The Sand Hill Road freeway exit.

Sand Hill Road is a road in Menlo Park, California, notable for the concentration of venture capital companies there. Its significance as a symbol of private equity in the United States may be compared to that of Wall Street in the stock market. Connecting El Camino Real and Interstate 280, the road provides easy access to Stanford University and Silicon Valley. For several years during the Dotcom boom of the late 1990s, commercial real-estate on Sand Hill Road was more expensive than anywhere else in the U.S. (even Manhattan). Image File history File links The sign for the Sand Hill Road exit from Interstate 280 (California) northbound. ... Image File history File links The sign for the Sand Hill Road exit from Interstate 280 (California) northbound. ... Cafe Borrone, adjacent to Keplers Bookstore in the Menlo Center, is a popular lunch spot in downtown Menlo Park. ... Venture capital is a general term to describe financing for startup and early stage businesses as well as businesses in turn around situations. ... Private equity is a broad term that refers to any type of equity investment in an asset in which the equity is not freely tradable on a public stock market. ... View up Wall Street from Pearl Street Wall Street is the name of a narrow thoroughfare in lower Manhattan running east from Broadway downhill to the East River. ... A stock market is a market for the trading of publicly held company stock and associated financial instruments (including stock options, convertibles and stock index futures). ... El Camino Real in California is historically the road built in 1769 by Father Junípero Serra to connect the Catholic missions in Alta California between Sonoma in the north, and (what is now Presidio Park in) San Diego in the south, during the Spanish colonial era, and now a... JUNCTION POSTMILE US-101 SCL 0. ... For other meanings of Stanford, see Stanford (disambiguation). ... A view of downtown San Jose, the self-proclaimed Capital of Silicon Valley. Like many large cities, San Joses downtown is expansive and encompasses much more area than shown in this view. ... Dot-com (also dotcom or redundantly dot. ... // Events and trends The 1990s are generally classified as having moved slightly away from the more conservative 1980s, but keeping the same mind-set. ... Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about: United States Wikinews has news related to this article: United States United States government CIA World Factbook Entry for United States House. ... Manhattan is an island bordering the lower Hudson River. ...

Some of the areas Sand Hill Road venture capitalists invest in:

• Internet companies
• Computer software
• Communications
• Computer services
• Medical
• Health
• Semiconductors
• Electronics
• Computer hardware
• Biotechnology
• Industrial
• Energy

Sand Hill Road also serves as home to the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ... The term communications is used in a number of disciplines: Communications, also known as communication studies is the academic discipline which studies communication. ... A semiconductor is a material with an electrical conductance that is intermediate to those of an insulator and a conductor. ... Hardware comprises all of the physical parts of a computer, as distinguished from the data it contains or operates on, and the software that provides instructions for the hardware to accomplish tasks. ... Biotechnology is technology based on biology, especially when used in agriculture, food science, and medicine. ... The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) is a U.S. national laboratory operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy. ...

History

For many years, Sand Hill Road's northern end terminated in the middle of Stanford Shopping Center's parking lot, and the only four-lane segment was the section from Interstate 280 to Alameda de las Pulgas (the section where all the venture capitalists are housed). The Stanford Shopping Center is an outdoor shopping mall located on El Camino Real at Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, California. ...

This situation resulted in two severe bottlenecks which made it difficult to travel to and from Stanford Shopping Center, Stanford University, and Menlo Park. For other meanings of Stanford, see Stanford (disambiguation). ... Cafe Borrone, adjacent to Keplers Bookstore in the Menlo Center, is a popular lunch spot in downtown Menlo Park. ...

Extension and widening of the road was ferociously opposed by environmentalists who were concerned about the road's proximity to San Francisquito Creek, and by residents of Menlo Park, who feared that completion of the road would increase traffic congestion in their area due to the mid-Peninsula region's lack of a direct north-south arterial.

After three decades of lobbying, negotiation, and litigation, the road was finally completed to El Camino Real in 2001. Oddly, only the existing portion from just north of Alameda de las Pulgas to just south of Stanford Shopping Center was widened to four lanes; the new extension past the shopping center was built only as two lanes.

The bottleneck near Alameda de las Pulgas is currently being fixed and should be taken care of by 2006. The project was delayed because the stretch of land at issue was the only segment of Sand Hill Road which runs through Menlo Park; the city reversed its stubborn opposition to the widening of its segment only after it saw how well the widening of the northern Palo Alto segment turned out.