Who put the Silicon in Silicon Valley? The place where rocks were made to think...

My hobby, since I was a boy is geology., with a house full of rocks and fossils, a huge geological map of the UK on my kitchen wall and a geological hammer in my car. My other great provocation is AI, which is a long-standing interest, since University.

So I’m glad I have lived long enough to see rocks that think. OK, before you attack the verb, they think not in terms of human thinking but It is clear they can outdo us on many tasks which we ‘think’ are ‘thinking’. If, like me, you believe in the computational theory of the mind, the hardware and software thinks.

Silicon, the rock that thinks is the second most abundant element on earth, making up 27.7% of the Earth's crust, commonly found in sand, quartz, and various silicate minerals.

In the mid-1950s, among the orchards of Mountain View, California, a revolution took root. Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, was founded in 1956 by physicist William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and Nobel Prize Winner. His was the first semiconductor company in what would later be known as Silicon Valley, attracting some of the brightest minds in the new field of electronics.

However, discontent was brewing. Shockley may have been a genius but was autocratic and abrasive. He stifled creativity and bred frustration. By 1957, tensions had reached a breaking point. Eight of Shockley's top engineers and scientists left. The group approached Sherman Fairchild, who saw their potential and agreed to back them and Fairchild Semiconductor was born in Palo Alto, a pivotal moment in technological history.

Shockley, feeling betrayed, dubbed them the ‘Traitorous Eight’. 

Their success attracted a wave of talent and investment to the region, setting off a chain reaction of entrepreneurship. The ‘Fairchildren’ founded numerous other companies that fuelled Silicon Valley's expansion.

Robert Noyce co-invented the integrated circuit. Jean Hoerni developed the planar process, a manufacturing technique that allowed for the mass production of reliable silicon transistors and integrated circuits. These ignited explosive growth in Silicon Valley.

Intel, founded in 1968 by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce after they left Fairchild. Eugene Kleiner, another of the eight, co-founded Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm that became instrumental in funding and nurturing countless tech startups, including giants like Google and Amazon.

 The Traitorous Eight championed an innovation culture that valued flat structures, minimising bureaucracy to allow creativity and engineering prowess to flourish. The emphasis was on risk-taking and entrepreneurship with bold ideas and collaborative effort could lead to monumental success.

Silicon valley remains the powerhouse of tech. Almost all of the innovation in AI came and still comes from that one place. We had te recent example of a bunch of smart people in OpenAI, eventually breaking out to form new enterprises. This is what made the Valley great. It is why it remains the power house of global tech.