Within days of the technology’s introduction in the Bay Area, Google’s rolling camera cars photographed a man urinating against a Highway 1 road sign, a pair of coeds sunbathing on Stanford’s campus,
and two men engaged in a full-on fistfight in San Francisco.

from “Google engineer hits street for proposal 2.0“, San Jose Mercury-News, Aug 6, 2008 page 6B

Google Tech Talks
December, 18 2007
Speaker: Steve Blank

How Stanford the CIA/NSA Built the Valley We Know Today

How much does an average Googler know about the history of the place he works in? Silicon Valley. Come and test your knowledge. I have seen this talk and I assure you - even seasoned Silicon Valley veterans will find this story interesting. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank will talk about how World War II set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of Silicon Valley, and the role of Frederick Terman and Stanford in working with government agencies (including the CIA and the National Security Agency) to set up companies in this area that sparked the creation of hundreds of other enterprises.

Speaker: Steve Blank
Steve Blank spent nearly 30 years as founder and executive of high tech companies in Silicon Valley, most recently the enterprise software firm E.piphany. He has been involved in or co-founded eight Silicon Valley startups, ranging from semiconductors to video games, and personal computers to supercomputers. He teaches entrepreneurship at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Columbia University and Stanford’s Graduate School of Engineering.