Indian Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: The Making of a Transnational Techno-Capitalist Class
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Indian Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: The Making of a Transnati ...

Chapter 1:  From “The Valleyof Heart’s Delight” to “Silicon Valley”
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Terman’s Vision for the Valley: Bringing the Boys Back Home

When asked why she had left Philadelphia to move to San Jose in the mid-1990s, Latika G2., an Indian immigrant software engineer and my host during the fieldwork research in the Valley, replied,

My husband [also an engineer] and I were graduate students in Philadelphia. We liked living in Philly. But my husband convinced me to move here. He thought this is where we would be most comfortable. We would get better jobs, find a large Indian community, and have easier access to learning about investment opportunities in hi-tech firms.3

The decision for Latika and her husband to leave the East Coast and move westward was not a difficult one to make; in fact, given their occupation, it was the natural and logical careeradvancement move. To be upwardly mobile and take advantage of emerging opportunities in their chosen profession, they felt that they had to be in Silicon Valley. It is therefore surprising to think that only half a century earlier, Frederick Terman (1947), a Stanford University professor, was concerned about creating a hi-tech industry comparable to the one in the East and to prevent the loss of his best students to companies on the Atlantic coast.

The West has long dreamed of an indigenous industry of sufficient magnitude to balance its agricultural resources. The war advanced these hopes and brought to the west the beginning of a great new era of industrialization.