Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto

No company shaped Palo Alto more than Hewlett-Packard. It began as a partnership between two Stanford graduates in a rented garage. It grew into the largest private employer in the city and helped turn Stanford's farmland into a research park. In 2015 it split into two companies. One is still headquartered in Palo Alto. The other moved to Texas.

This profile follows the company through its Palo Alto addresses. The garage years are covered in depth on our HP Garage page, so here they get only a short summary.

The garage years, 1938 to 1940

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard studied engineering at Stanford under Frederick Terman, who urged his best students to start companies near campus. In 1938 Packard and his wife Lucile rented the ground floor of a house at 367 Addison Avenue. The property came with a one-car garage. Hewlett lived in a small shed out back.

The two men started part time. They formalized their partnership on January 1, 1939. A coin toss settled the order of their names. The first product was the HP 200A audio oscillator. Walt Disney Studios ordered a modified version for work on Fantasia, which gave the tiny firm credibility. HP's own timeline dates the start of operations on Addison Avenue to August 1938.

Page Mill Road, 1940 to 1960

The garage was never meant to last. In 1940 the partners rented a small building at 481 Page Mill Road, near El Camino Real. They leased it from John Bell, who ran Tinker Bell's Fix It Shop in a neighboring building on the corner. HP kept using the Bell buildings until 1946. Both were demolished in 2009.

In 1942 HP put up its first company-owned building, known as the Redwood Building, on land it bought at 395 Page Mill Road. Some retellings call this a move to "Redwood City" or a "Redwood Avenue." Neither is right. The name came from the building, which stood just down Page Mill Road from the Bell shop. Decades later HP's Dymec division introduced the company's first computer, the 2116A, from the Redwood Building.

World War II brought large orders for test and measurement gear. The company kept growing after the war and was formally incorporated on August 18, 1947. In 1957 senior managers met in Sonoma and wrote down the management principles that became known as the HP Way. That same year HP sold shares to the public for the first time.

Moving into the research park

Stanford opened its industrial park along Page Mill Road in 1951. HP leased land there in 1956 and opened its first building in 1957. On June 11, 1960, the company moved into 1501 Page Mill Road, which became its headquarters. Our page on Stanford Research Park explains how those long ground leases work.

Over the following decades HP filled much of the park. It added offices, labs and manufacturing plants along Page Mill Road, Hanover Street and Deer Creek Road. By the 2000s the company's corporate address was 3000 Hanover Street, a short drive from 1501 Page Mill Road. Several of those HP buildings later passed to other famous tenants. The former HP and Agilent plant at 3500 Deer Creek Road became Tesla's headquarters. A former Agilent building at 1601 California Avenue became Facebook's research park home in 2009.

Hewlett-Packard timeline

Agilent, Compaq and a changing company

For its first 40 years HP was mainly an instrument company. Computers, calculators and then printers took over in the 1970s and 1980s. In March 1999 HP announced that it would spin off its test and measurement business as a separate company, Agilent Technologies. Agilent took over many of the older Palo Alto plants.

HP then bet heavily on personal computers. It announced a deal to buy Compaq Computer in September 2001 and completed the merger in 2002. Workers swapped the signs on buildings in Palo Alto and around the world. The merger made HP one of the largest technology companies by revenue, but the company spent much of the next decade trying to balance its consumer and business sides.

The 2015 split

On October 6, 2014, HP announced that it would divide into two publicly traded companies. The split took effect on November 1, 2015.

• HP Inc. kept the personal computer and printing business. It also kept 1501 Page Mill Road as its headquarters, so the original research park site stayed in the family.
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise took the servers, storage, networking and services business. It started life headquartered at 3000 Hanover Street in Palo Alto.

Both companies inherited parts of the HP name and history. The garage on Addison Avenue, which HP had bought in 2000, remains HP property and is still used in HP's own storytelling.

Where Hewlett Packard Enterprise went

HPE did not stay long in Palo Alto. In November 2017 it announced plans to move its headquarters to the Santa Clara offices of Aruba, a networking company it had bought in 2015. It also planned to sell the Hanover Street building. It later operated from San Jose. On December 1, 2020, HPE announced that it would move its headquarters to the Houston area, where it was building a new campus in Spring, Texas. HPE said San Jose would remain a major hub for its Bay Area staff.

The Hanover Street campus found a new tenant with a sense of history. In February 2023 Tesla announced its global engineering headquarters there. Elon Musk called it a transition from the company that founded Silicon Valley to Tesla.

HPE itself is now a large business technology company. In July 2025 it completed its purchase of Juniper Networks, which expanded its networking business.

HP in Palo Alto today

HP Inc. is still headquartered at 1501 Page Mill Road, inside Stanford Research Park, more than 65 years after the company first moved in. It is a private corporate campus with no visitor center or tours.

For visitors, the most meaningful HP site is still the garage. It sits on a quiet residential street in Professorville, a short walk from downtown. You can read the state landmark plaque from the sidewalk. Pair it with a walk past the Federal Telegraph plaque at Channing Avenue and Emerson Street, where radio research took place three decades before HP.

The HP story ties into almost every other Palo Alto company. Varian Associates was its research park neighbor from the start. Agilent buildings later housed Tesla and Facebook. For the wider picture, see our guide to Palo Alto companies and the famous tech addresses tour.

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