“And Ye Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Shall Make You Free”

Today, Silicon Valley, Berkeley’s public research university and it’s private research university brother Stanford are the center known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capitals (Sand Hill Rd), angels and “older brother” tech companies. Intel, HP, IBM, AOL, Ebay, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Skype, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pebble are some of many of the big companies that our lives over the last twenty years have come to dominate. Keep in mind though that only 5% of the start up scene in Silicon Valley is successful, 35% goes bankrupt and 60% runs a normal mid-size company. 

History wise we commonly know that with the birth of William Shockley’s (VIDEO) transistor from the Semiconductor Laboratory, Hewlett-Packard’s semiconductor devices, Intel’s integrated circuit and Moore’s law, the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak’s Apple I, Bill Gates Microsoft’s bought sofware QDOS, IBM’s PC and Marc Andreessen’s Mosaic the commercial succes started of the Valley and the rest is history. What we don’t know is that Silicon Valley did not sprang only from the discoveries of William Shockley’s transistor. But also from the earlier technology duel over the skies of Germany’s World War II and the Cold War led by Fredrick Terman (VIDEO). It was the US Defense Department, CIA and the National Security Agency that acted back then like today’s venture capitalists funding this first wave of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. 

The Valley was born from a constant relationship between federal funding, military research and private companies. 

We, as a society really need to start asking ourselves the questions: 

• “Do we really want to be continuously filmed by the new Google Glasses without you even knowing or approving”? 
• “Do we really need autonomous self-driving cars?
• "Do we really want Chris Anderson’s drones flying around all time in your own Neighbourhood ”?
• “Do we really want to play our own doctor with the Scanadu scout App for example”?
• “Do we really want Google’s new intelligent personal assistant called ‘Now’ collect all your internet and personal data and know eventually more then your own mother or wife”? 
• Are we going to move to a technological singularity in the year 2045 (VIDEO) ? 

I guess we don’t care right? Cause we share 20 billion private messages every day with WhatsApp, 40 million personal photos per day with Instagram, we upload 300 million personal photos and share 2.5 billion personal content items on Facebook daily without really knowing anything about it’s founding CEO’s Jan Koum, Kevin Systrom, Mark Zuckerberg and It’s financial starting roots of those companies……

• A-One-to-watch! Steve Blank’s “How Stanford & the CIA/NSA Built the Valley We Know Today" (VIDEO) 

(Photo credit Mark Coggins)