Silicon Valley

Why do so many of the world’s most famous companies come from the same university? Walk Around This Campus and You’ll See Something Strange Imagine walking through Stanford University on a sunny California afternoon. You pass a building where two PhD students once argued late into the night about the best way to organize the entire internet — they went on to create Google. A few minutes later, you walk past a dorm room where a college kid sketched out an app that would let photos disappear after ten seconds — that became Snapchat. Down the road, there’s a spot where four students got tired of not being able to order food delivery, so they built an app and started driving the meals themselves — that became DoorDash. ...

What if your phone, your music player, your camera, your map, and your game console were all the same thing? A Secret Project By the early 2000s, Apple was healthy again. The iMac was selling well. And in 2001, Apple released two things that would set the stage for something much bigger. First came iTunes — a simple program that let you organize and play music on your computer. Then came the iPod — a small, beautiful device that could hold a thousand songs in your pocket. Before the iPod, if you wanted to listen to music on the go, you carried a clunky CD player and a stack of CDs. The iPod changed all that. ...

What do you do when the company you built kicks you out? If you’re Steve Jobs, you come back and make it better than ever. Trouble in Paradise By the mid-1980s, Apple was one of the most exciting companies in the world. The Apple II was a massive hit. And in 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh — with one of the most famous product launches ever. On stage, Steve Jobs pulled a small beige computer out of a bag, and it spoke. “Hello,” the Macintosh said in a robotic voice. “I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.” The audience went wild. No computer had ever introduced itself before. ...

What happens when two kids who love building things meet — and decide to change the world from a tiny garage? The Kid Who Was Different Steve Jobs was a kid who couldn’t stop asking questions. He wanted to know how everything worked — why TVs glowed, how radios picked up sound, what made machines tick. He was wildly curious about how things worked — especially electronics. Growing up in Mountain View, California, right in the heart of what would become Silicon Valley, he was surrounded by engineers and tinkerers. His dad, Paul Jobs, had a workbench in the garage where he fixed cars and built things. Steve watched. ...