Silicon Valley is home to several major tech companies. Netflix, Google, Meta, Apple, Visa and many more tech companies. Silicon Valley became important already in the 20th century and experienced a great boom.
The U.S. Navy had a strong presence in what is now Silicon Vallley. Lockheed, the largest employer in Silicon Valley in the 1950s, was becoming more technologically advanced. Therefore, they had to import various technologies, such as semiconductors to the US. Therefore, it became more and more attractive for tech companies to move to Silicon Valley.
Stanford University also became very important in the creation of the Valley as we know it today. A teacher at the university encouraged his students to start their own business and helped them do so as well. The university had a lot of empty land in the beginning. That quickly changed by using the land to create office space for businesses. The teacher mentioned above, Frederick Terman, was also involved in the construction. This attracted more and more start-ups and large companies to the Valley.
However, there was still something about the dot-com bubble. In 2000, tech stocks like Amazon.com were at their peak. But then the stocks plummeted 90% in a matter of weeks. Many companies based in Silicon Valley were bankrupt. Investors disappeared and no one even had a reason to invest in tech companies. Jobs were eliminated and many people were faced with being out of work because real estate prices in the Valley were too high. Only a few companies survived the dot-com bubble.
Another setback the Valley had to deal with was Theranos, a company founded by Elizabeth Holmes. She had a breakthrough idea. Having a great fear of needles, she wanted to perform blood tests using only a small amount of blood. Theranos attracted many investors and was one of the most valuable startups in the world in 2015 with a valuation of $9 billion. However, the reporter John Carreyrou from "The Wall Street Journal" made an investigation. The latter published an article that concluded that the machine that was supposed to do the blood tests gave wrong results. This could have put several millions of people's lives in danger and is still considered the most serious scandal in modern science. The whole thing has legal consequences.
