Sand Hill Road

Sand Hill Road runs along the western edge of Menlo Park and into Woodside, connecting El Camino Real to the Junipero Serra Freeway. Its two miles house a higher concentration of venture capital firms than anywhere else on earth — Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, New Enterprise Associates, and dozens more have offices here. Investment decisions made on this road have shaped the development of Apple, Google, Genentech, Intel, and most of the other companies that define the modern technology industry.

The road itself is unremarkable — two lanes flanked by low-rise office buildings and parking lots, with the Santa Cruz Mountains visible to the west. There is nothing to see in the tourist sense. But for anyone working in or studying the technology industry, driving or cycling along Sand Hill Road is a pilgrimage of sorts, a chance to understand that the nerve centre of global technology capital is a quiet suburban street between a university and a freeway. The Stanford Shopping Center sits at the El Camino end and makes a natural starting or ending point.

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Sand Hill Road is the most densely venture-capital-funded street in the world — a two-mile corridor running from El Camino Real to the Stanford campus boundary that houses Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and dozens of other firms that have collectively funded much of the modern technology industry. The firms moved here partly because Stanford University won't allow commercial development on its land, pushing capital to the adjacent street instead.