In the last 40 years the region—now commonly known as Silicon Valley—has undergone an unparalleled transformation. The prunes, apricots, and cherries that were the original fruits of the Valley have been replaced by microprocessors, personal computers, and the Internet.
A recent report by a non-profit organization that monitors the economic vitality of the region estimates that Silicon Valley is now home to more than 7,000 technology-based companies and that it stretches across 30 cities, including San Jose, the third-largest city in California, and parts of four counties: Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda, and Santa Cruz. The organization also estimates that the economic region includes more than 1.2 million jobs and 2.3 million residents. It is now the most prosperous location in the most prosperous country in the world.
I first went to Silicon Valley in 1995, several days after moving to San Francisco. I had a meeting with a bank in Santa Clara, and borrowed a friend's car for the 45-minute drive. For the first time, I drove south of the San Francisco airport on Interstate 101 (or "the 101" as Californians like to say) and towards the heart of Silicon Valley.
Netscape had staged its initial public offering only days before I arrived in San Francisco and it seemed that Silicon Valley was back in the news after a long and fallow period of recessions. The startling stories of instant wealth were filtering back to the East coast and the press was cautiously trying to determine if the Internet was as significant as companies like Netscape claimed it was. Other new companies, like Yahoo and Excite, were lining up behind Netscape, hoping to reap the same rewards from the public markets.
I expected to encounter opulence as I drove down Route 101, like the kind of wealth one might find in Beverly Hills (my only other association with California's riches). I expected to see the spoils of the first two great innovations of the high tech revolution—the semiconductor and the personal computer. I expected lavish homes, manicured lawns, lush palm trees, and oddly shaped swimming pools. I thought I would see displays of conspicuous consumption—of young, harried technophiles driving obscure Italian sports cars. Of beautiful people in a beautiful setting. If all of this money is here, surely it must manifest itself boldly and without apprehension.
By the time I reached the city of Santa Clara, however, I wondered if there wasn't some heightened sense of discretion in Silicon Valley. Perhaps the criticism that "new" wealth is always vulgar and ostentatious was unfounded. Perhaps Silicon Valley's millionaires were exceedingly modest, despite their riches. I didn't encounter a garish display of wealth. In fact, I found quite the opposite
Santa Clara, which many consider to be the epicenter of Silicon Valley, is a city of halting banality. Viewed from the freeway, it's little more than a series of multi-lane surface roads which connect Silicon Valley's most dominant fixture: the nondescript, low-level office park. A handful of taller buildings exist and some newer high rises are under construction, but they look lonely and out of place. The faceless office park is Silicon Valley's dreary and enduring symbol.
And the aesthetic banality is not limited to the city of Santa Clara. From the northern reaches of San Mateo (at the upper end of the Valley) to the areas south of San Jose, Silicon Valley is a crude amalgam of strip malls, office parks, flimsy housing developments, and economy motels. On one side of Route 101, multimillion dollar homes are tucked into posh enclaves like Menlo Park, Atherton, and Woodside. On the other, cities like East Palo Alto are home to poverty and criminal activity that rivals the most unruly of urban settings.
How is it, then, that Silicon Valley—the global capital of innovation and creativity—came to be such an unremarkable slice of America? In its appearance and its aesthetic, Silicon Valley represents a pure contradiction. It makes perfect sense and no sense at all. The Valley's concentration of wealth is unmatched anywhere else in the world, yet the manifestation of that wealth is mostly absent.
The Valley of The Heart's Delight began its abrupt transformation into the valley it is today in the late 1950s. Hewlett-Packard, the grandfather of Silicon Valley technology companies, staged its first public stock offering on November 6, 1957. In 1961, an East coast financier named Arthur Rock decided to move west to provide financial backing for the growing number of "scientific" ideas that were emerging from universities like Stanford. Most East coast financial institutions were reluctant to participate in such risky investments. But Mr. Rock and another financier, Tommy Davis, formed Davis & Rock, a venture capital firm which was created before the term "venture capital" had even been coined.
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