History of Silicon Valley

Yesterday (dan this morning) I made presentations on the history of Silicon Valley. The idea is to learn from its history if we want to understand what happened (and will happen in the future). Here’s a picture before I made the presentation. The “Rock’N Roll” thing is another story.

I introduced Frederick Terman, William Shockley, Robert Noyce, and so on to the generation after them (Steve Jobs; then Google guys; then Facebook; …). Various videos were shown (old documentary videos to the recent videos on Silicon Valley). [I should put links here. Will do that later. Need to do mentoring first.]

There are several “values” that are still true there: risk taking, accepting of crazy ideas, open & helpful, sharing, accepting failure, and meritocracy. It goes something like this. What’s your idea? Can you do it? What can I do to help you realize that idea?

“Silicon Valley is not a place. It’s a state of mind.”

Most of my students (in my class this morning) are not interested in starting up. They are not entrepreneurs. But then again, somebody said that society only needs 2% of its population to become entrepreneurs.