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Revolutionary Roads: Mapping America's Innovation Capitals

30 tales of following where the spirit leads

By Nitasha Tiku and Jason Del Rey |  @nitashatiku @DelRey   | 
 

1. Seattle, 1967 The Lakeside Mother's Club uses the proceeds of a rummage sale to install an ASR-33 Teletype machine for kids to experiment with. Seventh grader Bill Gates finds his calling.

2. Portland, Oregon, 1982 Dan Wieden and David Kennedy set up their ad agency. Wieden uses a borrowed typewriter to tap out this slogan for their first client: "Just do it."

3. Sioux City, Iowa, 1985 Ted Waitt and Mike Hammond launch Gateway out of Waitt's dad's farmhouse; they load cattle trucks in lieu of paying rent. To play up their roots, they ship computers in boxes patterned like a Holstein.

4. Sausalito, California, 1998 The naming wizards at Lexicon Branding note that the tiny keys on Research In Motion's new device look not unlike the seeds on a strawberry. Come to think of it, a BlackBerry.

5. Danville, California, 1990 Having devoured five PowerBars during a 175-mile bike ride, Gary Erickson can ingest no more. The Clif Bar is born.

6. Berkeley, California, 1971 Under the aliases Berkeley Blue and Oaf Tobark, two guys peddle illegal devices dorm to dorm that "phreak" the phone system into making free calls. They use their real names -- Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs -- when they start Apple Computer in 1976.

7. Burlingame, California, 1982 During a kitchen-table discussion, Signe Ostby grumbles to her spouse about the tedium of paying bills. Putting all other husbands to shame, Scott Cook begins work on a solution. Within two years, Intuit and its flagship personal-finance software, Quicken, emerge.

8. Hawthorne, California, 2002 Elon Musk just has a thing about Mars. It takes $100 million, but SpaceX, his follow-up to PayPal, launches a rocket 180 miles above Earth.

9. La Honda, California, 1997 Reed Hastings contemplates lying to his wife about the $40 he owes Canyon Video for a misplaced copy of Apollo 13. Then, he gets a better idea: Netflix.

10. San Jose, California, 1995 Pierre Omidyar launches eBay from his apartment. One of the first items sold, for $14.83, is a broken laser pointer. When Omidyar contacts the winning bidder to make sure he knows that it's broken, the bidder writes back that he is in fact a collector of broken laser pointers.

11. Palo Alto, California, 1995 Stanford grad student Sergey Brin and prospective student Larry Page meet -- and disagree about almost everything. They get over it and start a search engine called BackRub. Two years later, it's renamed Google.

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    • Nitasha Tiku

    Reporter Nitasha Tiku covers technology, finance, green business, and social entrepreneurship for Inc. magazine and contributes to the staff’s daily links blog. Her work has appeared in New York magazine, The Villager, Chelsea Now, and on nymag.com. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.


    Jason Del Rey

    Senior reporter Jason Del Rey covers technology, branding, and company culture for Inc. magazine and contributes to the From the Reporters daily blog. Before joining Inc., his work appeared in Newsday, The (Newark) Star-Ledger, and the Staten Island Advance, and on ESPN.com. He lives in New York City.


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