Innovation

Innovation begins in the garage

HP isn’t the only high-tech company that started in this low-tech workspace. A look at how garages spark reinvention.

By Garage Staff — December 1, 2017

The world-famous garage where HP was born was named a U.S. historic landmark in 2007.

Courtesy of HP

The world-famous garage where HP was born was named a U.S. historic landmark in 2007.

Hewlett and Packard. Jobs and Wozniak.

These are some of the household names that hatched revolutionary companies in the unlikeliest of places, the California garage. Its humdrum qualities, from cheap rent to open space, are exactly what made it the perfect spot to launch companies — and become the symbol of a very specific kind of American innovation.

And if the garage equals innovation, the birthplace of HP on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California is a big reason why. It was there, during the Great Depression, at the end of a short driveway on a shady suburban street, that two friends literally tinkered their way into history.

As onetime Apple evangelist and fulltime pundit Guy Kawasaki says in “Origins,” a documentary about the history of HP: “HP was the inspiration for the entire Valley. No question.”

When William Hewlett and David Packard teamed up in 1938, the two college buddies didn’t have a business plan. What they had were some business notions, radio-engineering expertise and…a garage. Out of that space, they created a startup that set the mold for Silicon Valley’s seemingly infinite supply of tech adventurers.

“The HP garage endures because it’s the birthplace of entrepreneurialism,” says Michael S. Malone, a former HP employee and author ofBill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company.” “Bill and Dave started a company before they knew what they were going to sell. That garage is where they worked until they figured it out.”  

That scrappy nature of “the garage,” and the power of possibility that it offers, still resonates. 

“A garage sends a significant signal to people,” says Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, which mimicked the openness of the garage when it remodeled its space in 2016 — down to installing a working garage door that opens into the center’s popular meeting room. “We acknowledge the people who got things done with very few resources, who were willing to be different, who were the pirates.” 

“The HP garage endures because it’s the birthplace of entrepreneurialism.” 

Michael S. Malone, author of "Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company"

Garages are practical by nature

Before garages, there were barns for the horses, which were so smelly and noisy that they had to be built away from the main house, explains Eric Hintz of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.

When the automobile arrived in the 1910s, that physical detachment continued — to the advantage of inventors who could noodle away at all hours just as they pleased. “You’re hammering, you’re sawing, you may have smells, like when Dave and Bill were soldering,” explains Hintz.

As the Valley’s fields of fruit trees turned into sprawling suburbs, the cost of rent for space to make ideas reality and experiment skyrocketed. So when Google’s founders raised their first $100,000, they moved out of their dorms and rented the garage of fellow Stanford alum Susan Wojcicki for $1,700 a month, until their eight employees outgrew it a year later.

The garage is a sign of independence

Yet the garage’s perceived and real independence nearly always operates within a broad network of support.

Hewlett and Packard were wooed back to Palo Alto by a former professor who wanted to create an engineering powerhouse by fostering collaboration among students, professors and local businesses. It worked: During the 1970s, informal and formal networking among electronics clubs, tinkering of engineers after work and electronics swap meets where hackers showed off their accomplishments fueled the game-changing burst of innovations around the personal computer.

“If you look at the two guys in the next famous garage, which is Apple, they are deeply enmeshed in the existing Silicon Valley culture,” says Leslie Berlin, project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University and author of the recently published, “Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age.”

“You’re hammering, you’re sawing, you may have smells, like when Dave and Bill were soldering.”

Eric Hintz of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation

Packard and Hewlett return to the garage in 1989 to celebrate the company's 50th anniversary.

Courtesy of HP

Packard and Hewlett return to the garage in 1989 to celebrate the company's 50th anniversary.

The garage is the original open space

When Hewlett and Packard built their first actual offices in 1943, on 395 Page Mill Road, the 10,0000-sq.-ft. building had no internal walls — like their first garage. This deliberate move to encourage employee collaboration, the first open-plan design approach, is now ubiquitous at tech companies around the world.

Still, the two weren’t nostalgic for their own garage. After leaving it in 1940, they never looked back — they were focused on the future. “I joined HP in 1962, which was 23 years after the garage, and the garage was largely invisible to us,” says Chuck House, author of “The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation,” based in large part on interviews with HP employees. “Yet the garage became the model of how you start these things.” 

 

To learn more about the legendary HP garage, visit the museum's website.