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The Navy Built the Base. San Diego Built Two Industries Next to It.
Naval Base San Diego was the largest base on the West Coast before any tech company existed there. In 1965, city leaders deliberately zoned Torrey Pines Mesa for science instead of staying a one-industry Navy town -- producing Qualcomm's wireless industry and a genomics cluster decades apart.
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Where this connects
Twice the venture density sits in the Valley. What sits in the DMV instead doesn't have a name yet.
The DMV has less than half Silicon Valley's venture density -- 24% of DMV companies on file are investors or VC firms, against 52% in the...
Monterey Had a Real Industry Once. It Chose Not to Rebuild One.
Monterey was the real "Sardine Capital of the World" -- more than 30 canneries at its 1940s peak. It collapsed in the 1950s and, unlike S...
LA's First Aircraft Company Rented Space in an Abandoned Movie Studio
The film industry fled to Los Angeles to escape Thomas Edison's East Coast patent monopoly on movie cameras. A decade later, Donald Dougl...
Silicon Valley's Largest Employer for Decades Wasn't a Tech Company. It Was a Missile Plant.
The garage-startup story leaves out the tenant that mattered most: by 1959, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company employed nearly 20,000 pe...
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