Living in the UK, when one thinks of a valley, we think of it on a UK scale. We think of it as something that you’ll see in the Lake District.
If you are from the USA, they do things bigger there, a valley is not something that you can necessarily see both sides or each end of.
Silicon Valley in northern California encompasses the Santa Clara Valley. Some say it is 75 miles long.
What Silicon Valley has become is The Valley. It was a concentration of high tech firms long before Google and Facebook arrived.
Xerox had its research labs in Palo Alto. (check your history) Intel’s headquarters are in Santa Clara. Oracle Software is headquartered in San Francisco, if you travel by car from the SF International airport it is hard to miss. Cisco is, well you can probably guess.
Many of the entrepreneurs now running those global striding corporations were educated at Stanford University including google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
These huge global behemoths and the money they generated also paved the way for generations of high tech entrepreneurs and investors. Salesforce, Netsuite, Box, Dropbox, Red Hat, Cloudera, HPE Vmware.
A map of tech companies from google.
Next Page: Follow the money..
For many it is not the availability of brains, ideas and technology that separates Silicon Valley from other tech hubs that have sprung up around the world but it is the availability of money and the willingness to invest rapidly at scale. Check out the size of Uber’s first round of investment.
This access to capital stems from an investment community that is huge. Sequoia Capital, Aspect Ventures, Greylock, Accel Partners, Cowboy Ventures, Aurora, ScaleVP, are among the most high profile venture capital brands in Silicon Valley.
Add to this the VC money that is invested by those who made their money from technology and the pot keeps growing.
Silicon Valley is also a well known sitcom.
