The suburban office park that launched Silicon Valley

Summary

Stanford built one of the first office parks in the country. Tech pioneers swooped in. In the town of Palo Alto, California, tucked away between El Camino Real and Junipero Serra Boulevard, you’ll find the most influential office park in the world. Glassy buildings rise from manicured green lawns. Towering evergreen trees conceal asphalt parking lots. Somewhere, there’s a volleyball court. Although the landscape resembles the same focus-grouped blandness you’d find at any of the thousands of office parks spanning America’s suburbs, the logos in front of the buildings stand out: Tesla, Google, HP, Rivian. Facebook was here in the early 2010s. The personalities who’ve worked at this office park are just as prominent. A turtleneck-wearing man who invented the iPhone rented space in the 1980s after Apple ousted him. A turtleneck-wearing woman ran her miracle blood-testing company here before she was outed as a fraud. Welcome to Stanford Research Park. Designed in the early 1950s as one of America’s first suburban office parks, the ~700-acre development is home to 150 companies. But Stanford Research Park isn’t merely the setting for the cutting-edge tech companies and innovators that hold sway over America’s economy. By some measures, it catalyzed the entire scene. If not for this suburban office park, Silicon Valley might not exist. From apricots to microwave tubes In the late 1940s, as students poured in after World War II, Stanford University faced a classic American dilemma: It owned a bevy of land but was going broke. About 60 years earlier, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford had founded the university on his stock farm in Palo Alto, a sparsely populated town in a region where apricot and peach trees outnumbered houses. Roughly one-third of the world’s prune supply came from the orchards of Santa Clara County, which encompassed Palo Alto. Santa Clara County orchards from the 1930s. (Postcard via Facebook/Bob Emerson) When Stanford died in 1893, he bequeathed 8k acres ...