Palo Alto ( /ˌpæloʊˈæltoʊ/; Spanish: palo: "branch" and alto: "tall") is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, United States. The city shares its borders with East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park. It is named after a redwood tree called El Palo Alto. The city includes portions of Stanford University, is headquarters to a number of Silicon Valley high-technology companies, including Hewlett-Packard, VMware, Tesla Motors, Ning, IDEO, and Palantir Technologies, and has served as an incubator to several other high-technology companies, such as Google, Logitech, Intuit, Sun Microsystems, and PayPal. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 64,403 residents. Palo Alto was established by Leland Stanford when he established Stanford University, following the death of his son Leland Stanford Jr. on March 13, 1884.
Silicon Valley refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations. The term originally referred to the region's large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the American high-tech sector. Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers throughout the United States and the world, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading hub for high-tech innovation and development, accounting for 1/3 of all of the venture capital investment in the United States. Geographically, the Silicon Valley encompasses all of the Santa Clara Valley including the city of San Jose (and adjacent communities), the southern Peninsula, and the southern East Bay.