San Jose
From prune orchards to $69 billion in venture capital, San Jose rode adaptive radiation from one semiconductor firm into a global tech apex—now $1.9 million median home prices test whether the ecosystem can hold.
Before silicon, there were prunes. San Jose spent its first century as the agricultural capital of Santa Clara Valley, its orchards producing more dried fruit than anywhere on Earth. The transformation began not with a chip but with a real estate decision: when Stanford University encouraged faculty to lease land for commercial ventures in the 1950s, the valley's cheap acreage and pleasant climate attracted the same kind of opportunistic colonization that transforms any fertile but underexploited habitat.
Fairchild Semiconductor's founding in 1957 triggered a speciation event. Engineers left Fairchild to start Intel, AMD, and dozens of other firms in a pattern biologists call adaptive radiation—one ancestral species giving rise to many in a newly available niche. San Jose absorbed most of the growth, annexing aggressively through the 1960s and 1970s to become the largest city in Northern California. By the 1980s, orchards had become office parks, and the valley's export shifted from fruit to microprocessors.
San Jose today anchors a metropolitan area with GDP per capita ranking third globally, behind only Zurich and Oslo. The city hosts headquarters or major campuses for Adobe, Cisco, eBay, PayPal, and Zoom. Venture capital investment in the broader Silicon Valley reached $69 billion recently, while patents awarded to local inventors hit an all-time high of 23,600. Yet the ecosystem shows signs of strain: median home prices exceed $1.9 million, nearly half of residents consider leaving, and job growth has stalled even as per-capita income climbs past $157,000—a divergence that suggests the returns from innovation increasingly concentrate among fewer workers.
The city faces the classic dilemma of any apex ecosystem: the conditions that created dominance—talent density, network effects, institutional knowledge—now generate costs that push participants toward the periphery. San Jose's next chapter depends on whether agglomeration benefits can survive the affordability crisis eroding its talent pipeline.