Silicon Valley Regions

Silicon Valley, industrial region around the southern shores of San Francisco Bay, California, U.S., with its intellectual centre at Palo Alto, home of Stanford University. Silicon Valley includes northwestern Santa Clara county as far inland as San Jose, as well as the southern bay regions of Alameda and San Mateo counties. Its name is derived from the dense concentration of electronics and computer companies that sprang up there since the mid-20th century, silicon being the base material of the semiconductors employed in computer circuits. The economic emphasis in Silicon Valley has now partly switched from computer manufacturing to research, development, and marketing of computer products and software.

Valley of Heart’s Delight

Early in the 20th century the area now called Silicon Valley was a bucolic region dominated by agriculture and known as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” owing to the popularity of the fruits grown in its orchards. It is roughly bounded by San Francisco Bay on the north, the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west, and the Diablo Range on the east. But Silicon Valley is not only a geographic location. The very name is synonymous with the rise of the computer and electronics industry as well as the emergence of the digital economy and the Internet. As such, Silicon Valley is also a state of mind, an idea about regional economic development, and part of a new mythology of American wealth. Other U.S. states and even other countries have attempted to create their own “Silicon Valleys,” but they have often failed to re-create elements that were crucial to the success of the original.

Terman and Stanford Industrial Park

If any single person is responsible for Silicon Valley, it is the electrical engineer and administrator Frederick E. Terman (1900–82). While a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Ph.D., 1924), Terman saw how the faculty at Cambridge actively pursued research as well as contact with industry through consulting and the placement of students in corporations. Returning home to Palo Alto in 1925 to join the faculty at Stanford, where he had received his undergraduate degree, Terman realized that Stanford’s electrical engineering department was deficient. At MIT the faculty were experts in a broad range of fields—electronics, power engineering, computing, and communications—all on the leading edge of research. At Stanford the electrical engineering department had a single focus—electric power engineering.

Terman set out to build Stanford into a major centre of radio and communications research. He also encouraged students such as William Hewlett and David Packard (of the Hewlett-Packard Company) and Eugene Litton (of Litton Industries, Inc.) to establish local companies. Terman also invested in these “start-up” enterprises, personally demonstrating his desire to integrate the university with industry in the region.

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Terman was made director of Harvard University’s Radio Research Laboratory, which was dedicated to producing radar jamming and other electronic countermeasure technologies. At war’s end he returned to Stanford as dean of engineering, intent on transforming Stanford into a West Coast MIT. First, he selected technologies for research emphasis; given his wartime work on microwave radar, he began with microwave electronics. Second, he solicited military contracts to fund academic research by faculty members who had worked in microwave technology during the war. By 1949 Stanford had become one of the top three recipients of government research contracts, overshadowing all other electronics departments west of the Mississippi River.

In 1951 Terman spearheaded the creation of the Stanford Industrial (now Research) Park, which granted long-term leases on university land exclusively to high-technology firms. Soon Varian Associates, Inc. (now Varian Medical Systems, Inc.), Eastman Kodak Company, General Electric Company, Admiral Corporation, Lockheed Corporation (now Lockheed Martin Corporation), Hewlett-Packard Company, and others turned Stanford Research Park into America’s premier high-technology manufacturing region. A mutually beneficial relationship developed: professors consulted with the rent-paying tenants, industrial researchers taught courses on campus, and companies recruited the best students. The park was Silicon Valley in miniature. As more firms moved to the region, fueling demand for basic electronic components, technical skills, and business supplies, many former high-technology employees started their own companies. Long before the personal computer, the start-up was the culture of the Valley.

From semiconductors to personal computers

In 1956 William Shockley, Nobel Prize-winning coinventor of the transistor, established his new Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in the park. Within a year a group of dissatisfied engineers resigned en masse to join with Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation to establish Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation in nearby Santa Clara. (Engineers from Fairchild went on to coinvent the integrated circuit in 1958.) This was the first of many corporate fractures that shaped the American semiconductor landscape. Of 31 semiconductor manufacturers established in the United States during the 1960s, only 5 existed outside the Valley; the remainder were the result of different engineers leaving Fairchild.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a fundamental change in the semiconductor market. By 1972 the U.S. military accounted for only 12 percent of semiconductor sales, compared with more than 50 percent during the early 1960s. With the growth in consumer applications, by the mid-1970s venture capitalists had replaced the U.S. government as the primary source of financing for start-ups. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs were quickly establishing firms to supply the semiconductor manufacturers with everything from instruments and measurement equipment to furnaces and cubicle partitions. In Silicon Valley it was possible to establish a corporation, find venture capital, rent space, hire staff, and be in business within a matter of weeks.

In the 1980s and ’90s the Silicon Valley landscape changed further as the economy shifted from semiconductors to personal computer manufacturing and then to computer software and Internet-based business. Economic growth during the transitional period 1986–92 was an anemic 0.7 percent per year, leading many manufacturers in the region to demand government protection from foreign competitors. Nevertheless, Stanford students continued to establish roughly 100 new companies each year, including Sun Microsystems, Inc., in 1982 and Yahoo! Inc. in 1994. Successful entrepreneurs returned as venture capitalists to plow their expertise and wealth back into the Valley. The intellectual density of the Valley grew, and the constant movement of employees and skills continued. Yet, through all this frenetic growth, personal contact remained central to the Valley way of doing business. Indeed, personal relationships were as important in the age of the Internet as they were when the U.S. government gave out military research funding in the early years of the Valley’s development. A venture capitalist might read thousands of business plans, but it was usually the personal presentation and the personality of the entrepreneur that determined funding. A poor presentation would sink all but the most brilliant plan. This was one of the great ironies of the boom economy of the 1990s. While the Internet enabled global communications, many of the technologies that made this transformation possible were the product of a local culture of face-to-face interaction.
Explosive growth

Since the invention of the integrated circuit, Silicon Valley and growth have been nearly synonymous. In 1959 there were roughly 18,000 high-technology jobs in the area. By 1971 there were approximately 117,000 such jobs, and in 1990 nearly 268,000 filled positions. From 1992 to 1999 Silicon Valley added more than 230,000 jobs (an increase of 23 percent) and accounted for roughly 40 percent of California’s export trade. To fill the growing need for high-technology workers, particularly engineers, the United States relaxed immigration quotas for aliens with special training, and the region experienced a large influx of workers from India and China. From 1975 to the 1990 U.S. census, the foreign-born population of Santa Clara county more than doubled, to 350,000. By the 21st century the Valley’s population had grown to more than two million; San Jose alone grew from roughly 200,000 in 1960 to more than 900,000 by century’s end to become the largest city in northern California. Electronics, computers, and computer software made the region’s wealth, but much of that wealth was absorbed by real estate: by 2000 the median price of a home in Santa Clara county was more than twice the national median for major metropolitan areas.

Bursting bubbles

The year 2000 marked the end of the “Internet bubble,” a five-year period when the paper value of publicly traded stock in Internet-based companies rose far above the real earning potential of the industry. By 2005 publicly traded Valley firms were worth roughly one-third of their market peak—a paper loss of approximately $2 trillion. Economic change of that magnitude had a profound effect. In 2005 there were fewer jobs in Santa Clara county than before the boom began in 1995. Venture capital funding, the lifeblood of Valley start-ups, collapsed from $105.5 billion in 2000 to $20.9 billion in 2004. Even Silicon Valley’s famous optimism took a beating in the post-bubble environment. Yet it is striking that home values did not decline: Silicon Valley remained an expensive place to live. The housing bubble finally burst in 2008, along with the general economy, as the median sale price of homes in the Valley tumbled more than 30 percent during the year, with some areas experiencing a nearly 50 percent drop in housing prices.

Yet, even though Silicon Valley’s famous optimism took a beating in the post-bubble environment, it was not knocked out. In the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008–09, with unemployment rates in the Valley at 10 percent or more, newcomers such as LinkedIn and Facebook raised hopes that social media might be the next new wave to keep the Valley’s fortunes afloat. Even in a period of reduced investment, Silicon Valley companies drew as much as 40 percent of all venture capital funding in the United States.

Such statistics are important, but they cannot capture the essence of the Valley or the history that has made such a remarkable place possible. Most current residents see the Valley as a product of raw, naked capitalism, a place where cubicle workers exist on a diet of fast food, where venture capitalists drive luxury cars and specialize in particular types of computer chips, and where bright young men and women can pitch their ideas, obtain financial support, and wait for the initial public offering of stock in their enterprise to transform them from hardworking individuals into hardworking millionaires. After the bursting of the Internet bubble, of course, residents realized that expectations of constant, unimpeded growth were not simply foolish but dangerous. Historical amnesia is an important part of Valley culture, but even this emphasis on the “new new thing” cannot erase the fact that the region’s economic power is a product of its past as well as its present, of military contracts as well as venture capital. Silicon Valley is an economically mature region whose childhood and adolescence were paid for by U.S. tax dollars