The secretive billionaire who built Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

The secretive billionaire who built Silicon Valley

fortune.com

175 pointsaluciani21 comments

Probably not HN's main interest, but Arrillaga is basically the main reason Stanford has sports teams (in particular, funding the football team)- he's basically funded everything they have around that, to say nothing of his other contributions to the school. And amusingly enough, If Silicon Valley has such a thing as a "power couple", Marc Andressen (the new world) and Laura Arillaga (scion of the old world, professor at the GSB) are it.

could he be the one who gave money anonymously to name Cardinal football team's Offensive coorinator's position as "Andrew Luck Director of Offense"?

I'd be surprised, only because he puts his name on everything else - why make this one anonymous? I assume that the Andrew Luck thing came from some tech donor type, but that's definitely a WAG.

He doesn't put his name on everything. Apparently he's contributed to over a hundred buildings and could have had his name on many of the if he wanted to. I heard that he didn't even want his name on the new dining hall, but someone convinced him (which may be why it's "Arillaga Family").

In the article Fortune refers to Hewlett & Packard as "computer whizzes". Negatory.

They were electronic (vacuum tube) whizzes who staked their entrepreneurialism to advanced instrumentation.

Then world war broke out again and government contracts were very good to them.

Later, solid-state electronics came along, and eventually computers and these were adopted early by HP simply because they were . . . well . . . electronic, and HP was a (non-consumer) electronic leader by then.

Computers were definitely not their main thing when the company was still in possession of its true greatness.

Maybe he is secretive, but anybody affiliated with Stanford will instantly recognize his name.

And anyone who's passed by any of the construction sites and seen the big "Peery - Arrillaga" banners

So... who is Company X?

"Their speculative approach was essentially unheard-of locally, but the two believed that if they built the office space, tenants would come."

That's awesome; "built it and they will come" - an approach I have recently overcome the fear of, due to them never coming on a couple projects I learned from.

I appreciate how they disliked borrowing in the early stages, too.

"Build it and they will come" works a lot better with land, since land is pretty finite and people tend to want to do something with it. Also see the adage, "location location location".

Online mindshare, on the other hand, is basically infinite and unless there's a path to discovery, there's not really any reason for people to show up.

Is there some kind of private-sector/public-sector "who built silicon valley" battle going on right now? See [1]

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8001224

EDIT: may just be coincidence, but they're pretty close together.

I agree it's striking that these two articles came out at the same time. Two PR firms waging battle against each other in advance of some sort of political decision?

Which political decision? Coincidence seems more likely.

They are both true too.

The government's involvement with the early history of silicon valley prompted the need for more buildings, which these guys supplied. I mean they were smart, they saw a demand and filled it, and then they got lucky when silicon valley became massively successful.

I think the more interesting thing is that they are using slightly different connotations of the word built. The government "built" silicon valley as a conceptual place. And these guys literally built it.

This really isn't newsworthy. Also, anyone even marginally working in the Real Estate industry is a scumbag.

This man added no value other than as an intermediary; he may have added value to Stanford (questionable) but he got rich off land. Nothing more.

tl;dr it's Oprah.

Right. Anyone who's gone to Stanford will know the name. Cool to read the backstory, though.

I assume you're assuming most people here went to Stanford. Not too surprising.

I didn't go to Stanford. What's Stanford?

It's a small junk shop run by a man and his son .. oh, you said S_T_anford.

Be nice. The point is that it's silly to call someone "secretive" when they are well known by 50k alumni of the most influential school in the region under discussion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com