How John Arrillaga Sr. transformed California fruit orchards into high-priced office space for the likes of Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Cisco.
For months it has been a popular parlor game among the tech cognoscenti: speculating on the identity of Company X, the mysterious tenant slated to move into the 2-million-square-foot office park planned near Mineta San Jose International Airport. Some insist that it’s Apple, spreading its cash-laden wings beyond Cupertino and Sunnyvale. Did we mention the scale: 10 seven-story buildings, 7,000-plus parking spaces, a complex twice the size of Facebook’s current quarters in Menlo Park? Others say Samsung–or Google. Note the Googley underground pool, the skyways, the soccer field sketched out in the blueprint. Still others claim Company X is Qualcomm, decamping at last from the outback of San Diego–or EMC, or SAP. Hey, San Jose’s mayor slipped that it’s a Fortune 100 company … Then Microsoft? Or Cisco, maybe?
Of all the names connected to the development, though, there is one that says more about the project–about the mystery surrounding it, about the history of Silicon Valley and perhaps even its future–than any other. And that, remarkably, is one that most people outside the Valley have never heard of: John Arrillaga Sr., the 77-year-old co-founding partner of the site’s developer, Peery Arrillaga. Sure, the modern tech industry was created by visionaries like Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, the semiconductor entrepreneurs who put the “silicon” in the Santa Clara Valley; by the likes of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the computer whizzes who burnished the romance of starting a company in a one-car garage; by Steve Jobs, who, well, was Steve Jobs. But Arrillaga–who also happens to be the father-in-law of one of the Valley’s famed venture capitalists, Marc Andreessen–is the guy who built the tech corridor where it all happened.
He and business partner Richard Peery are the real estate developers who had the foresight in the 1960s to buy up the Valley’s fruit orchards and turn the farmland into thousands of acres of low-slung office parks and campuses that have come to house Intel, HP, Apple, Google, and more. All told, the duo have erected more than 12 million square feet of office space and sold or leased tens of billions of dollars in property–an effort that has made Arrillaga, worth more than $2.5 billion, perhaps the richest man in Silicon Valley who didn’t make his money by starting a tech company. (Peery is also a billionaire.)
Seemingly in lockstep with these development projects, Arrillaga has remade, brick by brick, his alma mater, Stanford University–contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to the school and donating an additional 160 buildings, including Stanford Stadium, which he demolished and rebuilt in 2005 and 2006. There are even those who credit Stanford’s unprecedented run of championship NCAA teams–in June the school collected its 20th consecutive Learfield Sports Directors’ Cup, awarded to the nation’s best college athletic program overall–in large part to Arrillaga’s dutiful, hands-on patronage. (The claim is hardly outlandish.)See also:
But if all this weren’t unusual enough, there is one aspect to the man that runs counter to the tech industry’s star-centered ethos, the look-what-I-did mantra of founder-folk like Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison: John Arrillaga doesn’t want to be known. Famously private, the developer detests awards, won’t do ribbon-cuttings, and never talks to the press. (Keeping to that practice, he refused to be interviewed for this story.) Though his family name graces several buildings at Stanford, Arrillaga reportedly does the vast majority of his giving anonymously. Interviews with dozens of associates, relatives, and business partners–many of whom requested anonymity as well–paint a portrait of a man who is so modest that he looks downright pained when receiving a compliment. He will listen with a kind of gentle frustration, say two longtime friends who were classmates of Arrillaga’s at Morningside High School in Inglewood, Calif. “He just has no place in his life to put admiration,” says one....MORE
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