In the slides from that talk he actually anchored the start of Silicon Valley with Hewlett Packard. I blogged last year that Federal Radio was a much better starting point, See http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/05/steve-blank-on-secre... based on Timothy J. Sturgeon’s "How Silicon Valley Came to Be" where he notes:
The fact that the San Francisco Bay Area’s electronics industry began close to the turn of the Twentieth Century should lay to rest the notion that industrialization and urbanization on the scale of Silicon Valley can be quickly induced in other areas. Silicon Valley is nearly 100 years old. It grew out of a historically and geographically specific context that cannot be recreated. The lesson for planners and economic developers is to focus on long-term, not short-term developmental trajectories. Silicon Valley was the fastest growing region in the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s; but that growth came out of a place, not a technology. Silicon Valley’s development is intimately entwined with the long history of industrialization and innovation in the larger San Francisco Bay Area.