The modest wooden structure sits behind a Craftsman bungalow on a quiet residential street. Hewlett and Packard rented the property in 1938 -- Packard lived in the house with his wife; Hewlett lived in a small building behind it. The garage served as their workshop, where they built the first HP products using a coin-flip to decide whose name came first. The audio oscillator, priced at $54.40, was dramatically cheaper than competing products, and its success launched one of the world's great technology companies. Hewlett-Packard would grow to become the largest personal computer manufacturer in the world.

The HP Garage has become the founding myth of Silicon Valley -- the template for every startup origin story that followed. Two Stanford graduates, a mentor in Frederick Terman, a small amount of capital, and a garage: the formula was so potent that 'garage startup' became shorthand for an entire philosophy of entrepreneurship. Apple, Google, and Amazon all claim garage origins, consciously or not echoing the HP story. The plaque designating the site as the 'Birthplace of Silicon Valley' was placed by the state of California, granting official status to what was already cultural gospel.

The garage is privately owned and not open to regular public tours, though HP has restored it and maintains it as a museum. From the street, it looks like what it is: a small garage behind a nice house. There is no monument to scale here, no corporate grandeur. The gap between the garage and what it became -- a company that at its peak employed over 300,000 people -- is the entire point. Silicon Valley's foundational belief is that transformative things begin in small spaces. The HP Garage is the physical evidence.