The San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley
San Francisco is a captivating city with a fascinating history that pre-dates the current high-tech gold rush, and is a great place to live and work. Silicon Valley (named after the Santa Clara Valley) is located on the peninsula South of San Francisco with its hub around Stanford University and extending down to San Jose. The Bay Area includes San Francisco, Silicon Valley and the East Bay which also have many well established high-tech companies in IT and life sciences.

The nexus of intellectual talent, business savvy and venture capital focused on high-tech has defined the character of the region and will continue to be a dominant theme of the business landscape in the Bay Area. Decades before the term Silicon Valley was coined by an insightful journalist in 1971, Stanford University and its alumni such as Hewlett and Packard seeded the spirit of innovation that has given us companies like Sun (Stanford University Networks), Cisco Systems and Genentech. The concept of a high-tech cluster started here, with the elements of academia, private business, government funding and venture capital providing the dynamic driving force that has propelled companies to new levels of innovation and business execution.

With Genetech, the mass production of a critical mammalian protein, insulin, by a genetically modified bacterium proved the benefit to society that technology can provide and cemented the link between academia and commerce. Innovation continues with nanotech. South San Francisco is a key biotech center, and the Mission Bay project in San Francisco is a new tech park that supports the life sciences.

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