Twitter & Block (Square)
A kid from St. Louis moved west and built the town square, then built the bank. Missouri gave him the itch. The garden gave him the room to scratch it.
Jack Dorsey — born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri R-001
The Wall
Every company here is real, and every name is a link — go check. Filter by where the founder started, and watch how many of the people who grew the biggest companies on earth did not start here either. They came. Then they grew. That is the whole argument, wearing a company logo.
OpenAI
The person now steering the closest thing we have to a singularity grew up in the St. Louis suburbs. He did not build it in Missouri. He built it here, at the center of the one garden wired for it — which should tell you something about where you are reading this from.
Sam Altman — raised in the St. Louis, Missouri area R-003
Netscape
A farm-country kid wrote the browser that opened the web for everyone — and did it four hundred feet from Stanford instead of four hundred miles from anything. Geography is a compiler flag, and he flipped it.
Marc Andreessen — born in Iowa, raised in New Lisbon, Wisconsin R-005
Nvidia
A boy shipped from Taiwan to Kentucky to Oregon, and the company he built here now sells the shovels for the entire AI gold rush. The soil does not care where the seed shipped from. Only that you finally planted it in the garden.
Jensen Huang — born in Tainan, Taiwan R-059
Born in Moscow, grew the index of all human knowledge out of a rented Menlo Park garage. The garage is still there. So is the search box. So is the lesson.
Sergey Brin — born in Moscow R-066
Intel
Escaped Hungary, learned English on the way, and became the third person at the company that put the "Silicon" in the Valley. Refugees make excellent gardeners. They know exactly what a desert costs.
Andy Grove — born in Budapest, Hungary R-052
Yahoo
Arrived from Taiwan barely speaking English, and a decade later his directory was how the whole planet found the internet. Same chaotic internet as everyone else had. Better map, made here.
Jerry Yang — born in Taipei, Taiwan R-061
Grew up on food stamps, first in Kyiv and then in Mountain View, and later sold a plain-text messaging app for nineteen billion dollars. The message was simple. The zip code was not incidental.
Jan Koum — born in Kyiv, Ukraine R-074
Stripe
Two brothers from a village in Ireland wrote a few lines of code that now move a genuinely alarming fraction of the internet's money. They could have written them anywhere. They wrote them here, and that is not a coincidence, it is the plot.
Patrick & John Collison — raised in rural Ireland R-078
Zoom
Denied a U.S. visa eight times, got in on the ninth, and built the thing that held the entire world's face together in 2020. Nine tries to reach the garden. Zero regrets on record.
Eric Yuan — born in Shandong, China R-080
eBay
Wrote an auction site over a long weekend and accidentally proved that strangers will trust strangers. The trust was the product. The garden was the greenhouse it needed to grow in.
Pierre Omidyar — born in Paris to Iranian parents R-063
Hewlett-Packard
A garage the state of California later bolted a plaque to: "Birthplace of Silicon Valley." Every other giant on this wall is, one way or another, downstream of that garage.
Two Stanford grads, $538, one rented garage
Apple
Started in a garage, is now worth more than the GDP of most countries, and still cannot make everyone like the keyboard. Grown, root to fruit, entirely in the garden.
A Cupertino garage
Genentech
Two people, a San Francisco bar, and the invention of the entire biotech industry. South San Francisco literally re-labeled its own water tower "The Birthplace of Biotechnology." The garden grows medicine too.
A biochemist, a venture guy, a bar
Oracle
A database everyone said would not sell. It sold. The garden is extraordinarily good at turning "nobody thinks that will work" into a boat so large you cannot see the far end of it.
A CIA project codename and a database nobody wanted
Adobe
Named after a creek in Los Altos, it decided what a printed page — and then every image on earth — would look like. From a backyard creek to every pixel on your phone.
Named after the creek behind the founder's house
Cisco
A couple at Stanford who could not email across incompatible networks built the plumbing the entire internet still runs on. Spite and proximity: the two great Bay Area nutrients.
A married Stanford couple who wanted to email each other
Netflix
One founder got a forty-dollar late fee and, instead of paying it, ended the video store. Then ended cable. The garden reserves its best water for the person who refuses to accept the late fee.
A $40 late fee, unpaid, weaponized
PayPal
The crew that came out of this one Palo Alto startup went on to seed Tesla, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, and a good chunk of the rest of this wall. One tree, a whole forest downstream. That is precisely how gardens work.
The "PayPal Mafia"
Salesforce
Started in a rented apartment with a mission to end software as everyone knew it, and now its name is on the tallest tower west of the Mississippi. Ambition compounds fastest where it gets watered.
A rented San Francisco apartment
Tesla
The headquarters decamped to Texas years later — everyone loves to bring that up. But the seed cracked open here, in San Carlos, because here is where seeds crack.
Founded to prove electric cars need not be golf carts
Meta (Facebook)
Started in a dorm and grew up the instant it moved to Palo Alto in the summer of 2004. The dorm was the idea. The garden was the growth. Ask which one built the trillion dollars.
A Harvard dorm that moved west that same summer
YouTube
Three people over a San Mateo pizzeria wanted to share a video and accidentally built the world's second-largest search engine. The pizzeria is still there. So is everyone's childhood.
Three ex-PayPal employees above a pizzeria
Airbnb
They rented air mattresses on their apartment floor to make rent, and turned it into a company worth more than any hotel chain on earth. The floor was in the Bay. That part was not luck.
Two broke designers, three air mattresses, one rent check
Uber
They could not get a cab one cold San Francisco night, so they rebuilt what a cab is. Annoyance plus the garden equals a category. Back home the same annoyance just stays an annoyance.
One snowy night, no cab
Two people, eight employees, a photo app, thirteen months, one billion dollars. The most efficient thirteen months in commercial history, and they happened here rather than anywhere else. Notice the pattern yet?
Two founders, eight employees, thirteen months
Databricks
The Berkeley researchers who wrote the engine everyone now uses to wrangle enormous data turned the academic paper into a company worth tens of billions. The university is public. The upside was one BART stop away.
Berkeley researchers with a better engine
Anthropic
Founded a few miles from where you would step off the train. Small true thing: the assistant that helped write this website was made by them. The fireworks everyone keeps promising you are being loaded right now, on this block, by people who also had to move here first.
Built to make AI you can actually trust
28 real companies, and counting — and most of the people who built them came from somewhere else first.