Silicon Valley Lost, and Found

Silicon Valley is a place that is just as much about people reinventing themselves as it is about people reinventing industries.

As a new year turns, it’s time to go through that silly (but actually necessary) exercise of pausing to reflect. In a world of endless e-mail and distractions, it’s hard to remember where we came from, or where we are collectively going. For better and worse, Silicon Valley suffers from a perpetual loss of memory.

I have three simple stories about reinvention, that hopefully present a historical arc of this place. They belong to my family. For three generations, we have come here — before the orchards were cut down for silicon chip factories, before the chip makers left for Asia, before the dot-com era transformed warehouses into startup offices and before drones and Bitcoin.

1930s-1960s: Hard Sciences

Even though the “Silicon Valley” moniker only came into existence in the 1970s, this place’s history as a technology hub is about a century old. The establishment of Stanford and the University of California system along with generous federal research funding formed an initial pool of talent in the 1930s through 50s.

After escaping Russian pogroms as persecuted Jews during the turn of the 20th century, my great-grandparents managed to make it to Ellis Island. To make ends meet during the Great Depression, they ran a grocery and Jewish deli in Los Angeles. My grandfather used to tell me stories of 5-cent hamburgers and being cast as a Liszt-piano playing extra in the Frank Sinatra film “Anchors Aweigh” when he was a teenager.

They never had much, so my grandfather ran out of money after four quarters of college and had to drop out of Stanford. He left to join a small electronics company back in Los Angeles to work on frequency meters and to help the family out with money.

It took him about nine years to come back and finish. It was a setback, but along the way he met my grandmother. He didn’t get his bachelor’s degree until he was 30 — an age that some people might be written off in this forever youth-obsessed industry.

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