

The secretive billionaire who built Silicon Valley - aluciani
http://fortune.com/2014/07/07/arrillaga-silicon-valley/

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crapshoot101
Probably not HN's main interest, but Arrillaga is basically the main reason
Stanford has sports teams (in particular, funding the football team)- he's
basically funded everything they have around that, to say nothing of his other
contributions to the school. And amusingly enough, If Silicon Valley has such
a thing as a "power couple", Marc Andressen (the new world) and Laura Arillaga
(scion of the old world, professor at the GSB) are it.

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FraaJad
could he be the one who gave money anonymously to name Cardinal football
team's Offensive coorinator's position as "Andrew Luck Director of Offense"?

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crapshoot101
I'd be surprised, only because he puts his name on everything else - why make
this one anonymous? I assume that the Andrew Luck thing came from some tech
donor type, but that's definitely a WAG.

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jackowayed
He doesn't put his name on everything. Apparently he's contributed to over a
hundred buildings and could have had his name on many of the if he wanted to.
I heard that he didn't even want his name on the new dining hall, but someone
convinced him (which may be why it's "Arillaga Family").

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danelectro
In the article Fortune refers to Hewlett & Packard as "computer whizzes".
Negatory.

They were electronic (vacuum tube) whizzes who staked their entrepreneurialism
to advanced instrumentation.

Then world war broke out again and government contracts were very good to
them.

Later, solid-state electronics came along, and eventually computers and these
were adopted early by HP simply because they were . . . well . . . electronic,
and HP was a (non-consumer) electronic leader by then.

Computers were definitely not their main thing when the company was still in
possession of its true greatness.

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batbomb
Maybe he is secretive, but anybody affiliated with Stanford will instantly
recognize his name.

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muzz
And anyone who's passed by any of the construction sites and seen the big
"Peery - Arrillaga" banners

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redwood
So... who is Company X?

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pyfish
"Their speculative approach was essentially unheard-of locally, but the two
believed that if they built the office space, tenants would come."

That's awesome; "built it and they will come" \- an approach I have recently
overcome the fear of, due to them never coming on a couple projects I learned
from.

I appreciate how they disliked borrowing in the early stages, too.

~~~
saraid216
"Build it and they will come" works a lot better with land, since land is
pretty finite and people tend to want to do something with it. Also see the
adage, "location location location".

Online mindshare, on the other hand, is basically infinite and unless there's
a path to discovery, there's not really any reason for people to show up.

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pfraze
Is there some kind of private-sector/public-sector "who built silicon valley"
battle going on right now? See [1]

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8001224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8001224)

EDIT: may just be coincidence, but they're pretty close together.

~~~
Patient0
I agree it's striking that these two articles came out at the same time. Two
PR firms waging battle against each other in advance of some sort of political
decision?

~~~
eli
Which political decision? Coincidence seems more likely.

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sscalia
This really isn't newsworthy. Also, anyone even marginally working in the Real
Estate industry is a scumbag.

This man added no value other than as an intermediary; he may have added value
to Stanford (questionable) but he got rich off land. Nothing more.

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antidaily
tl;dr it's Oprah.

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Lannister1980
Right. Anyone who's gone to Stanford will know the name. Cool to read the
backstory, though.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
I assume you're assuming most people here went to Stanford. Not too
surprising.

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philbarr
I didn't go to Stanford. What's Stanford?

~~~
kghose
It's a small junk shop run by a man and his son .. oh, you said S_T_anford.

