: transistors double ~2 yrs.
Homebrew Computer Club, Apple II (1977). Computers for people, not just labs.
1994–2004: browsers, search, social. Sand Hill Road funds it all.
2007 iPhone, 2012 deep learning (Stanford/ Google Brain), now OpenAI/Anthropic SF + Nvidia Santa Clara.
Dean Frederick Terman leased Stanford land cheap to startups (Stanford Industrial Park, 1951) and pushed professors to found companies. Add defense $$$ (Lockheed, NASA Ames), open culture, and failure = badge of honor.
$ who made the valley
> fairchild_traitorous_eight --found intel
✓ Noyce, Moore, Grove…
> steve_jobs --garage Los_Altos
✓ Apple I boots
> larry_sergey --dorm Stanford
✓ google.stanford.edu live