It was hard to believe that California could continue its postwar hot streak, especially after the end of the space race and the defeat in Vietnam. The resulting wave of layoffs confirmed the widespread suspicion that it all couldn’t last. In the next chapter I’ll cover the personal computer industry, which started the accumulation cycle over again, but the Mac and PC weren’t the only things Palo Alto had to offer. Finance capital always did like the suburbs. Novelty is high-growth, and Palo Alto built an incubator for new technologies. The huge capital-gains tax cut—more than 50 percent—and pension-investment deregulation helped turn venture capital from something small groups of well-connected buddies did in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Bay Area into a national growth strategy. Money raced from all over the world to Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road, capital’s new capital, and into the hundreds of venture funds springing up like apricot trees. Capital in the funds quadrupled in the early 1980s, from $1 billion at the close of the 1970s to $4 billion in 1983.17