A History of Silicon Valley

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These are excerpts from Piero Scaruffi's book
"A History of Silicon Valley"


(Copyright © 2016 Piero Scaruffi)

Sharks: the iPhone, Cloud Computing, Location-based Services, Social Games, and Personal Genomics (2007-10)

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The Empire

Looking at the numbers, Silicon Valley had never been healthier than it was in 2008, before the big worldwide financial crisis struck. It had 261 public companies and countless startups. eBay was selling $60 billion worth of goods in 2007, a figure higher than the GDP of 120 countries of the world. In 2007 venture capitalists invested $7.6 billion in Silicon Valley and an additional $2.5 billion in the rest of the Bay Area. The Bay Area boasted the world's highest concentration of venture capitalists. Silicon Valley's share of venture-capital investment in the US reached 37.5% at the end of 2009 (compared, for example, with New York's 9.2%). Silicon Valley had 2.4 million people (less than 1% of the US's population) generating more than 2% of the US's GDP, with a GDP per person of $83,000.

The rest of the Bay Area was equally stunning: by 2009 the Lawrence Berkeley Labs alone boasted 11 Nobel Prize winners, more than India or China, and UC Berkeley boasted 20. So the tiny town of Berkeley alone had 31, more than any country in the world except the US, Britain, Germany, and France. Add Stanford's 16 and UCSF's 3 for a grand total of 50 in a region of about 19,000 square kilometers, smaller than Belize or Slovenia. In 2006 the Bay Area received three Nobel prizes out of nine: one each to Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF. In the last 20 years the winners included: Richard Taylor of Stanford University (1990), Martin Perl of Stanford University (1995), Douglas Osheroff of Stanford University (1996), Steven Chu of Stanford University (1997), Robert Laughlin of Stanford University (1998), and George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley Labs (2006) for Physics; William Sharpe of Stanford University (1990), Gary Becker of Stanford University (1992), John Harsanyi of UC Berkeley (1994), Myron Scholes of Stanford University (1997), Daniel McFadden of UC Berkeley (2000), Joseph Stiglitz of Stanford University (2001), George Akerlof of UC Berkeley (2001), and Oliver Williamson of UC Berkeley (2009) for Economics; Sydney Brenner (2002), the founder of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, Andrew Fire of Stanford University (2006), and Elizabeth Blackburn of UCSF (2009) for Medicine; Roger Kornberg of Stanford University (2006) for Chemistry.

Another Nobel prize in Physics came in 2011: Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley Lab. And then Brian Kobilka of Stanford in Chemistry in 2012, and Shinya Yamanaka of UC San Francisco for Medicine, also in 2012. And then in 2013 Michael Levitt for Chemistry (Stanford), Randy Schekman for Medicine (Berkeley) and Thomas Sudhof for Medicine (Stanford). In 2014 William Moerner of u in Chemistry. In 2020 Jennifer Doudna (UC Berkeley) in Chemistry, Reinhard Genzel (UC Berkeley) in Physics, as well as Stanford economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson. In 2021 David Julius (UC San Francisco) in Medicine as well as economists David Card (UC Berkeley) and Guido Imbens (Stanford). In 2022 Carolyn Bertozzi (Stanford) in Chemistry and John Clauser (UC Berkeley) in Physics.

The Bay Area was more than a region: it was an economic empire. The number of jobs that had been outsourced to countries like India probably exceeded the number of jobs created in Silicon Valley itself. And the relationship with the rest of the world was as deep as it could be. A study by Duke University found that 52.4% of Silicon Valley's high-tech companies launched between 1995 and 2005 had been founded by at least one immigrant. This phenomenon was probably a first in history. At the same time investors flocked from all over the world. For example, in 2008 Taiwanese conglomerate Quanta invested into two Silicon Valley's "fab-less" startups: Tilera (founded in October 2004 by Anant Agarwal) and Canesta (founded in April 1999 by Cyrus Bamji, Abbas Rafii, and Nazim Kareemi).


click here for the other sections of the chapter "Sharks: the iPhone, Cloud Computing, Location-based Services, Social Games, and Personal Genomics (2007-10)"
(Copyright © 2016 Piero Scaruffi)

Table of Contents | Timeline of Silicon Valley | A photographic tour | History pages | Editor | Correspondence