Silicon Valley

The strip of the Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco was covered in fruit orchards when, in 1939, two Stanford graduates named William Hewlett and David Packard began building audio equipment in a Palo Alto garage. Their mentor, Stanford engineering dean Frederick Terman, spent the following decades pushing his students to start companies nearby rather than leave for the East Coast — seeding a culture of local entrepreneurship that would define the region long before anyone called it Silicon Valley.

The silicon arrived in 1956, when William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, set up a semiconductor lab in Mountain View. He was a brilliant physicist and an impossible boss; within a year, eight of his best researchers walked out to found Fairchild Semiconductor. From Fairchild and its many offshoots — most famously Intel, launched in 1968 — came the integrated circuit and the microprocessor, the chips that put computing power onto a sliver of silicon and gave the valley its name in a 1971 trade-paper headline.

A second culture grew up alongside the engineers: the financiers who bet on them. Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park became the address of the modern venture capital industry, where firms traded money for equity in unproven startups and reaped fortunes when a handful succeeded. That model — high risk, high reward, fast failure — funded the personal computer boom of the late 1970s, the internet companies of the 1990s, and the smartphone and social-media giants of the 2000s.

By the twenty-first century Silicon Valley had become shorthand for an entire way of building the future, exported to imitators worldwide. Its companies reshaped how people work, shop, and communicate, while its concentration of wealth drove some of the steepest housing costs and starkest inequality in the country. The orchards are long gone, but the valley remains the densest cluster of technological and financial power the modern economy has produced.