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The triangular relationship between Stanford University, the local electronics industry, and federal government funding rapidly transformed the region within a short span of 50 years, changing the landscape from an agricultural setting at the turn of the 19th century to the center of technological productivity by the 1950s.
The focus on the techno-entrepreneurial climate of the region is critical to understanding why Indian immigrants, well versed in technical skills, were able to entrench themselves deeply into the ethos of Silicon Valley—first, as a significant part of its educated workforce, and second, as the region’s emerging transnational entrepreneurs. The ethos of Silicon Valley, its “culture,” is one in which an environment of understandable rivalry between competing firms happily coexists with a less visible and underlying atmosphere of mutual cooperation. The Indian immigrant population of the region imbibed the tenets of this firmly grounded belief. However, replicating the culture of mainstream society to engage in entrepreneurial ventures is not what one expects to find in the literature on immigrant entrepreneurship.
Thus, secondly, the chapter grapples with the existing scholarly accounts on entrepreneurial practices of ethnic minority communities in developed societies. The case of Indian immigrants in Silicon Valley—who neither operate ventures in the traditionally lowskilled businesses that immigrants typically find themselves in, nor engage in business practices geared primarily toward a coethnic labor market relying on coethnic labor—offers a unique opportunity to study new and emerging entrepreneurship practices among highly skilled immigrants.