Silicon Valley

Stanford continues to be near the center of activity for Silicon Valley. The University continues to grow, attracting entrepreneur minded students, and perpetuating a progressive ethos that […]

Samsung located Samsung Research and Innovation Center in Sunnyvale moving in 2014. The campus includes several buildings and is located across the freeway from Moffett Field.

Evernote was founded by Stepan Pachikov in 2007, with the Evernote web service opening in beta in June 2008. Originally founded in Sunnyvale, Evernote moved to the […]

Y Combinator was founded in March 2005 in Mountain View by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. Y Combinator is a venture capital firm […]

Box was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie, which started as a college project while he was a student at USC. Levie cofounded the company with his […]

Facebook launched its website on February 4, 2004, developed by Mark Zuckerberg with his Harvard roommates and friends. By summer 2004, the company moved out to Palo […]

Android, Inc. was founded in Palo Alto in October 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White to develop an advanced operating system for […]

Shown above is Tesla Motors headquarters located in the Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto. Tesla was originally founded in 2003 in San Carlos just a block […]

Survey Monkey started as an atypical technology company, founded in 1999 by brothers Ryan and Chris Finley, without raising any outside funding, not common at a time […]

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while graduate students at Stanford University. They originally named their new search […]

In December 1998, PayPal was started as Confinity founded by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery, building security software for handheld devices. They developed […]

Juniper Networks was founded in 1996 by Pradeep Sindhu a scientist from PARC, who came up with an idea on building a better router specifically for Internet […]

If you were in the Bay Area during the dotcom era, you likely remember the Excite building right on 101 in Redwood City, often with the Mystery […]

Netscape started as Mosaic Communications Corporation in 1994, when Jim Clark recruited Marc Andreessen to co-found the company. The original idea was for an online gaming network […]

Yahoo was founded in January 1994 by graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo as a simple directory to find sites on the web, original named “Jerry […]

Adobe Systems was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke who left Xerox PARC to develop and sell PostScript. Apple would include PostScript in its […]

Brothers John, Randy, and David Fry inherited money from their father who ran Fry’s Supermarket, a small chain of grocery stores in California. The brothers were not […]

Sun Microsystems was founded in 1982 by Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students. They were joined shortly by Bill Joy of Berkeley, […]

Oracle Corporation was founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates initially named Software Development Laboratories. They started developing services but moved to selling […]

The IBM Great Oaks facility was a research facility in south San Jose where they developed the RAMAC computer and the magnetic disc drive. You can view […]

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne started Apple Computer in 1976; selling their machines out of this Los Altos garage; home of Steve’s parents, Paul and […]

The MITS Altair 8800 is widely recognized as the first spark that led to the microcomputer revolution. MITS was founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1969 by […]

Xerox established their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970. They were hired many employees of the nearby SRI Augmentation Research Center; as funding from DARPA, NASA, […]

SRI is a quiet but very important non-profit research institute. It was established by the trustees of Stanford University in 1946 as a center of innovation to […]

Jerry Sanders, along with seven of his colleagues from Fairchild Semiconductor, started Advanced Micro Devices in 1969. Sanders, an electrical engineer and the director of marketing at […]

National Semiconductor was founded in Connecticut in 1959. The founding engineers left Sperry Rand to start National, which resulted in patent disputes taking years to resolve causing […]

Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce founded Intel in 1968 in Mountain View, CA. The two were original members of the Traitorous Eight that left Shockley Labs for […]

Applied Materials was founded in 1967 to support the exploding semiconductor manufacturing boom. Applied supplies the equipment, services and tools to enable the manufacturing of semiconductors. The […]

Fairchild Semiconductor was founded by eight employees that left Shockley Labs together, they became known as the Traitorous Eight. They were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, […]

In 1956 William Shockley moved to Mountain View, CA to start Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Shockley was a physicist and researcher at Bell Labs in New York where […]

Lockheed Martin, a major defense contractor, whose missiles division was relocated to the Bay Area from its previous location in Southern California. The reason for the move […]

Varian is one of the quiet unsung heroes of Silicon Valley, the company has played an important role in history and is lesser known than Hewlett Packard, […]