650 Area Code 🌍☎️

Palo Alto is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County in the San Francisco Bay Area, incorporated in 1894 by industrialist Leland Stanford and his wife Jane when they founded Stanford University. With a 2020 population of 68,572, Palo Alto is one of the principal cities of Silicon Valley and serves as headquarters for tech giants including HP, VMware, and PARC, while also being the founding location of Apple, Google, Meta, Tesla, and PayPal. The city, named after a coastal redwood tree called El Palo Alto discovered by explorer Gaspar de Portolá's 1769 expedition, was built on lands that included Mission Santa Clara de Asís established by Father Junípero Serra in 1777 and were ceded to the United States through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Palo Alto residents are among the most educated in the country and the city has one of the highest costs of living in the United States, though it faces a youth suicide rate four times higher than the national average. The city borders East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Stanford, Menlo Park, and other Bay Area municipalities. San Mateo is the most populous city in San Mateo County, California, located approximately 20 miles south of San Francisco on the San Francisco Peninsula as part of the San Francisco Bay Area metropolitan region, with a population of 105,661 according to the 2020 census. The city's economy is driven primarily by technology, healthcare, and education sectors. Originally inhabited by the Ramaytush people since at least 10,000 BC, San Mateo was documented by Spanish colonists in 1789 as part of Mission Dolores lands and later incorporated the Rancho de las Pulgas and Rancho San Mateo land grants, including William Davis Merry Howard's 6,438-acre rancho purchased in 1846. In the 1850s, following American conquest, San Franciscans built summer homes in the area due to its milder climate, while the city also served as a Butterfield Overland Mail stage station in 1858 and became home to A.P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of Italy (later Bank of America), whose mansion Seven Oaks is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, part of the San Francisco Bay Area, with a population of 82,376 at the 2020 census and a total area of 12.236 square miles. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the city was settled by European-Americans in 1852 as a stagecoach station and grew from 6,563 residents in 1950 to 30,889 by 1960 following development of the adjacent Moffett Field Naval Air Station and aerospace industries. Mountain View became integral to Silicon Valley's history when William Shockley established Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory there in 1956, the first company to develop silicon semiconductor devices in the region. The city now hosts headquarters for many of the world's largest technology companies, including Google and Alphabet Inc., Intuit, NASA Ames Research Center, and former headquarters for Symantec, LinkedIn, and Samsung, with technology leases generating over $5 million annually in city revenue as of 2014. Originally an agricultural and fruit-shipping center by the early 1900s, Mountain View transformed into a technology hub, with few visible remnants of its agricultural past.