Asian Americans are significant contributors to the high tech boom in California’s Silicon Valley, which began in the late twentieth century and continues today. In the 1990s, the Silicon Valley was a fertile field of innovation. Its allure attracted many college-educated professionals in the computing and technological fields. Highly-skilled Asian Americans and Asian immigrants worked to establish successful high tech startup companies—over 40 percent of them—during this period. 

While some Asian American entrepreneurs were able to build lucrative companies, their success was made possible because of the labor of many lower-income Asian Americans, often in ways that were not widely acknowledged.