California's Silicon Valley sprawls across some 1,500 square miles from San Francisco east to San Jose. A well-known center for research and development and for investment, a cutting-edge market, and a bastion of talent, it is a magnet for skilled workers and capital from around the globe.
The area has been blessed in so many ways that venture capital, technology, and the brightest stars in any number of fields have continued to flock here in spite of its soaring housing and electricity prices, high labor costs, and the chronically heavy traffic along its main artery, Highway 101.
The area was nothing but a broad expanse of farmlands and orchards until the 1940s. Its development began in 1939, when Frederick Terman, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, encouraged his students William Hewlett and David Packard to turn the audio oscillator they had designed into a commercial product. Terman even negotiated the bank loan that got them started. The Walt Disney Company used their new product during the making of their cartoon classic Fantasia, and Hewlett-Packard was born.
By 1955, William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, had left his position at Bell Labs on the East Coast and founded Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto. The company's poor management soon led eight of its brightest engineers to strike out on their own. These eight, who Shockley came to refer to as "the eight traitors," founded Fairchild Semiconductors. In 1968, three of the "traitors"--Robert Noyce (who invented the integrated circuit), Gordon E. Moore, and Andy Grove--left Fairchild to found Intel. Others among them were to go on to establish other leading technology companies, including AMD, LSI Logic, and National Semiconductor.
As the area's farmlands were transformed into high-tech communities in the 1970s, the place came to be known as "Silicon Valley."
Today, Silicon Valley is the heart of the world's semiconductor industry. In fact, the saying goes that "Silicon Valley is built on ICs." But this expression has a second meaning, in which "ICs" refers not to the integrated circuits for which the area is so well known, but to the ethnic Indians and Chinese who help produce them. Well-educated and fluent in English, these ethnic Chinese and Indians have been a driving force behind the creation of this technology hub. So much so that people here joke that Silicon Valley would be paralyzed if its Chinese and Indian engineers ever went on strike.
AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor with the University of California, Berkeley's Department of City and Regional Planning, studies the relationship between migration and regional economic development. Her research shows that prior to 1999, ethnic Chinese or Indians ran 29 of every 100 Silicon Valley enterprises. Companies founded by persons of Chinese or Indian descent generated US$19.5 billion in revenues in 2000 and provided more than 72,000 jobs. Fifty-three percent of Silicon Valley's high-tech workers are immigrants, with ethnic Indians and Chinese accounting for 25% (20,000 Indians, 5,000 Taiwanese, and 15,000 Chinese). This diverse workforce is one of Silicon Valley's great competitive strengths.
The valley has had its ups and downs over its 30-some-year history, and memories of the recent Internet boom and bust are still fresh in the minds of locals.
Globalization and the emergence of Asian markets have fed an ongoing surge in outsourcing, encouraging (and, in some cases, compelling) many of Silicon Valley's ethnic Chinese to become what the overseas Chinese media refers to as "seagulls"--trans-Pacific workers who commute between the US and Asia.
Saxenian many years ago proposed abandoning the term "brain drain" in favor of "brain circulation." Her point is that in years gone by, Asian immigrants came to the US to start businesses, creating job opportunities, but, in more recent years, the growth in Asia's own economies has drawn them back. Though some have chosen to remain in the US, technology-related migration flows continue to play an important role in linking the US to distant markets. Saxenian therefore believes that the processes of "brain circulation" and high-tech migration benefit both markets.
Whether you call these ethnically Chinese tech-industry globetrotters "seagulls," "migratory birds," or "sea turtles" (a pun on the Chinese for returning home from abroad), the fact is that they are flying higher and farther in search of markets and opportunities.
This feature will address two key questions: How are these trans-Pacific travelers contributing to Taiwan's next wave of industrial development? How can Taiwan participate in this global brain circulation to attract and foster talent?
The early summer weather was lovely when we arrived in Silicon Valley to work on this story. We spent ten days there, driving some 1000 miles (a distance equal to a full circuit of Taiwan) as we reported the story. In Northern California, the summer sun sets late, allowing us to schedule interviews from breakfast through dinnertime and on into the evening.
As the days passed, the number of interviews mounted as the people we spoke to introduced me to still others. On several occasions, we inadvertently reached people on their cellphones in Beijing, where it was the middle of the night, and had to ask sheepishly (after profuse apologies) when they would be back in Silicon Valley. Some of the people I spoke with in Silicon Valley were available to talk again in Taipei the following week. The circulation of these ethnic Chinese "brains" truly has become ubiquitous, drawing Asia and Silicon Valley ever closer together.
For this article we interviewed dozens of students studying in the US, research and development engineers, upper-level executives, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. In so doing, we received so much information and heard so many compelling stories that we decided to split this feature into two parts, one on the people and the other on start-up enterprises, which will appear in consecutive issues of Taiwan Panorama.