Twenty years ago, I loved the Silicon Valley high-tech maps which were regularly printed. You could see the density of famous start-ups around Santa Clara, San Jose, Cupertino, Mountain View, Redwood City or Palo Alto, cities which would be unknown and uninteresting outside the technology world. Just have a look at some examples in the end of the post.

When playing with Banksy’s adventures in NYC, I used Google for building a customized map. And a few days later, I thought about doing the same for Silicon Valley unicorns. Remember the unicorns are the rare companies which reach a $1B valuation. According to the 2013 SV150 there are 94 such publicly-quoted companies. Too much for an interactive map. So I did the exercise with the $10B+ companies (I found 23 with their roots in Silicon Valley).

Choosing the market capitalization is debatable. I could have taken sales or profits. Companies such as Electronic Arts, Juniper, Xilinx, AMD, nVidia would have appeared but the group would have been similar. I just add to choose. You can open the map directly in Google maps for a better interface.

Diplay Technology companies on a bigger map

Again there is something fascinating about this density. People claim the center of gravity of the region is moving north to San Francisco because of the web 2.0. This remains to be seen over the long term…