San Francisco’s rise as a tech powerhouse began south of the city with Stanford professor Frederick Terman, who urged his engineering students to stay local and launch companies instead of fleeing east. His push created an early cluster of electronics firms, the most important being Fairchild Semiconductor, founded in 1957. Fairchild became a factory for talent, spawning dozens of spin-off companies known as the “Fairchildren,” including Intel. 

By the time the personal computer and internet revolutions arrived, the region already had the engineers, the money, and the culture of experimentation that turned San Francisco and Silicon Valley into the global center of tech.