The Coin Flip That Didn’t Build Silicon Valley (But Everyone Says It Did)
You’ve probably heard the version where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard flipped a coin to decide where to start their company, and that’s supposedly how Palo Alto became the birthplace of Silicon Valley instead of, say, the East Coast. It’s a great story. It’s also not what happened. Here’s the real sequence, and the version most people never hear.