The nine-county San Francisco-Silicon Valley Bay Area has been the international innovation economy’s hub since the 1970s, one of the nation’s most resilient regions for the past fifty years, and the fertile ground on which Apple, Facebook, Google, and other corporations have grown into top companies by global capitalization in just the last decade.
Even though these economic success trajectories have been almost unprecedented, the Bay Area economy is still currently on the upswing, rather than having reached a peak or started a decline. Much of the growth has occurred in clusters of highly-productive industries. These have thrived due to factors such as the Bay Area’s unparalleled workforce, world-class higher education system, premier startup ecosystem, and the almost limitless opportunities created by the region’s dense concentration of venture capital that funds innovation across a broad range of established and emerging industries.