Business Travel Awards
Celebrating the top spots for the corporate crowd
a little over half a century ago, the only apples in Silicon Valley were falling from trees. Situated in the Santa Clara Valley, the region was known as The Valley of Heart’s Delight for the thousands of acres of fruit trees. But in the 1950s, Stanford University’s Frederick Terman created Stanford Industrial Park (now Stanford Research Park) and in the decades since, the area has become defifined by the high-tech companies that have sprung up, cementing Silicon Valley’s reputation as the hub of scientifific and commercial dominance and the home of tech titans such as Apple, Facebook and Google. By 2015, it had the third-highest GDP per capita in the world.
It remains a hotbed of success stories and tales of survival. For every “unicorn” – a startup with a net worth of $US1 billion or greater, such as Airbnb, Dropbox and Pinterest – there’s a plethora of investors who rode out the dotcom crash of the early 2000s and are eyeing offff the Next Big Thing.
Since the crash, Silicon Valley, which is 65 kilometres south of San Francisco, has enjoyed stability and a focus on local investments that goes beyond startups. It has embraced transformation, upgrading cafés and cultural institutions on and around University Avenue. Its communities, such as Mountain View, Palo Alto and Los Gatos, have concentrated on the needs and tastes not only of the cashedup elite but also young families, inquisitive tourists and tech-savvy nerds hoping to strike it rich in the global tech capital.