Sand Hill Road shortened to just "Sand Hill", is an arterial road in western Silicon Valley, running through Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Woodside, notable for its concentration of venture capital companies. The road has become a metonym for that industry, its significance as a symbol of private equity and venture capitalism in the United States is compared to that of Wall Street and the stock market, K Street in Washington, D. C. and political lobbying. Connecting El Camino Real and Interstate 280, the road provides easy access to Stanford University and the northwestern area of Silicon Valley; the road runs southwest of Interstate 280 into a residential neighborhood of Woodside, but the private equity companies are concentrated to the east of the freeway on the main stretch of the road in Menlo Park. On its northeast end, it crosses into and runs through Palo Alto before ending at El Camino Real. Sand Hill Road is home to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. For many years, Sand Hill Road's northern end terminated in the middle of Stanford Shopping Center's parking lot, the only four-lane segment was the section from Interstate 280 to Santa Cruz Avenue.

This situation resulted in two severe bottlenecks which made it difficult to travel to and from Stanford Shopping Center, Stanford University, Menlo Park. Extension and widening of the road was fiercely opposed by environmentalists, who were concerned about the road's proximity to San Francisquito Creek, by residents of Menlo Park, who feared that completion of the road would increase traffic congestion in their area due to the mid-Peninsula region's lack of a direct north-south arterial. After three decades of lobbying and litigation, the road was completed to El Camino Real in 2001. Only the existing portion from just north of Alameda de las Pulgas to just south of Stanford Shopping Center was widened to four lanes; the bottleneck near Santa Cruz Avenue was widened in 2006 and features a 16-foot high faux rock wall at the junction of Sand Hill Road and Santa Cruz Avenue. The project was delayed; the first venture capitalist to establish itself on Sand Hill Road was Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1972.

Since beneficiaries of funding from Sand Hill include Microsoft, Amazon.com, Twitter and Skype. For several years during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, commercial real estate on Sand Hill Road was more expensive than anywhere else in the world; the annual rent in the area around Sand Hill Road peaked at around $144 per square foot in mid-2000. In 1997, the Harvard Business School opened the California Research Center at 3000 Sand Hill Road, whose aim is to enable HBS faculty to write business cases about Silicon Valley; as of December 2014, Sand Hill Road is still the most expensive office space in the United States with annual rent reported at $111 per square foot, higher than Manhattan's Fifth Avenue at $102 per square foot. Some venture capital and private equity firms located on Sand Hill Road include: The season two premiere episode of the HBO television series Silicon Valley, in which the show's protagonists try to secure venture capital for their startup, was titled "Sand Hill Shuffle".

In the movie Birdemic: Shock and Terror, protagonist Rod meets with the fictional "Evergreen Capital" on Sand Hill Road in hopes of getting funding for his solar panel startup. In the second episode of Chelsea Handler's Netflix special she takes a helicopter trip over Sand Hill Road as well as visits with Geoff Yang, a founding partner of Redpoint Ventures, to try and understand Silicon Valley better

Finish Ticket is an American musical group from Alameda, California. The members are Brendan Hoye, Alex DiDonato, Gabe Stein; the band was a staple in the local San Francisco music scene, self-releasing two EPs and an album and playing at local venues and music festivals. They gathered national fame after signing to Elektra Records in 2014, releasing their debut EP with the label in 2015, they have toured both nationally in the United States and in Europe and have performed with artists such as The Black Keys, Twenty One Pilots and The Tantrums, AWOLNATION, Ed Sheeran. Finish Ticket began when founding members and twin brothers Brendan and Michael Hoye were still in high school, they started the group along with guitarist Alex DiDonato and were joined by brothers Gabe and Nick Stein in 2012. Early in their career, the group headlined local venues; the group had a brief hiatus when the members went to college, reuniting after a year in order to pursue their careers in music. Finish Ticket continued opening for big names in one-off shows.

They self-released two EPs, Life Underwater in 2009 and Shake a Symphony in 2010. They followed up with a self-release album called Tears You Apart in 2013, they made the rounds at music festivals including playing at Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival and venues such as the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California. The group's album Tears You Apart was picked up by Elektra Records who signed the group to a deal and re-released the album in 2014, they traveled to London to record their debut EP for the label, released in 2015. Following recording, Finish Ticket toured Europe, performing shows in Germany, France and Netherlands, they were recognized as The Best of What's Next by Paste Magazine. In 2015, Finish Ticket was the opening act for the national Blurryface Tour, headlined by Twenty One Pilots, they returned from the tour as the headliner for a show at the Great American Music Hall. In early 2016, the group embarked on the "Ones To Watch" tour with Vinyl Theatre. Beginning in September 2016,the group performed a headlining tour with the opening bands being Run River North and Irontom.

As of August 2017, the group is working on a new album. On November 9, 2018, Finish Ticket announced that Michael Nick Stein had left the band. Finish Ticket is continued by Brendan Hoye, Alex DiDonato, Gabe Stein. Finish Ticket made their return to the live stage in May of 2019, announcing two shows in San Francisco and Los Angeles, they announced a full length U. S tour that took place between September 8th to 28th of that same year. On June 27th, 2019, the band announced their first new music since the release of When Night Becomes Day in 2015 with the track "Dream Song", released July 12th; the songs "Ceiling Won't Break" and "Black Horse" were subsequently released in the following months. Finish Ticket official

Ned Markosian is an American philosopher. He is professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Markosian has four brothers, he received his BA from Oberlin College and his PhD in Philosophy from UMass Amherst in 1990. His doctoral advisor was Gareth Matthews. Markosian has taught at Lawrence University, University of New Hampshire, West Virginia University, Bay Path College, University of Hartford, Western Washington University, he has been at UMass Amherst since Fall 2015. Markosian's work is on metaphysics, namely philosophy of time, metaphysics of physical/material objects and determinism, personal identity, he was written on ethics, decision theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, history of philosophy. Markosian has delivered lectures on over a dozen countries, he has visited Armenia on several occasions. In 2013 he delivered. In 2017 he co-founded of the Yerevan Academy for Linguistics and Philosophy, an annual intensive summer school of analytic philosophy and theoretical linguistics hosted by the American University of Armenia.

He began it with Susanna Melkonian-Altshuler and Arshak Balayan. According to his profile on PhilPapers, Markosian is an atheist. In 2019 Markosian was among the panelists at the an American Philosophical Association meeting on how to diversify philosophy departments. In 2019 Markosian, along with dozens of other philosophers, signed a list of proposals cfor what individual philosophers and departments can do to prevent harassment and support victims of sexual harassment in academia. BooksCarroll, John W. and Ned Markosian. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Cambridge University Press, 2010. ArticlesMarkosian, Ned. “On Language and the Passage of Time.” Philosophical Studies, vol. 66, no. 1, 1992, pp. 1–26. Markosian, Ned. "How fast does time pass?." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53, no. 4: 829-844. Markosian, Ned. "Brutal composition." Philosophical Studies 92, no. 3: 211-249. Markosian, Ned. "What are physical objects?." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61, no. 2: 375-395. Markosian, Ned.

"A defense of presentism." Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 1, no. 3: 47-82. Markosian, Ned. "Time". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Archived from the original on 30 November 2019