leslie1996selling

p. 435: “If anyone deserved to be called ‘the father of Silicon Valley,’ it was Frederick Terman. . . . it was Terman who first envisioned Silicon Valley’s unique partnership of academia and industry and trained the first generation of students who made it happen.”

p. 437: Frederick Terman explained to conference participants in Colorado that “universities are rapidly developing into more than mere places of learning. They are becoming major economic influences in the nation’s industrial life, affecting the location of industry, population growth, and the character of communities. Universities are in brief a natural resource just as are raw materials, transportation, climate, etc.”

p. 437: Various places attempted to replicate Silicon Valley – New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Tennessee, South Carolina, Texas, South Korea – in the mid-1960s. Texas, South Korea, and New Jersey secured the consulting services of Terman to learn about how to succeed as the next Valley.

p. 438: There are three things Terman did not understand in selling his vision of the Valley: 1) overestimating the importance of an educational institution and underestimating the difficulty of convincing competing firms to support common goals; 2) failed to recognize the pattern of defense spending that Stanford benefitted from; 3) did not appreciate the difference between the corporate needs and strategies of start-ups in the Valley versus spatially-distributed and vertically integrated multinational corporations that sought his advice.

pp. 437-438: Terman recognized the ability of research universities driving economic growth as a graduate student at MIT in the 1920s and witnessed the cooperative education programs sponsored by General Electric, AT&T, and other high tech firms. In the 1930s, he helped remake Stanford’s electrical engineering development following MIT’s pattern, cooperating closely with local firms working in high tech. By the end of the decade, Terman had built a nationally-recognized graduate program in electronics and supported student entreprenuers including Hewlett, Packard, and Charles Litton.

p. 438: The demand of wartime electronics propelled tech companies in the Bay Area. HP, a company of nine employees and $34,000 in sales in 1940 jumped to 100 employees and $1 million in sales in a single year. Terman helped direct wartime funding to high technology firms. When he returned to Stanford in 1946, Terman was convinced that industry “must develop its own intellectual resources of science and technology, for industrial activity that depends on imported brains and second-hand ideas cannot hope to be more than a vassal that pays tribute to its overlords, and is permannetly condemned to an inferior competitive position.”

p. 438-440: Terman called this a campaign of “steeple building.” Instead of competing with firms and universities, Terman encouraged industrial growth in areas where northern California had gained a niche. That guiding principle led Stanford to establish a traveling-wave tube research program, support Stanford alumni Varian brothers in founding their microwave tube company in 1948, encouraged faculty consulting, arranged for industrial researchers to teach courses, and established an honors program that allowed corporate employees to earn degrees while working.

pp. 441-442: By the 1960s one-third of the country’s traveling-wave tube manufacturing and a large share of microwave tube manufacturing was located in Santa Clara Valley. Several companies got their start at Stanford and drew upon graduates and professors – Hewlett-Packard, Varian Associates, Watkins-Johnson, Microwave Electronics Corporation, Litton, Granger Associates, Huggins Laboratories, and Applied Technologies. Other companies, although not part of the Stanford lands, established firms near the campus to tap into the entreprenural and corporate culture of the Valley. General Electric, Sylvania, Admiral, and Zenith set up labs near the Park.