The current and former tenants of Stanford Research Park, the 75-year-old technology and business district in Palo Alto, read like a star-studded cast of Silicon Valley characters.
There’s the vintage starlets: Hewlett-Packard and Varian Associates were the park’s first two tenants. The icons: NeXT Inc., a graphics company Steve Jobs founded in the late 1980s when he was briefly ousted from Apple. The anti-heroes like Elizabeth Holmes, of Theranos, the fraudulent blood-testing company that occupied a space at 1701 Page Mill Road from 2014 to 2017. The A-listers: Facebook – now Meta – grew its platform by hundreds of millions of users as a tenant in the early 2010s, and Tesla, a current tenant, moved to the park in 2009 and has expanded its footprint since.
And that’s an abbreviated list. Stanford Research Park, which sits on land owned by Stanford University, celebrated its 75-year anniversary in a two-day celebration on Oct. 21 and 22, at The Hub, a community space at the park that opened in 2022. The festivities commemorated the park’s unique 1951 origin story and its present-day status as a “cradle of innovation and technology,” according to Stanford’s Dean of the School of Medicine Lloyd Minor.
The park’s earliest tenants were the “luminaries” of their time, said Tiffany Griego, senior managing director of commercial real estate at Stanford.
“They became the backbone of the Silicon Valley tech industry, and they helped us demonstrate the vision,” she said. “Science and business and academia located in close proximity would create a powerhouse of innovation in this region, and those companies helped establish our reputation over time.”
“I think it’s safe to say that if there was not Stanford Research Park, Silicon Valley would not exist in its current form,” said Mary Wadden, a Palo Alto native and historian of the park who has authored three books on Silicon Valley history including “Inventing the Future: 75 years at Stanford Research Park.”
While the park is known for its technology, some change is on the horizon for its land use. Stanford University owns the land, but the 700-acre park is within the jurisdiction of Palo Alto, where city leaders have been discussing opening the park to residential uses. The City Council opted not to include Stanford Research Park as a potential housing site in its current Housing Element, a state-mandated document that lays out the city’s vision for housing between 2023 and 2031. But since the document’s adoption, council members and political candidates have generally concurred over the past two years that the sprawling campuses near the foothills should be in play for housing.
The housing plan also commits the city to engaging Stanford University in “a dialogue about future multi-family housing opportunities within the Stanford Research Park, including consideration of a new neighborhood along Foothill Expressway.”
The university, for its part, is now ready to play ball. According to Stanford’s recently submitted General Use Permit application, the university’s plan for campus growth and expanded development, Stanford is looking to develop over 500 units of housing for the general public in the park. The idea of allocating some land at the park for housing has been considered for years, but the GUP application is the most concrete step yet towards its realization. The plan, which is now in the early stages of review by Santa Clara County, would position the park to tackle one of the most challenging local problems: the shortage of housing.
History of innovation
Seventy-five years ago, though – following World War II – Stanford was land-rich, cash-poor while federal government funding for academic research was expanding. The park was the brainchild of Fred Terman, Stanford University’s former provost and dean of engineering, said Griego. Often called the “Father of Silicon Valley,” Terman envisioned a partnership between academia, industry and Palo Alto that could generate income for the university, provide high-quality job opportunities for Stanford graduates and facilitate collaborative opportunities to solve real-world problems.
“Stanford was a good regional university that was better known for its football team than for its scientific and technical research,” university president Jonathan Levin said at the event, referring to the years following the war. That perception changed after the creation of the park. “It set the conditions not just for the creation of Silicon Valley, the hardware industry, and everything followed from it, but for Stanford to be the world-leading university.”
Stanford Industrial Park, as it was then called, was opened in 1951 with 200 acres of land that was annexed by Palo Alto but remains owned by Stanford, which serves as the landlord and operates the park through long-term leases. This unusual partition of administrative responsibilities was “groundbreaking” at the time, said current Palo Alto Mayor Vicki Veenker. Today, the park has grown to 700 acres, 150 companies and roughly 23,000 employees. Tenant companies work in a range of industries including biotech, car manufacturing, life sciences, software and aerospace engineering. They also span a range of maturity, from start-ups to established titans.
Today, Stanford Research Park generates approximately $25 million in taxes annually for the Palo Alto’s general fund, approximately $30 million per year for the Palo Alto Unified School District, and approximately $30 million per year for the County of Santa Clara, Foothill-De Anza Community College District, and other regional jurisdictions, according to Joel Berman, Stanford’s director of land and local policy communications. It also generates approximately $20 million in taxes for the state of California.
Stanford Research Park tenants shaped Silicon Valley culture as it is known today, Wadden said. The early tenants also played with office space in ways that were unusual at the time, leading to the bean bag chairs, arcade games and ping pong tables that sometimes furnish today’s start-ups.
“In the context of the 1950s, there was no such thing as startup-culture yet,” Wadden said. “(Terman’s) idea was pretty revolutionary: you graduate from Stanford and now you start your own company instead of taking your creations and going to work for an already-established one.”
A unicorn factory
That concept created a cluster of innovative companies in Palo Alto who could draw from Stanford’s talent pool. In turn, the culture of ambition and entrepreneurship is woven into the fabric of Stanford and the surrounding area, creating an valuable ecosystem of talent and resources – or “network effects,” said Cameron Teitelman, CEO of the Stanford accelerator and founder community StartX. With an emphasis on peer support, the program has helped launch 1,500 start-ups since its founding in 2011, including 30 “unicorns” — companies worth over a billion dollars.
By Teitelman’s tally, the market capitalization of companies founded by Stanford alumni amounts to the third-largest economy in the world, after only the U.S. and China. The thing that set apart the entrepreneurs who found repeated success, Teitelman said, was the learning system they built around them both for technical skills and for psychological support.
“I think if you have a vicinity of very high talent in one place that has similar cultural norms, it creates certain behavior,” Teitelman said. “Those cultural norms facilitate bigger success with innovation, and so I think the Research Park is like a physical manifestation of that.”
The list of inventions with roots in Stanford Research Park is long. As David Park, CEO of SRI said during the Oct. 21 event, citing famed former Xerox Palo Alto Research Center computer scientist Mark Weisberg, the most profound technologies are those that become mundane, or “disappear” from our awareness.
“They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it,” Park said. “We’re creating the technologies of the future that people will no longer even realize are so amazing because they’re going to be part of everyday life.”
Five technologies with roots at the park
Here are just a few of the many innovations that came out of Stanford Research Park.
1. The klystron
The klystron, a microwave generator, is used in a variety of devices, including your kitchen microwave, radar systems and medical equipment used for treatments like cancer radiation therapy. A more powerful version of the technology powers the 2-mile-long particle accelerator at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which has enabled discoveries in chemistry and physics.
The technology pre-dates the Stanford Research Park, as it was invented by brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian and a Stanford physics professor at Stanford University in 1937. The klystron became the foundational technology of Varian Associates, which was founded to commercialize it, and Varian became the park’s first tenant.
2. Ethernet
In 1973, Ethernet was invented at Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center, also known as Xerox Parc, a tenant at Stanford Research Park from 1970 to 2002. Ethernet created a fast, standardized way to connect computers, laying the foundation for the modern computer network. Though the technology is over 50 years old, it is generally speedier, steadier and more secure than Wi-Fi. Today, it is widely used in artificial intelligence data centers to connect servers and processors that must rapidly exchange large amounts of data.
3. Hand-held scientific calculator
Hewlett-Packard pioneered the hand-held scientific calculator with the HP-35, introduced in 1972. It was the first device capable of performing advanced math functions including logarithms, exponents and trigonometric functions such as sine and cosine. The compact device and its successors soon replaced slide rules – an analog device for making math calculations – for engineers, scientists and students and allowed them to perform complex calculations quickly and accurately.
4. Laser Printer
Another Hewlett-Packard invention, the HP LaserJet, was a compact, mass-produced desktop laser printer introduced in 1984. In its first year on the market, it sold nearly 250,000 units; successor models helped make laser printing a mainstay of offices around the world. The printer allowed businesses and publishers to produce professional-looking documents without relying as much on commercial printing services.
5. NeXTSTEP operating system
After Steve Jobs departed Apple in the mid-1980s, he founded NeXT Computer in 1985. The startup was a tenant at Stanford Research Park, where it developed high-end computers with advanced graphics and a clean design, along with the NeXTSTEP operating system. Apple acquired NeXT in 1996, and the operating system laid the foundation for Mac OS X, which later evolved into the macOS widely used today. Though NeXTSTEP was eventually discontinued, it helped advance graphical computing and software development. Further, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer running NeXTSTEP to create the first web browser and web server, laying the groundwork for the World Wide Web.
