Meanings
- An arterial road in western Silicon Valley, California, running through Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Woodside, notable for its concentration of venture capital firms' offices.
Holonym: Silicon Valley
- A neighborhood of Palo Alto, California, named after the road.
Holonym: Silicon Valley
2 more examples
There was a time when funding for internet start-ups was so easy that what came to matter was not how much you could get but where it came from. And if you got it from Sand Hill Road, Wall Street regarded that much as Catholics regard a benediction from the Pope.
2001 August 25, John Naughton, “There is a message in the dust on Sand Hill Road”, in The ObserverYet there is little visible gloom along Sand Hill Road, a suburban business neighborhood where office real estate is among the most expensive in the world.
2003 December 29, John Markoff, “The Year Ahead: Consolidation and Competition as an Industry Grows Up”, in The New York Times, →ISSN - metonymicallyThe Californian venture capital industry, including its influence on Big Tech and biotech.
Near-synonym: Silicon Valley
2 more examples
Bryce Roberts said, “It has to be a way of disrupting Sand Hill Road”—where a number of the Valley’s top venture firms reside.
2016 October 3, Tad Friend, quoting Bryce Roberts, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny”, in The New YorkerSuch numbers aren’t everything to a candidate running for the president of the entire country and not just Sand Hill Road, especially at a point in the campaign when many donors are hedging their bets by backing multiple candidates.
2019 July 30, Julia Carrie Wong, “Young, Ivy League and data-driven: why venture capitalists love Pete Buttigieg”, in The GuardianSynonyms: Sand Hill, SHR, Silicon Valley
Synonyms & antonyms
proper nounAn arterial road in western Silicon Valley, California, running through Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Woodside, notable for its concentration of venture capital firms' offices.
proper nounThe Californian venture capital industry, including its influence on Big Tech and biotech.
Origin
The road and its name existed in the 1920s and possibly before. The road was evidently named as a route toward a place called Sand Hill, but the Sand Hill in Oakley is not the referent, as it lies in a distant part of the Bay Area. The neighborhood sense and the venture-capital industry sense are by metonymy and are many decades newer.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
Sand Hill Road. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Sand%20Hill%20Road
“Sand Hill Road.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Sand%20Hill%20Road. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Sand Hill Road,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Sand%20Hill%20Road.
Source: Sand Hill Road on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.