124 Fun Facts About Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley corresponds roughly to the geographical area of which county's namesake valley?

It sits in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, with San Jose as its largest city.

Until the 1960s the region was the world's largest fruit-packing area. What was its nickname?

It once had 39 fruit canneries before the orchards gave way to office parks.

Which journalist is credited with popularising the name Silicon Valley in a 1971 article?

Don Hoefler's series 'Silicon Valley U.S.A.' ran in the trade paper Electronic News in 1971, after he heard visiting marketing people use the term at lunch.

The "silicon" in Silicon Valley refers to the element used in what?

Silicon is the semiconductor in transistors and chips, the region's founding industry; the name only became widespread in the early 1980s, around the IBM PC's launch.

Which Stanford engineering dean, who urged graduates to start companies, is called a father of Silicon Valley?

Terman spearheaded the creation of Stanford Industrial Park in 1951 and found venture capital for start-ups.

What was the first tenant of Stanford Industrial Park?

Varian Associates, founded in 1948 by the Varian brothers and Stanford colleagues to build klystron tubes, became Stanford Industrial Park's first tenant in 1953.

At what address is the HP Garage, the private museum billed as the Birthplace of Silicon Valley?

The HP Garage at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto, is California Historical Landmark No. 976; it can only be viewed from the sidewalk.

In what year did Bill Hewlett and David Packard found Hewlett-Packard in Packard's garage?

Hewlett-Packard was founded on 1 January 1939 in the Palo Alto garage, with a coin toss deciding the name order; the pair's first business meeting was in August 1937.

Which airship was Hangar One at Air Base Sunnyvale, later Moffett Field, built to house in 1933?

Hangar One was built in 1933 for the Navy airship USS Macon, lost off Point Sur in 1935; NACA, NASA's forerunner, later took over parts of the field.

Which aerospace firm was the area's largest employer from the 1950s into the 1980s?

Lockheed's Missiles and Space division, based in Sunnyvale from 1956, was the area's largest employer from the 1950s into the 1980s, long before software arrived.

Who started the first US radio station with regularly scheduled programming, in San Jose in 1909?

Charles Herrold's San Jose station, broadcasting regularly scheduled programmes from 1909, evolved into today's KCBS in San Francisco.

Why did transistor co-inventor William Shockley move his new semiconductor lab to Mountain View in 1956?

Shockley set up in Mountain View to be near his ailing mother in Palo Alto; he also believed silicon, not germanium, was the better transistor material.

What did Shockley call the group of engineers who quit his lab in 1957 to form Fairchild Semiconductor?

Shockley branded them the 'traitorous eight' when they left in September 1957; two of them went on to found Intel in 1968.

Which financier backed the eight defectors, giving his name to the company they formed in September 1957?

Sherman Fairchild of Fairchild Camera and Instrument funded the eight; Fairchild Semiconductor became the seedbed for dozens of spin-offs nicknamed 'Fairchildren'.

Which of the eight Fairchild founders later co-founded a famous venture firm bearing his name?

Eugene Kleiner, the oldest of the eight, co-founded Kleiner Perkins with Tom Perkins in 1972; the firm went on to back Amazon, Google and Netscape.

Who invented the monolithic integrated circuit chip at Fairchild in 1959?

Robert Noyce devised the monolithic silicon integrated circuit at Fairchild in 1959, months after Jack Kilby's hybrid germanium version at Texas Instruments; Noyce later co-founded Intel in 1968.

What was the first single-chip microprocessor, released in 1971?

The Intel 4004, a 4-bit chip launched in November 1971, was designed by Federico Faggin with Ted Hoff, Stanley Mazor and Masatoshi Shima.

On which street in Menlo Park and Palo Alto are the Valley's venture capital firms famously clustered?

Sand Hill Road, home to Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, had the world's most expensive office rents at the height of the dot-com bubble.

Which two venture firms, both founded in 1972, marked the emergence of the Valley's VC industry?

Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, both founded in 1972 and both later based on Sand Hill Road, backed Apple, Amazon, Google and Cisco between them.

What feature of California law let Valley workers hop between employers, unlike Boston's Route 128?

Section 16600 of California's Business and Professions Code makes non-compete clauses unenforceable, letting engineers move freely between firms and spreading know-how across the Valley.

Which lender, founded in 1983 by former BofA executives to serve start-ups, collapsed in 2023?

Silicon Valley Bank, founded in 1983, specialised in lending to start-ups still in the 'preprofit' stage; a run on deposits led regulators to close it on 10 March 2023.

Where was the first meeting of the hobbyist club that inspired the Apple I held in March 1975?

The first meeting, on 5 March 1975, was held in Gordon French's garage in Menlo Park; Steve Wozniak later credited it with inspiring him to design the Apple I.

Where was the Apple I first previewed?

Steve Wozniak first showed the Apple I at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting in 1976; by then the club met in an auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Douglas Engelbart's 1968 presentation of the mouse and hypertext tools is now known by what name?

The 9 December 1968 San Francisco presentation was later dubbed 'The Mother of All Demos'; Engelbart's SRI lab went on to be the ARPANET's second node.

Which research centre pioneered graphical user interfaces, Ethernet, PostScript and laser printers in the 1970s and 80s?

Xerox PARC's inventions led directly to 3Com and Adobe and indirectly to Apple's Macintosh, while Xerox itself mostly failed to profit.

Which company grew out of routing multiple protocols over Stanford's campus network?

Cisco was founded in 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, who had run Stanford's computer networks and commercialised the multiprotocol router developed there.

The Stanford Research Institute operated one of how many original ARPANET nodes in 1969?

The ARPANET's four original 1969 nodes were UCLA, SRI, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah; the first message went from UCLA to SRI on 29 October 1969.

The dot-com bubble is said to have collapsed after which stock index began falling sharply in April 2000?

The tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite began falling sharply in April 2000 and had lost nearly 80 percent of its value by October 2002, wiping out most dot-com start-ups.

Which group of ex-colleagues is credited with reviving start-ups after the dot-com bust?

The PayPal Mafia, alumni of the payments firm eBay bought in 2002, went on to found or fund LinkedIn, YouTube, Tesla, SpaceX and Yelp.

Which city topped a 2006 Wall Street Journal ranking of America's most inventive towns, with 3,867 patents in 2005?

Sunnyvale was second with 1,881 patents.

As of 2015, which two cities beat the San Jose metro area for GDP per capita?

A 2015 Brookings Institution ranking put the San Jose metro area third in the world for GDP per capita, behind only Zurich and Oslo.

Which HP product of 1984 transformed the home-printing market?

HP's 1984 ThinkJet was the first thermal drop-on-demand ink-jet printer; its cheap disposable print heads led to the DeskJet and mass home printing.

Who created the HBO comedy Silicon Valley with John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky?

Judge had briefly worked as a programmer at a Valley start-up called Parallax Graphics in 1987 and hated it.

What is the name of the start-up founded by Richard Hendricks in the HBO series?

Pied Piper starts as Richard's music-copyright app before its lossless compression algorithm, rated on the fictional Weissman score, becomes the engine of the show.

Who plays Richard Hendricks?

Thomas Middleditch fronts a cast that includes Josh Brener, Martin Starr, Kumail Nanjiani and Zach Woods.

What is the name of the Google-like tech giant run by Gavin Belson?

Hooli, Gavin Belson's Google-like giant, has its engineers reverse-engineer Richard's algorithm into a rival compression product called Nucleus.

At which real-world event do Richard's start-up and Hooli both present in the season one finale?

At TechCrunch Disrupt, Richard's all-night recode produces a compression score that crushes Hooli's Nucleus and gets him mobbed by investors.

Which actor's December 2013 death led Silicon Valley to write out investor Peter Gregory?

Christopher Evan Welch died on 2 December 2013 having filmed Peter Gregory's scenes for the first five episodes; Laurie Bream replaced the character at Raviga.

Which cast member, who played incubator owner Erlich Bachman, left the show after season four?

T.J. Miller left after season four in 2017; his character Erlich Bachman is last seen in a Tibetan opium den.

Bertram Gilfoyle, the start-up's network engineer, follows which religion?

The Canadian's stolid sarcasm is aimed mostly at Java programmer Dinesh Chugtai.

How many episodes of Silicon Valley aired on HBO between 2014 and 2019?

Silicon Valley ran for 53 episodes across six seasons, from April 2014 to December 2019.

Which tech billionaire complained that the show's creator 'has never been to Burning Man'?

Elon Musk said at the 2014 premiere that Mike Judge 'has never been to Burning Man, which is Silicon Valley'; T.J. Miller replied that the billionaires perhaps didn't get the joke.

In the series finale, why does Richard's team deliberately sabotage its own launch?

The team discovers its AI has learned to bypass all encryption, so they torpedo the launch; a ten-year flash-forward ends with Richard misplacing the flash drive holding the code.

Which company buys most of Hooli after the disastrous Signature Box 3 launch?

After the Signature Box 3 flop, Amazon buys most of Hooli; Richard's company later purchases what is left, including its subsidiary FoxHole.

How many consecutive Emmy nominations for Outstanding Comedy Series did the HBO show earn?

Silicon Valley earned five consecutive Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy nominations, one for each of its first five seasons (2014–2018), though it never won.

Which venture firm do Peter Gregory and later Laurie Bream run?

Raviga Capital is Peter Gregory's venture firm; after his death it passes to the eccentric Laurie Bream, played by Suzanne Cryer, and leads Pied Piper's funding.

Whose buyout does Richard turn down before accepting Russ Hanneman's money?

Richard rejects Gavin Belson's Hooli buyout, a $10 million offer in the pilot and again during the lawsuit, before taking Russ Hanneman's $5 million in season two.

Which appliance accidentally proves Pied Piper's decentralised internet concept works?

Jian-Yang's smart refrigerator, which Gilfoyle had hacked using Pied Piper code, turns out to be holding data, proving the decentralised network works.

What does Jian-Yang convince a judge of in order to inherit his landlord's estate?

The estate includes the incubator and a 10 percent share of Pied Piper.

To which division does Gavin Belson promote Big Head to discredit Richard?

Belson parks Big Head at Hooli [xyz], its moonshot lab, so people will think Big Head, not Richard, created the compression algorithm.

Which actor plays Nelson 'Big Head' Bighetti in Silicon Valley?

Josh Brener plays Nelson 'Big Head' Bighetti, Richard's hapless friend who keeps failing upward and is president of Stanford in the finale's flash-forward.

Which character does Kumail Nanjiani play in the series?

Kumail Nanjiani plays Dinesh Chugtai, the Pakistani-born Java coder locked in rivalry with Gilfoyle; Time named Nanjiani one of its 100 most influential people in 2018.

Which Marvel character does Gilfoyle actor Martin Starr play in the Spider-Man films?

Martin Starr plays teacher Roger Harrington in Spider-Man: Homecoming, Far From Home and No Way Home; he was also Bill Haverchuck on Freaks and Geeks.

Zach Woods played which character on The Office before Jared Dunn?

Zach Woods played Sabre liaison Gabe Lewis on The Office from 2010 to 2013; he also recurred on Veep as Ed Webster.

Amanda Crew, who played Monica, made her film debut in which horror sequel?

Amanda Crew made her film debut as Julie in Final Destination 3 (2006); the Canadian actress was born in Langley, British Columbia, in 1986.

Which 2016 film did Gavin Belson actor Matt Ross write and direct?

Captain Fantastic, written and directed by Matt Ross, won him the Un Certain Regard directing prize at Cannes 2016 and earned Viggo Mortensen a Best Actor Oscar nomination.

Jimmy O. Yang, who plays Jian-Yang, was born in which city?

Jimmy O. Yang was born in Hong Kong in 1987; his family emigrated to Los Angeles when he was 13.

Laurie Bream actress Suzanne Cryer appeared in which famous Seinfeld episode?

Suzanne Cryer played Marcy, George's 'yada yada' girlfriend, in the 1997 Seinfeld episode 'The Yada Yada'; she trained at the Yale School of Drama.

Chris Diamantopoulos, who played a three-comma billionaire, voices which Disney icon?

Chris Diamantopoulos began voicing Mickey Mouse in Disney's 2013 Mickey Mouse shorts; he also played Moe Howard in 2012's The Three Stooges.

Which four cities are frequently cited as the birthplace of Silicon Valley?

Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Menlo Park ring Stanford and housed the founding firms: HP in Palo Alto, Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, SRI in Menlo Park and Lockheed in Sunnyvale.

Which company's December 1980 IPO instantly created around 300 millionaires?

Apple's 12 December 1980 IPO, priced at $22 a share, raised about $100 million and instantly created roughly 300 millionaires among employees and early investors.

Which Silicon Valley city is home to Apple's headquarters?

Apple moved to Cupertino in 1977 and opened its ring-shaped Apple Park campus there in 2017, a few miles from the old 1 Infinite Loop headquarters.

Which company bought Fairchild in 1979 before selling it to National Semiconductor?

Oil-services group Schlumberger bought Fairchild in 1979 and sold it to National Semiconductor in 1987; Fairchild was spun off as an independent company again in 1997.

Which Fairchild founder developed the planar process for making transistors?

Jean Hoerni's planar process of 1959 sealed transistor junctions under a silicon dioxide layer, making them cheaper and more reliable and laying the basis for the integrated circuit.

In which month and year was Fairchild acquired by ON Semiconductor?

ON Semiconductor completed its $2.4 billion purchase of Fairchild in September 2016, after Fairchild had rejected a rival bid from a Chinese consortium.

Which Xerox chief scientist founded PARC in 1970?

PARC pioneered the GUI, Ethernet and the laser printer.

Which microcomputer's arrival prompted the Homebrew Computer Club's first meeting in 1975?

Gordon French and Fred Moore hosted it in French's garage.

Whose 'Open Letter to Hobbyists' scolded early hackers for copying software?

Bill Gates's 1976 'Open Letter to Hobbyists', printed in the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter, complained that most users of Altair BASIC had never paid for it.

Sand Hill Road connects El Camino Real to which highway?

Sand Hill Road runs west from El Camino Real past Stanford to Interstate 280 and on into Woodside, passing through Palo Alto and Menlo Park.

Who founded Sequoia Capital in 1972?

Don Valentine, a former Fairchild and National Semiconductor sales executive, founded Sequoia Capital in 1972 and backed Atari, Apple, Oracle and Cisco.

Which two partners took over leadership of Sequoia in 1996?

Don Valentine handed Sequoia to Doug Leone and Michael Moritz in 1996; Moritz, a former Time journalist, went on to lead its Google and PayPal investments.

What name did Sequoia's India and Southeast Asia arm take when the firm split in 2023?

Peak XV Partners is the name Sequoia's India and Southeast Asia business adopted in June 2023, when the firm split into three; the China arm became HongShan.

In which year was Andreessen Horowitz founded?

Andreessen Horowitz was founded in July 2009 with an initial $300 million fund; its nickname a16z counts the 16 letters between the a and the z of its name.

Gordon Moore earned his PhD in chemistry from which institution in 1954?

Gordon Moore completed his PhD in chemistry at Caltech in 1954, then did postdoctoral research at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory before joining Shockley.

In 1975, Moore revised his forecast to transistor counts doubling how often?

Moore's 1975 revision to doubling every two years implies a compound annual growth rate of about 41 percent in transistor counts.

Moore's original 1965 observation predicted doubling every year for at least how long?

In his 1965 Electronics article, written as Fairchild's research director, Moore predicted yearly doubling would continue for at least another decade, to 1975.

Robert Noyce was nicknamed what?

Robert Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild in 1957 and Intel in 1968, was known as 'the Mayor of Silicon Valley' for his standing among the Valley's entrepreneurs.

Which president awarded Noyce the National Medal of Technology in 1987?

Ronald Reagan presented Noyce with the National Medal of Technology in 1987; two years later President George H. W. Bush keynoted Noyce's Business Hall of Fame induction.

In which Iowa town was Robert Noyce born?

Robert Noyce was born in Burlington, Iowa, on 12 December 1927; the family later settled in Grinnell, where at twelve he and his brother built a boy-sized aircraft.

Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with which two Bell Labs colleagues?

John Bardeen and Walter Brattain built the first point-contact transistor at Bell Labs in December 1947; the 1956 Nobel honoured all three for their discovery of the transistor effect.

In which city was William Shockley born?

William Shockley was born in London on 13 February 1910 to American parents, who moved the family to Palo Alto when he was three.

Which company funded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1955?

Arnold Beckman's Beckman Instruments bankrolled Shockley's lab as a division in 1955; Beckman sold the lab to Clevite in 1960, and it passed to ITT in 1968.

Which of these was NOT one of the traitorous eight?

Grove joined Noyce and Moore later, at Intel.

Andy Grove fled which country during its 1956 revolution?

Andy Grove, born András Gróf in Budapest, fled Hungary after the 1956 uprising; he became Intel's third employee in 1968 and its third CEO in 1987.

Which magazine named Andy Grove 'Man of the Year' in 1997?

Time made Andy Grove its 1997 Man of the Year, citing his role in the growth of microchip power and Intel's dominance of the PC industry.

Besides Atari, which restaurant chain did Nolan Bushnell establish?

Nolan Bushnell opened the first Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre in San Jose in 1977, pairing pizza with arcade games and animatronic shows.

At which company did Bushnell meet Atari co-founder Ted Dabney?

Bushnell and Ted Dabney met as engineers at Ampex, the Redwood City audio and video recording company, and left to found Atari in 1972.

Who founded Silicon Graphics in Mountain View in 1981?

James H. Clark, then a Stanford associate professor, founded Silicon Graphics in 1981 with several of his students, and went on to co-found Netscape in 1994.

Which Netscape employee created JavaScript?

Brendan Eich wrote the first version of JavaScript in ten days in May 1995 for Netscape Navigator 2; colleague Lou Montulli invented HTTP cookies.

Which company acquired Netscape in 1999 in a deal ultimately worth $10 billion?

AOL's all-stock purchase of Netscape, announced in November 1998 at $4.2 billion, had swelled to about $10 billion by the time it closed in March 1999.

What was Netscape's original company name?

The company was incorporated as Mosaic Communications Corporation in April 1994 and renamed Netscape Communications that November after the University of Illinois objected to the Mosaic name.

In which month and year did the dot-com bubble peak?

The Nasdaq Composite peaked at 5,048 on 10 March 2000; it then fell 78 percent to a low of about 1,114 in October 2002.

Which company's August 2004 IPO used an unusual Dutch-auction process?

Google's August 2004 IPO used a Dutch auction open to small investors, pricing shares at $85 and valuing the company at about $23 billion.

Which online grocer is named alongside Pets.com and Boo.com as a dot-com casualty?

Webvan, the Foster City online grocer, burned through about $800 million in funding before filing for bankruptcy in July 2001 and became a byword for dot-com excess.

Whose 1968 quest for a historical collection led to the Computer History Museum?

Gordon Bell, DEC's engineering chief, began collecting in 1968; the resulting Museum Project's first exhibit sat in a converted coat closet in a DEC lobby in 1975.

In which year did the Computer History Museum open its Mountain View building?

The Computer History Museum moved into its Mountain View building, a former Silicon Graphics headquarters on North Shoreline Boulevard, in 2002; a major renovation followed in 2011.

What nickname did the media give Apple Park's circular building?

The media dubbed the Norman Foster-designed ring 'the spaceship' after Steve Jobs unveiled the plan to Cupertino's city council in 2011; employees call it 'the ring'.

Roughly what share of the Apple Park site is landscaped green space?

About 80 percent of Apple Park's 175-acre site is landscaped, planted with some 9,000 trees; employees began moving in during April 2017.

Which Apple designer worked closely with Norman Foster for five years on the Apple Park campus?

Jony Ive and Foster designed everything from the glass panels to the elevator buttons.

What is the street address of the Googleplex?

The Googleplex at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, takes its name from 'googolplex', the number 10 to the power of a googol.

In which year did Google begin leasing the former SGI campus that became the Googleplex?

Google leased the Silicon Graphics campus in 2003 and bought it outright from SGI for $319 million in 2006.

Roughly how much did Theranos raise from investors before its collapse?

Theranos raised more than $700 million from investors including Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family, reaching a $9 billion valuation in 2014.

Which Wall Street Journal reporter's 2015 investigation questioned Theranos' technology?

John Carreyrou's October 2015 Wall Street Journal exposé revealed Theranos ran most tests on conventional machines; he later told the story in the book Bad Blood.

Which pharmacy chain offered Theranos blood tests in-store from 2013?

Walgreens ended the partnership in June 2016.

Which Theranos COO was in a secret relationship with Elizabeth Holmes?

Ramesh 'Sunny' Balwani, Theranos president and COO from 2009 to 2016, was secretly Holmes's partner; he was convicted of fraud in 2022 and sentenced to nearly 13 years.

How much did Holmes pay to settle SEC fraud charges?

Holmes's March 2018 SEC settlement cost her a $500,000 penalty, 18.9 million shares and a ten-year ban on serving as an officer of a public company.

Between which years was Frederick Terman provost of Stanford?

He was dean of engineering from 1944 to 1958.

Stanford Research Park is described as the world's first what?

Stanford Research Park, established in 1951 as a venture between Stanford and the City of Palo Alto, is called the world's first university-run technology hub.

Roughly how large is Stanford Research Park?

Stanford Research Park covers about 700 acres along Page Mill Road, with some 10 million square feet of commercial space leased to firms including Hewlett-Packard and Lockheed Martin.

In which year did the Stanford Research Institute formally separate from the university?

Stanford Research Institute split from the university in 1970 amid student protests over its military research; it was renamed SRI International in 1977.

Which SRI lab did Douglas Engelbart run when he invented the mouse?

Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at SRI built the oN-Line System (NLS), which demonstrated the mouse, hypertext and networked collaboration in 1968.

Engelbart's law concerns the intrinsic rate of what?

Engelbart's law holds that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential: people can improve how they improve, accelerating their own capabilities over time.

Which two mountain ranges border the valley that Silicon Valley occupies?

The Santa Clara Valley lies between the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west and the Diablo Range to the east, running roughly 90 miles south-southeast toward Hollister.

The valley floor formed in a graben between the San Andreas Fault and which two faults?

The Hayward and Calaveras faults to the east and the San Andreas to the west bound the graben, a block of crust dropped between parallel faults.

Which NASA research centre occupies Moffett Field in Mountain View?

NASA's Ames Research Center, founded as a NACA laboratory in 1939, occupies Moffett Field; Google leased NASA land there for its Bay View campus, opened in 2022.

Which university did Gordon Moore transfer to in 1948, graduating in chemistry in 1950?

Gordon Moore started at San Jose State, transferred to UC Berkeley in 1948 and took his chemistry degree there in 1950; he was born in San Francisco in 1929 and raised in Pescadero.

What does the 'hierarchical' in Yahoo's backronym describe?

Its database arranged in layered subcategories is what the word meant; Jerry Yang and David Filo began Yahoo in 1994 as a hand-built directory of websites at Stanford.

Adobe takes its name from a creek that ran behind co-founder John Warnock's house in which Silicon Valley town?

Los Altos's Adobe Creek named the company Warnock and Charles Geschke founded after leaving Xerox PARC in 1982 to sell PostScript.

In which city did Y Combinator run its first start-up batch in 2005?

Cambridge, Massachusetts hosted Y Combinator's first batch in summer 2005, with Sam Altman among the founders funded; the programme then alternated with Mountain View before settling in California in 2009.

Before Tesla bought it in 2010, the Fremont plant was NUMMI, a GM joint venture with which automaker?

NUMMI was a General Motors–Toyota joint venture from 1984 until GM's 2009 bankruptcy ended it; Tesla bought most of the Fremont site in 2010 for about $42 million.

San Jose's Winchester Mystery House was the home of the widow of which kind of magnate?

Firearms money from the Winchester Repeating Arms fortune built Sarah Winchester's sprawling mansion, which opened to tourists within a year of her death in 1922 and is famous for its stairs to nowhere.

Palo Alto takes its name from El Palo Alto, a tree of which kind?

Palo Alto, Spanish for 'tall stick', is named for El Palo Alto, a coast redwood on San Francisquito Creek that also appears on Stanford University's seal.

Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford as a memorial to whom?

The founders' only son, Leland Stanford Jr., gave the university its full name; it opened in 1891 on their Palo Alto farm, and Jane kept it running through a lawsuit against Leland's estate after 1893.

Meta, parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is headquartered in which Silicon Valley city?

Menlo Park is home to Meta, whose advertising made up 97.8% of revenue in 2023 across a family of apps that also includes Messenger and Threads.