It is not known for sure when a garage was first used to give birth to a startup in Silicon Valley. But we know the exact date on which a company that started in a garage was born: August 18, 1947.
The company was called Hewlett-Packard, from the name of the two founders, William Hewlett e David Packard, and the garage was the one in their house, at 367 Addison Avenue, in Palo Alto, where for some years there has been a plaque indicating that place as “the cradle of Silicon Valley.” Actually the term Silicon Valley did not exist at the time, was coined many years later by a journalist; and then on 18 August 1947 the two founders had already left the garage and built a real office nearby.
Hewlett-Packard was born as a simple company in 1939, but Bill and David had been active the year before. In 1935 they had graduated from Stanford with a degree in electrical engineering. At the time you graduated from Stanford and then went to the east coast of the United States to work. One professor, however, told the boys that it was worth trying to stay in California (his name was Frederick Terman, and he was the dean of the faculty). At the time, computers weren’t a business yet, and there wasn’t even an idea of the Internet. But these were the years of radio and the first sound films: the two boys saw a sea of opportunities with their skills. Then Packard quit the job he had found in New York with General Electric and with his wife he rented a three-story house in Palo Alto; Hewlett slept in a shed. But the important thing was the garage which became a laboratory where the two literally built the first products: Walt Disney was among the first customers who bought 8 oscillators to adjust the sound in theaters they would broadcast Fantasia (the masterpiece that will be released in 1940, the first film in stereo).
And so a startup born in a garage with a few hundred dollars of capital took off: on August 18, 1947, after the Second World War, Hewlett-Packard became a public company (“Incorporated”) and then it will go public, becoming one of the leading multinationals in the sector (at one point, from 2007 to 2013, it was also the first manufacturer of personal computers, a term that according to some would have been coined by HP in 1968).
Today it has been divided in two, one company deals with services for companies (Hpe) and the other (Hp) continues to oversee computers, printers and the surrounding area. The garage has been repurchased and it has become a small museum, which, however, is not very easy to visit.
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