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Couldn't you make the same argument about Harvard (Microsoft, Facebook, Broderbund, Electronic Arts, OKCupid, not to mention Polaroid, Merck, and Weezer) or MIT (Hewlett-Packard, Thinking Machines, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Visicalc, Lotus, Akamai, Fairchild, Intel, 3Com, DEC, ETrade, Bose, Kurzweil, and iRobot, not to mention McDonnell Douglas, Campbell Soup, Boston, and the National Enquirer)?

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Hewlett-Packard: I'd give that one to Stanford way more than MIT. From Wikipedia:

"Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard graduated in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company originated in a garage in nearby Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with a past professor, Frederick Terman at Stanford during the Great Depression. Terman was considered a mentor to them in forming Hewlett-Packard."

If anyone's interested, here's a fuller list of SV companies founded by Stanford-affiliated people: http://www.stanford.edu/group/wellspring/economic.html

Hmmm, you're right, their formal education at MIT only includes Hewlett getting his Masters there with his BS and Ph.D. at Stanford (Packard got his BS and Masters at Stanford, all this according to Wikipedia).

As far as I know they did feel some affinity with MIT, but it sounds like the Stanford connection is overwhelmingly dominant.

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