But the garage shared by Billl Hewlett and Dave Packard at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto, is not only the birthplace of the multinational electronics company: it's a key part of Silicon Valley's cult of entrepreneurship. The Hewlett Packard story - of college friends with no capital experimenting under a bare lightbulb to create an innovation that will make their fortune - has become the archetypal start-up legend, a symbol of American ingenuity and the transformative possibilities of hard graft.

Countless other corporate histories feature suburban outbuildings, small teams, and supportive families. The Apple company has its origins in the Jobs family garage; Chester Carlson, the inventor of electrophotography, spent years developing his ideas in the back room of his house in New York before licensing the technology to the Haloid - later Zerox - corporation. And it's not just high-tech companies: Walt Disney's first studio was his uncle's garage in Los Angeles; and Mattel, the Barbie doll maker, was started by a husband and wife in a garage in Southern California in 1945.

So powerful is the garage story that it has attained the status of contemporary legend, endlessly repeated and consciously emulated. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started renting a garage - two years after they had set up the company and when they already had venture capital backing - almost in homage to Hewlett Packard. Like HP, Google recently bought back their garage in order to preserve it as a historical artefact.

The popular resonance of the garage folk tale, however, often obscures the true makings of an entrepreneur. A 2005 paper by Berkeley academics Pino Audia and Christopher Rider concludes that, far from being lone iconoclasts, most entrepreneurs were "organizational products". They had generally worked for some time in large companies where they acquired the "psychological and social resources” to start their own companies. Industry knowledge and social networks were the key to most start-ups. Steve Jobs built up experience and contacts at Hewlett Packard before setting up a workshop back at his parents’ house, and Dave Packard himself worked for GE before the garage years in Addison Avenue.

Audia and Rider also found that the mythology of the garage start-up does not seem to exist outside the United States. In our Ideas Masterclass interviews with leading European business people we found less emphasis on the origin of companies and more on the social factors that pushed our entrepreneurs. Easygroup's Stelios is typically self-effacing. "[My father] financed my dreams. I cheated in the beginning because I had money from him. He was a true self-made entrepreneur - and I always respect those more."

Brent Hoberman, one of the UK's best known entrepreneurs, told us, "part of it is being an outsider in the UK - I’m originally South African. Another factor was that my grandfather was an entrepreneur in South Africa. He started with one shop and ended up with 650. And I saw how much he loved doing that and loved getting up every day."

Ab Banerjee, founder of ViewsOnYou, told us he made a conscious decision to work as a management consultant until he was in the right position to start his own company in his thirties. And Nicholas Bloy, Founding Partner of Navis Capital Partners, worked for Boston Consulting Group for ten years before he felt ready "to risk my own capital".

The lovingly restored Hewlett Packard garage is recognised by the State of California as a historic landmark; Google garage, barely a decade after the dotcom boom, is already a tourist attraction. Of the many differences between attitudes to entrepreneurship in the US and in Europe, this mythologising of origin stories is one of the most profound: the idea of a business as a powerful force for good with humble beginnings. As (American) Julie Meyer told us "the entrepreneur's journey is really the hero's journey from ancient mythology - the highs and the lows and the attainment of the big goal. If you are even slightly into stories, you can't help but loving working with entrepreneurs."

Victoria Crawford
Producer
CNBC