Summary: Secrets of Silicon Valley

Review and Analysis of Piscione's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9782511024218
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: IT Industry
• Index: Business

The must-read summary of Deborah Perry Piscione's book: `Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Everyone Else Can Learn from the Innovation Capital of the World`.

This complete summary of the ideas from Deborah Perry Piscione's book `Secrets of Silicon Valley` shows how we can all learn something from the world's most prosperous and successful group of companies. In this book, the author gives us an insight into the Silicon Valley ecosystem and highlights the 10 features that are the keys to its success. By reading this summary and understanding the actions at the heart of these world-class companies, you can adapt their processes to suit your own company and start climbing to the top.

Added-value of this summary:
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To learn more, read `Secrets of Silicon Valley` and find out the keys to success that the world's best companies have been hiding.

Summary of Secrets Of Silicon Valley (Deborah Perry Piscione)

1. How Silicon Valley Came To Be

There are eight historical events which have helped mold and shape the Silicon Valley of today:

1. Stanford University
2. The vacuum tube
3. Moffett Field
4. Frederick Terman
5. The growth of electronics
6. Shockley Semiconductor
7. Spin-off culture
8. The growth of venture capital

1. Stanford University

Stanford University has been an integral driver of the growth of Silicon Valley. In 1885, Leland and Jane Stanford provided a founding grant to establish a university at their country estate in Palo Alto in honor of the passing of their first child in 1884. The Stanford’s insisted that science should be the vanguard of the university and that professors should form lasting relationships with leaders in business and government.

Stanford University opened its doors to students on October 1, 1891. Today, Stanford admits about 2,400 freshmen each year. About 60 percent of Stanford’s undergrads and more than half of its graduate students are of Asian, Indian, Hispanic, African-American or Native American descent. Half of Stanford’s undergraduates receive financial aid and if a family’s household income is below $100,000, then tuition is free. Stanford’s alumni are very proactive in giving back to the university that gave them their start and Stanford raises more money each year than any other university in America.

2. The vacuum tube

Vacuum tubes – which controlled electric currents and allowed the commercialization of radio broadcasting, television, sound recording and more – were one of the most significant inventions of the twentieth century. Lee De Forest, who had invented an electronic amplifying vacuum tube called the audion in 1906, moved to the Bay Area in 1910.

De Forest established his Electronics Research Laboratory in Palo Alto and would subsequently come out with new technology which would underpin advances in radio telephones and receivers. He was also closely involved in engineering the first coast-to-coast telephone line. His work in particular solidified Palo Alto’s reputation for innovation in electronics.

3. Moffett Field

In the 1920s, real estate broker Laura Whipple learned that U.S. Navy Rear Admiral William A. Moffett was lobbying the federal government to develop a fleet of two airships. One was to be stationed in New Jersey and the other somewhere on the West Coast. Whipple organized the Mountain View and Sunnyvale Chambers of Commerce to get into action and they raised $476,000 in donations to purchase a 1,000-acre block of farmland which was located about 7 miles away from Stanford University.

The land was then offered to the U.S. Navy for $1 and in February 1931, the United States Congress voted an appropriation of $5 million to construct a new airfield for one of the airships on that block of land. The Macon arrived at its new base on October 16, 1933 but within two years the airship had crashed and the base was turned over to the War Department. It then became a training center for the United States Air Corps.

With the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Sunnyvale Air Station was reassigned back to the Navy who wanted to use airships once again for patrols for submarines and mines. The base was renamed as Moffett Field and was used for training and then increasingly as a place where patrol airships were manufactured and assembled. The Navy’s airship program was finally and permanently shut down in 1947, by which time the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) needed a new manufacturing base. NACA eventually teamed up with NASA to establish the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in 1958 to engage in research on wind tunnels and the aerodynamics of propellor-driven aircraft. Today, Ames Research Center is a world leader in astrobiology, supercomputing, intelligent/adaptive systems and the search for inhabitable planets.

4. Frederick Terman

When the National Defense Research Committee decided in 1945 they would invest $450 million in weapons R&D spending, they allocated $30 million to Harvard, $30 million to Columbia University, $83 million to CalTech and $117 million to MIT. Stanford received just $50,000 in funding because the committee felt Stanford didn’t have a credible research lab. That infuriated Stanford’s Chair of Engineering Frederick Terman who vowed that would never happen again.

Terman wen...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Book Presentation
• Summary of Secrets Of Silicon Valley (Deborah Perry Piscione)
• About the Summary Publisher
• Copyright