by Sheridan Winn

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, so they say.

Put two brilliant minds together in a garage, add imagination, energy, belief and commitment—and what do you get?

Well, you might just get one of America’s great companies: Hewlett Packard, Apple and Google were each launched in garages by a pair of like-minded friends who, by developing a far-sighted idea, ended up creating a new market.

The low-budget garage startup has become the folklore of California’s Silicon Valley. We like the idea that a multibillion-dollar company can be born in our garages, in our homes. Home is the place where we can bounce ideas around, work all hours and save on office rental. It is a good place to start.

The world’s most famous garage—and the birthplace of the electronics revolution—is 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto. William Hewlett and David Packard launched Hewlett-Packard here on January 1, 1939, with $538 and a Sears-Roebuck drill. The two Stanford University electrical engineering graduates had been encouraged by their professor and mentor, Fred Terman, to start a business and “make a run for it.”
David and his wife, Lucile, lived on the first floor of the house; William slept in a shed out back. Lucile did the accounts and, at the kitchen stove, baked paint for the sheet-metal casings. In a classic tale of entrepreneurship, the men worked in the garage, under a single lightbulb.

Their first product was the Model 200A audio oscillator: The Walt Disney Company bought eight of these machines to enhance the soundtrack of its animated film Fantasia. HP’s first year revenue was $5,369. Today, it employs about 151,000 people, has annual revenue of just under $90 billion and enjoys a reputation as one of the world’s most far-sighted companies.

In 1967, a 12-year-old boy named Steve Jobs telephoned Hewlett, then president of HP. Jobs wanted to know how to build a frequency counter: Hewlett talked to him for 20 minutes, during which he offered Jobs some HP parts for his machine and work for the summer.

Nine years later, in 1976, Jobs and Steve Wozniak started the Apple Computer Company in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, a short distance from the HP garage.

Jobs’s father removed his car-restoration equipment and brought the boys a huge wooden workbench. The garage became Apple’s manufacturing and shipping base. Working capital was raised from the sale of Jobs’s Volkswagen minibus and Wozniak’s programmable calculator. “It was just the two of us, Woz and me,” Jobs once told Fortune magazine.
Their first Apple model was a working circuit board for hobbyists, and it pioneered many of the features that made Apple II a success. With its integrated keyboard, high-resolution color graphics, innovative sound and sleek plastic case, Apple II was the first machine to appeal to the average consumer.

Another garage success story is Google’s. Larry Page and Sergey Brin dropped out of their PhD course at Stanford University, and raised $1 million from family and friends to found their Internet search engine in 1998—from a friend’s garage. The pair did not immediately hit it off when they met in the mid-1990s but became friends while trying to develop a new software search engine system.
Google’s growth has been phenomenal: 20,000 searches were received each day at the outset; by December 2004, there were 650 million. Today, some 5,000 employees work from Google’s Mountain View headquarters. The company’s fourth-quarter revenue (to December 31, 2005) rose by 86% to $1.92 billion, from $1.03 billion in the same quarter in 2004.

Not bad for two young men who started their company in a garage.
Sheridan Winn is a freelance business and lifestyle journalist based in the UK. Her insightful and entertaining features are published regularly in newspapers and journals on four continents.