Get to Know Menlo Park

Menlo Park is a pretty, leafy Peninsula suburb that also happens to be a Silicon Valley powerhouse. It has much in common with Palo Alto, its next-door neighbor, and the two are frequently mentioned in the same breath. Perhaps Menlo Park is a touch quieter — it has about half the population of Palo Alto and lacks the college town–aspects of the Stanford campus — but any differences are minor. Meta, parent company of Facebook, has its headquarters in Menlo Park and a little company called Google was founded here in a garage. Today, the city is known as the “Capital of Venture Capital,” due to the high concentration of VC firms that line the iconic Sand Hill Road. When not coming up with the next hot tech start-up, the community loves shopping and dining at long-time local favorites like Draeger’s Market, Kepler’s Books, and the very first Round Table Pizza.

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Living in Silicon Valley

Twentieth-century innovation transformed the Santa Clara Valley, once a verdant Eden of blossoming plum and apricot orchards, from the rural “Valley of Heart’s Delight” to suburban Silicon Valley. Located at the south end of the San Francisco Bay Area, its borders are more or less congruent with Santa Clara County, though they're sometimes stretched by extension to cover tech-forward areas up the peninsula and the lower East Bay. Though roads are the default thoroughfare for local travel, there's a growing number of transit alternatives: Caltrain and now BART provides easy travel to San Francisco and Oakland, and the VTA light rail slinks streetcar-style through downtown San Jose on its way from Milpitas and Mountain View to Campbell and Santa Teresa. The Santa Cruz Mountains to the south and west, along with Mt. Hamilton and the Diablo Range to the east, keep nature in easy reach.