Secret History of Silicon Valley
Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capital and peopled by fabled entrepreneurs. But it wasn't always so.
Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency.
In this lecture, renowned serial entrepreneur Steve Blank presents how the roots of Silicon Valley sprang not from the later development of the silicon semiconductor but instead from the earlier technology duel over
the skies of Germany and secret efforts around (and over) the Soviet Union. World War II, the Cold War and one Stanford professor set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley.
The world was forever changed when the Defense Department, CIA and the National Security Agency acted like today's venture capitalists funding this first wave of entrepreneurship. Steve Blank shows how these groundbreaking
early advances lead up to the high-octane, venture capital fueled Silicon Valley we know today.
| Secret History of Silicon Valley |
| Related Links |
| Technology Entrepreneurship This course introduces the fundamentals of technology entrepreneurship, pioneered in Silicon Valley and now influencing other locations around the world. |
| Understanding Silicon Valley John Markoff reported on the emergence of Silicon Valley and has covered technology developments in the region from 1977 to 2017. |
| Pirates of Silicon Valley This is a 1999 film based on the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. |
| Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires This is a PBS documentary series hosted by Bob Cringely, telling a history of personal computers from its beginning in the 1970s to the release of Windows 95 in the mid 1990s. |