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Downtown San Jose, the self-proclaimed "Capital of Silicon Valley."

The Market in Downtown San Jose as seen with uplit palms.

Silicon Valley refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations.^[1] The term originally referred to the region's large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the American high-tech sector. Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers throughout the United States and the world, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading hub for high-tech innovation and development, accounting for one-third (1/3) of all of the venture capital investment in the United States.^[2] Geographically, the Silicon Valley encompasses all of the Santa Clara Valley including the city of San Jose (and adjacent communities), the southern Peninsula Valley, and the southern East Bay.

Origin of the term[link]

The term Silicon Valley was coined by Ralph Vaerst, a successful Central California entrepreneur. Its first published use is credited to Don Hoefler, a friend of Vaerst's, who used the phrase as the title of a series of articles in the weekly trade newspaper Electronic News. The series, entitled "Silicon Valley in the USA," began in the paper's issue dated January 11, 1971. Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley, located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, while Silicon refers to the high concentration of companies involved in the semiconductor (silicon is used to create most semiconductors commercially) and computer industries that were concentrated in the area. These firms slowly replaced the orchards which gave the area its initial nickname, the Valley of Heart's Delight.

History[link]

"Perhaps the strongest thread that runs through the Valley's past and present is the drive to "play" with novel technology, which, when bolstered by an advanced engineering degree and channeled by astute management, has done much to create the industrial powerhouse we see in the Valley today."^[3]

Looking west over northern San Jose (downtown is at far left) and other parts of Silicon Valley

Stanford University, its affiliates, and graduates have played a major role in the development of this area.^[4] Some examples include the work of Lee De Forest with his invention of a pioneering vacuum tube called the Audion and the oscilloscopes of Hewlett-Packard.

A powerful sense of regional solidarity accompanied the rise of Silicon Valley. From the 1890s, Stanford University's leaders saw its mission as service to the West and shaped the school accordingly. At the same time, the perceived exploitation of the West at the hands of eastern interests fueled booster-like attempts to build self-sufficient indigenous local industry. Thus, regionalism helped align Stanford's interests with those of the area's high-tech firms for the first fifty years of Silicon Valley's development.^[5]

During the 1940s and 1950s, Frederick Terman, as Stanford's dean of engineering and provost, encouraged faculty and graduates to start their own companies. He is credited with nurturing Hewlett-Packard, Varian Associates, and other high-tech firms, until what would become Silicon Valley grew up around the Stanford campus. Terman is often called "the father of Silicon Valley."

During 1955-85, solid state technology research and development at Stanford University followed three waves of industrial innovation made possible by support from private corporations, mainly Bell Telephone Laboratories, Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Xerox PARC. In 1969 the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), operated one of the four original nodes that comprised ARPANET, predecessor to the Internet.^[6]

Social roots of information technology revolution[link]

It was in Silicon Valley that the silicon-based integrated circuit, the microprocessor, the microcomputer, among other key technologies, were developed. The region employs about a quarter of a million information technology workers.^{[citation needed]} Silicon Valley was formed as a milieu of innovations by the convergence on one site of new technological knowledge; a large pool of skilled engineers and scientists from major universities in the area; generous funding from an assured market with the Defense Department; the development of an efficient network of venture capital firms; and, in the very early stage, the institutional leadership of Stanford University.^[7]

Roots in radio and military technology[link]

The San Francisco Bay Area had long been a major site of United States Navy research and technology. In 1909, Charles Herrold started the first radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming in San Jose. Later that year, Stanford University graduate Cyril Elwell purchased the U.S. patents for Poulsen arc radio transmission technology and founded the Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) in Palo Alto. Over the next decade, the FTC created the world's first global radio communication system, and signed a contract with the Navy in 1912.^[3]

In 1933, Air Base Sunnyvale, California, was commissioned by the United States Government for use as a Naval Air Station (NAS) to house the airship USS Macon in Hangar One. The station was renamed NAS Moffett Field, and between 1933 and 1947, U.S. Navy blimps were based there.^[8] A number of technology firms had set up shop in the area around Moffett Field to serve the Navy. When the Navy gave up its airship ambitions and moved most of its west coast operations to San Diego, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, forerunner of NASA) took over portions of Moffett Field for aeronautics research. Many of the original companies stayed, while new ones moved in. The immediate area was soon filled with aerospace firms, such as Lockheed.

Stanford Industrial Park[link]

After World War II, universities were experiencing enormous demand due to returning students. To address the financial demands of Stanford's growth requirements, and to provide local employment opportunities for graduating students, Frederick Terman proposed the leasing of Stanford's lands for use as an office park, named the Stanford Industrial Park (later Stanford Research Park). Leases were limited to high technology companies. Its first tenant was Varian Associates, founded by Stanford alumni in the 1930s to build military radar components. However, Terman also found venture capital for civilian technology start-ups. One of the major success stories was Hewlett-Packard. Founded in Packard's garage by Stanford graduates William Hewlett and David Packard, Hewlett-Packard moved its offices into the Stanford Research Park slightly after 1953. In 1954, Stanford created the Honors Cooperative Program to allow full-time employees of the companies to pursue graduate degrees from the University on a part-time basis. The initial companies signed five-year agreements in which they would pay double the tuition for each student in order to cover the costs. Hewlett-Packard has become the largest personal computer manufacturer in the world, and transformed the home printing market when it released the first ink jet printer in 1984. In addition, the tenancy of Eastman Kodak and General Electric made Stanford Industrial Park a center of technology in the mid-1990s.^[9]

Silicon transistor and birth of the Silicon Valley[link]

In 1953, William Shockley left Bell Labs in a disagreement over the handling of the invention of the transistor. After returning to California Institute of Technology for a short while, Shockley moved to Mountain View, California in 1956, and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Unlike many other researchers who used germanium as the semiconductor material, Shockley believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. Shockley intended to replace the current transistor with a new three-element design (today known as the Shockley diode), but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. In 1957, Shockley decided to end research on the silicon transistor. As a result of Shockley's abusive management style, eight engineers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor; Shockley referred to them as the "traitorous eight." Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, would go on to found Intel.^[10][11]

Law firms[link]

The rise of Silicon Valley was also bolstered by the development of appropriate legal infrastructure to support the rapid formation, funding, and expansion of high-tech companies, as well as the development of a critical mass of litigators and judges experienced in resolving disputes between such firms. From the early 1980s onward, many national (and later international) law firms opened offices in San Francisco and Palo Alto in order to provide Silicon Valley startups with legal services. Furthermore, California law has a number of quirks which help entrepreneurs establish startups at the expense of established firms, such as a nearly absolute ban on non-compete clauses in employment agreements.

Venture capital firms[link]

By the early 1970s, there were many semiconductor companies in the area, computer firms using their devices, and programming and service companies serving both. Industrial space was plentiful and housing was still inexpensive. The growth was fueled by the emergence of the venture capital industry on Sand Hill Road, beginning with Kleiner Perkins in 1972; the availability of venture capital exploded after the successful $1.3 billion IPO of Apple Computer in December 1980.

The rise of software[link]

Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area's economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and Internet services. Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces.

Using money from NASA and the United States Air Force, Doug Engelbart invented the mouse and hypertext-based collaboration tools in the mid-1960s, while at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). When Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center declined in influence due to personal conflicts and the loss of government funding, Xerox hired some of Engelbart's best researchers. In turn, in the 1970s and 1980s, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) played a pivotal role in object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), Ethernet, PostScript, and laser printers.

While Xerox marketed equipment using its technologies, for the most part its technologies flourished elsewhere. The diaspora of Xerox inventions led directly to 3Com and Adobe Systems, and indirectly to Cisco, Apple Computer and Microsoft. Apple's Macintosh GUI was largely a result of Steve Jobs' visit to PARC and the subsequent hiring of key personnel.^[12] Cisco's impetus stemmed from the need to route a variety of protocols over Stanford's campus Ethernet.

Internet bubble[link]

Silicon Valley is generally considered to have been the center of the dot-com bubble which started from the mid-1990s and collapsed after the NASDAQ stock market began to decline dramatically in April 2000. During the bubble era, real estate prices reached unprecedented levels. For a brief time, Sand Hill Road was home to the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, and the booming economy resulted in severe traffic congestion.

Even after the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley continues to maintain its status as one of the top research and development centers in the world. A 2006 The Wall Street Journal story found that 12 of the 20 most inventive towns in America were in California, and 10 of those were in Silicon Valley.^[13] San Jose led the list with 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005, and number two was Sunnyvale, at 1,881 utility patents.^[14]

Economy[link]

According to a 2008 study by AeA in 2006, Silicon Valley was the third largest high-tech center (cybercity) in the United States, behind the New York metropolitan area and Washington metropolitan area, with 225,300 high-tech jobs. The Bay Area as a whole however, of which Silicon Valley is a part, would rank first with 387,000 high-tech jobs. Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high-tech workers of any metropolitan area, with 285.9 out of every 1,000 private-sector workers. Silicon Valley has the highest average high-tech salary at $144,800.^[15] Largely a result of the high technology sector, the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area has the most millionaires and the most billionaires in the United States per capita.^[16]

The region is the biggest high-tech manufacturing center in the United States.^[17][18] The unemployment rate of the region was 9.4% in January 2009, up from 7.8% in the previous month.^[19] Silicon Valley received 41% of all U.S. venture investment in 2011, and 46% in 4Q11. ^[20]

Media[link]

Local and national media cover the Silicon Valley region and its companies. CNN, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News operate Silicon Valley bureaus out of Palo Alto. Public broadcaster KQED, ABC and NBC Bay Area operate from San Jose. San Jose-based media serving Silicon Valley include the San Jose Mercury News daily and the Metro Silicon Valley weekly. Specialty media include El Observador and the San Jose / Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Notable companies[link]

Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley. Among those, the following are in the Fortune 1000:

Adobe Systems

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

Apple Inc.

Cisco Systems

eBay

Facebook

Google

Hewlett-Packard

Intel

Intuit

Nvidia

Oracle

Sun Microsystems

VMware

Yahoo!

YouTube

Additional notable companies headquartered (or with a significant presence) in Silicon Valley include (some defunct or subsumed):

Silicon Valley is also home to the high-tech superstore retail chain Fry's Electronics.

Notable government facilities[link]

• Moffett Federal Airfield
• NASA Ames Research Center
• Onizuka Air Force Station

Universities and colleges[link]

• San José State University
• San Francisco State University
• Stanford University
• Santa Clara University
• John F. Kennedy University Campbell Campus
• University of California, Berkeley Extension
• University of California, Santa Cruz Extension
• Hult International Business School
• Carnegie Mellon University (Silicon Valley campus)
• Golden Gate University Silicon Valley Campus
• Silicon Valley University
• California State University, East Bay, Hayward
• University of Phoenix San Jose Campus
• University of San Francisco South Bay Campus
• Lincoln Law School of San Jose
• University of Silicon Valley Law School
• San Jose City College
• Menlo College
• Evergreen Valley College
• Foothill College
• De Anza College
• Chabot College
• Peralta Colleges
• Mission College
• West Valley College
• National Hispanic University
• Ohlone College
• Cogswell Polytechnical College
• The Art Institute of California – Sunnyvale

Cities[link]

A number of cities are located in Silicon Valley (in alphabetical order):

• Campbell
• Cupertino
• Gilroy
• Los Altos
• Los Altos Hills
• Los Gatos
• Milpitas
• Monte Sereno
• Morgan Hill
• Mountain View
• Palo Alto
• San Jose
• Santa Clara
• Saratoga
• Sunnyvale

Cities sometimes associated with the region:

• East Palo Alto (San Mateo County)
• Emeryville (Alameda County, Pixar, MobiTV)
• Oakland (Alameda County, Ask.com(Ask Jeeves), Pandora Media)
• San Leandro (Alameda County, OSIsoft)
• Foster City
• Fremont (Alameda County)
• Hayward (Alameda County) (home of California State University, East Bay and Dust Networks)^[21]
• Menlo Park (San Mateo County, location of some venture capital companies)
• Newark (Alameda County)
• Redwood City (San Mateo County, home to Oracle, Electronic Arts and PDI/DreamWorks)
• San Francisco (San Francisco County, home to Quantcast, Salesforce, Square, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yelp, and Zynga)
• San Mateo, California (San Mateo County; home to Akamai's Silicon Valley office; YouTube was founded here; home to SolarCity, NetSuite among others)
• Scotts Valley (Santa Cruz County, home to Seagate Technology among others)

See also[link]

San Francisco Bay Area portal

• List of attractions in Silicon Valley
• List of places with "Silicon" names
• List of research parks around the world
• List of technology centers around the world
• Microcomputer revolution
• Pirates of Silicon Valley — 1999 movie
• Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition
• Sustainable Silicon Valley (SSV)
• Silicon Border
• San Fernando Valley, sometimes erroneously called "Silicon Valley"
• Silicon Fen
• Titanium Valley
• Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires — 1996 documentary
• Optics Valley
• Silicon Wadi
• Silicon Roundabout

References[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

• California's Historic Silicon Valley
• Growth of a Silicon Empire by Henry Norr published at the end of 1999 in the San Francisco Chronicle
• How Silicon Valley Came to BePDF (90.0 KiB)
• Red tile roofs in Bangalore: Stanford's look copied in Silicon Valley and beyond from Stanford University
• The Silicon Valley Cultures Project from San Jose State University
• Silicon Valley Historical Association
• A Weekend in Silicon Valley - slideshow by The New York Times

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Jason Calacanis
Calacanis at Gnomedex 5.
Born	(1970-11-28) November 28, 1970 (age 41) Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York City
Occupation	Internet entrepreneur / Blogger

Jason McCabe Calacanis (born November 28, 1970^[1]) is an American Internet entrepreneur and blogger. His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York, and his second venture, Weblogs, Inc., capitalized on the growth of blogs before being sold to AOL.

Early life[link]

Calacanis was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Xaverian High School in 1988. He then attended Fordham University, where he majored in psychology.^[2]

Career[link]

During the dot-com boom, Calacanis was active in New York's Silicon Alley community and in 1996 began producing a publication known as the Silicon Alley Reporter. Originally a 16-page photocopied newsletter, as its popularity grew it expanded into a 300-page magazine, with a sister publication called the Digital Coast Reporter for the West Coast. Calacanis's tireless socializing earned him a nickname as the "yearbook editor" of the Silicon Alley community.^[3] With the end of the Dot-com bubble, Silicon Alley Reporter failed.^[4]

Calacanis co-founded Weblogs, Inc. with Brian Alvey in 2003, supported by an angel investment from Mark Cuban. Time Warner's America Online agreed to buy Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005 for $25–30 million.^[5]

Netscape.com[link]

Six months into his tenure with AOL, Calacanis was offered a chance to be the General Manager of the new Netscape website. Calacanis used the model pioneered by Digg, Del.icio.us, and Furl and added an editorial layer to the system. The project has launched and occupied the front page of Netscape. Calacanis started by hiring a team of eight "anchors" to follow up users' top stories. He then hired some of the top users of social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and Flickr to go to Netscape as Netscape Navigators,^[6] which prompted a public debate with Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.

On November 16, 2006, TechCrunch reported that Calacanis had resigned from his position as CEO of Weblogs, Inc. and General Manager of Netscape.^[7] Calacanis later confirmed this with a post at his blog.^[8]

Sequoia Capital[link]

On December 5, 2006, Techcrunch reported that Calacanis was going to announce his new position at Sequoia Capital as an EIA (entrepreneur in action).^[9] Calacanis later confirmed this on his blog.^[10]

Mahalo.com[link]

Calacanis founded Mahalo.com, a "human-powered search engine",^[11] which launched in alpha test in May 2007. During a speech about the site at the Gnomedex conference in August 2007, Calacanis got into a public confrontation with Dave Winer that led to Winer's resignation from the panel of experts for the TechCrunch20 conference organized by Calacanis. Winer interrupted Calacanis' speech during the event, calling it "conference spam" and igniting a war of words on their blogs. "I'm not interested in having someone berate me like this," Calacanis wrote on his blog.^[12]

As of April 21, 2010 Mahalo had 9.4 million global (5.7 million US) unique monthly visitors, down from a peak of 14.1 million global (7.4 million US) unique monthly visitors, according to Quantcast.^[13]

Angel Investing[link]

In 2009 Calacanis founded the Open Angel Forum, an event that connects early stage startups with angel investors. The forum was the culmination of a series of public comments by Calacanis questioning the ethics of pay-to-pitch angel forums.^[14] Calacanis believes startups shouldn't have to pay to pitch angel investors.^[15] Calacanis is also an Angel Investor in Gowalla.

ThisWeekIn.com[link]

Calacanis is a co-founder of ThisWeekIn.com and host of the live streamed "This Week In Startups" on the network. ^[16]

LAUNCH Conference[link]

Calacanis announced the creation of the LAUNCH Conference to spotlight unannounced start-ups. The first conference was held on February 23rd and 24th 2011 and featured 140 startups. A number of companies received funding at the event and the winners included Room 77 and GreenGoose.

Controversy[link]

Calacanis was involved in a 2010 Internet hoax involving his Twitter postings regarding the introduction of the Apple iPad. In his tweets, he claimed to have a "reviewer's copy" of an iPad device describing in great detail the features of such device. The device in question was not in his possession nor did it exist. It was explained to have been an attempt by Calacanis to expose the hysteria regarding Apple product launches. The hoax also called into question the fact checking and verification processes of the mainstream media who published the hoax story as true.^[17][18]

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jason Calacanis

• The Jason Calacanis Weblog

Reid Hoffman
Hoffman in 2011
Born	Reid Garrett Hoffman August 5, 1967 (1967-08-05) (age 44) Stanford, California, USA
Alma mater	Stanford University Oxford University
Occupation	Entrepreneur and investor
Known for	Executive VP of PayPal Founder of LinkedIn
Net worth	US $1.8 billion[1]
Spouse	Michelle Yee[2]
Children	None as of 2011[3]

Reid Garrett Hoffman^[4] (born August 5, 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. Hoffman is best known as the co-founder of LinkedIn, a social network used primarily for business connections and job searching.

Early education and career[link]

Hoffman was born in Stanford, California, the son of Deanna Ruth Rutter and William Parker Hoffman, Jr.,^[5][6] and grew up in Berkeley, California. His paternal great-great-great-grandfather was Presbyterian minister and Indiana University president pro tempore Theophilus Adam Wylie.^[6] He attended high school at The Putney School.^[7] He graduated from Stanford University in 1990 (where he won both a Marshall Scholarship and a Dinkelspiel Award) with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science.^[8] He went on to earn an M.A. in philosophy from Oxford University in 1993.

Hoffman says he saw academia as an opportunity to make an "impact", but later realized that an entrepreneurial career would provide him with a bigger platform. "When I graduated from Stanford my plan was to become a professor and public intellectual. That is not about quoting Kant. It's about holding up a lens to society and asking 'who are we?' and 'who should we be, as individuals and a society?' But I realised academics write books that 50 or 60 people read and I wanted more impact."^[9]

So Hoffman pursued a career in business and entrepreneurship. After working at Apple Computer and Fujitsu in product management, Hoffman co-founded his first company, SocialNet.com, an online dating service.

PayPal[link]

While at SocialNet, Hoffman was a member of the board of directors at the founding of PayPal, an electronic money transmission service, and later joined the firm as a full-time employee. At the time of PayPal's acquisition by eBay in 2002, he was Executive Vice President of PayPal. He was responsible for all external relationships for PayPal, including Payments Infrastructure (VISA, MasterCard, ACH, WellsFargo), Business Development (eBay, Intuit, others), Government (Regulatory, Judicial), and Legal.

LinkedIn[link]

Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in December 2002. It was one of the first business-oriented online social networks. He was LinkedIn’s founding CEO for the first four years before becoming Chairman and President, Products in February 2007. Currently he is Executive Chairman. LinkedIn currently has over 135 million members in over 200 countries.^[10] With the IPO of LinkedIn on May 19, 2011, Hoffman owns a stake worth an estimated $2.34 billion dollars, not including any potential benefits from Greylock Partners, where he was named a Partner in 2009.^[11]

Investing[link]

After the PayPal sale to eBay, Hoffman became one of Silicon Valley's most prolific and successful angel investors. According to venture capitalist David Sze, Hoffman "is arguably the most successful angel investor in the past decade."^[12] He made 80 angel investments in technology companies. In 2010 Hoffman joined Greylock Partners and runs their $20 million Discovery Fund.^[13]

Facebook[link]