The Luckiest Address in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

The Luckiest Address in Silicon Valley

milo.com

17 pointsjaybol20 comments

I thought this was the luckiest: http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-...

Care to explain? :)

The physicist Werner Heisenberg was once asked if he knew where Stanford University was located. "I believe it is on the west coast of the United States, not far from San Francisco. There is also another school nearby, and they steal each other's axes," he replied, referring to Stanford's rivalry with the University of California, Berkeley. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University)

Lucky? Sun, Yahoo, Google, Loopt as a small sample. For god's sake, there is a Sequoia Hall on the map!

:-)

Couldn't you make the same argument about Harvard (Microsoft, Facebook, Broderbund, Electronic Arts, OKCupid, not to mention Polaroid, Merck, and Weezer) or MIT (Hewlett-Packard, Thinking Machines, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Visicalc, Lotus, Akamai, Fairchild, Intel, 3Com, DEC, ETrade, Bose, Kurzweil, and iRobot, not to mention McDonnell Douglas, Campbell Soup, Boston, and the National Enquirer)?

Hewlett-Packard: I'd give that one to Stanford way more than MIT. From Wikipedia:

"Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard graduated in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company originated in a garage in nearby Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with a past professor, Frederick Terman at Stanford during the Great Depression. Terman was considered a mentor to them in forming Hewlett-Packard."

If anyone's interested, here's a fuller list of SV companies founded by Stanford-affiliated people: http://www.stanford.edu/group/wellspring/economic.html

Hmmm, you're right, their formal education at MIT only includes Hewlett getting his Masters there with his BS and Ph.D. at Stanford (Packard got his BS and Masters at Stanford, all this according to Wikipedia).

As far as I know they did feel some affinity with MIT, but it sounds like the Stanford connection is overwhelmingly dominant.

Also highly relevant to why 165 University would be lucky: downtown Palo Alto is within walking distance from "the quad" on Stanford campus (just down Palm Drive).

nostrademons, you have a terrific memory and you are right. But, this particular thread calls for Silicon Valley. Let the poor school have it's moment in the SUN :-)

Actually, I just looked at the "famous alumni" lists on Wikipedia and filtered for a.) companies that we've heard of where b.) the founder's MIT degree was somewhat relevant to the company. There was some fascinating...TIL that Campbell Soup took off through the skills of an MIT-trained chemist who invented condensed soup, and that the National Enquirer was turned into a tabloid by an MIT-trained engineer who had worked for the CIA's psychological warfare unit. I can just see the conspiracy theories fly on that one.

Underwood went to MIT to solve their problems with canning and the result was making the process scientific and safe and the birth of food science and technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Underwood_Company#Invol...

MIT's Food and Nutrition department was very successful until it became Applied Biology and committed the sin of raising more money than the Chemistry and Biology departments, at which point administrators who were professors in those departments figuratively killed it in the dead of night (although recently another Applied Biology department was evidently started).

Definitely, MIT has spun off some great companies to be sure. What caught my attention the most was Campbell's soup - thanks for that share. Wouldn't have ever guessed that.

Wow that is pretty incredible to hear the story of the National Enquirer. I just thought it was where Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith got their leads for hunting down aliens!

I think you mean "let the poor school have its moment in the ORACLE". :-)

Obvious questions: how many other, less successful businesses did this building host?

Slightly aside, but worth noting is that much of the founding team of Danger went on to create a small startup known as Android, later acquired by Google.

"Before Google grew here, PayPal did. Later came Danger, the phone innovator that Microsoft Corp. acquired for $500 million before its founder, Andy Rubin, took a leading role in Google's Android project." - http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-milo6-2010apr06,0,3496...

Wasn't this also FaceBook headquarters until their very recent move? Or is that across the street?

I was told FaceBook HQ was at 150 University Ave; just down the street: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=165...

But they may have very well leased space in 165 University Ave; I was also told by the time they moved, they had a complex shuttle system to get between their many office spaces in Palo Alto.

I don't believe in luck. There is only work ethic and understanding the probabilities.

actually i was looking to rent a garage in the area.

there is something special about palo alto garages

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