There's something almost mythical about the American garage. It's where teenagers tinker with cars, where holiday decorations go to hibernate, and apparently, where trillion-dollar companies are born.

HP, Apple, Google, and Microsoft — four titans that collectively shape how we work, communicate, and doom-scroll at 2 AM — all started in garages. It's not a coincidence. It's practically a Silicon Valley origin story requirement.

The Original: Hewlett-Packard

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard kicked off the garage tradition in 1939, working out of a small garage in Palo Alto, California. Their first product? An audio oscillator. Their first major customer? Walt Disney, who bought eight of them for the sound design of Fantasia.

That garage at 367 Addison Avenue is now a California State Historic Landmark, officially designated as "The Birthplace of Silicon Valley."

The Apple Story

In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first Apple computers in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos. Woz did the engineering wizardry while Jobs handled the business side — and occasionally sold his belongings to fund the operation.

The Apple I was literally hand-built, and they sold them for $666.66 each. Within a decade, Apple would be a Fortune 500 company.

Microsoft's Humble Start

Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but the company's DNA traces back to earlier garage tinkering. Before the official founding, Gates was coding in the family garage and any space he could find access to a computer.

Their big break? Writing a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 — software they famously developed before they even had access to the actual hardware.

Google: The Most Recent Graduate

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage from Susan Wojcicki (who would later become YouTube's CEO) in Menlo Park. The monthly rent was $1,700.

They'd already developed their search algorithm at Stanford, but the garage became Google's first official headquarters. Today, that same company processes over 8.5 billion searches per day.

Why Garages?

The pattern isn't accidental. Garages offer:

Cheap rent — critical when you're bootstrapping
Space for equipment — computers, soldering irons, and prototypes need room
Privacy — no landlord asking what you're building
Proximity to home — essential for 18-hour workdays

There's also something psychologically powerful about starting small. The garage represents possibility without pretension. You're not playing startup — you're just building something.

The Garage Myth vs. Reality

Of course, the "garage startup" story has become so romanticized that it sometimes obscures the full picture. These founders also had access to elite education, early investors, and supportive networks that most entrepreneurs don't.

The garage wasn't magic. It was just where the magic happened to take place.

Still, there's an undeniable charm to knowing that companies now worth trillions of dollars started in spaces most people use to store lawn mowers. It's a reminder that world-changing ideas don't require world-class facilities — just the right people, the right timing, and apparently, a garage.

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