Everything in life is cyclical, and the mantra holds true when it comes to Silicon Beach.

Spend even a few minutes talking with the region’s technology entrepreneurs, and they’ll tell you the reason Los Angeles is fertile ground for their companies has much to do with its history as an aerospace hub, an industry whose roots in the area date back to the 1930s.

Giants such as Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Co. and McDonnell Douglas rose to prominence over the next five decades thanks to massive defense industry contracts – and Los Angeles became home to scores of engineers.

That, in turn, strengthened the engineering programs at local universities such as USC, UCLA and Caltech, which became eager to feed talent to the aerospace sector while the Cold War took care of demand.

The end of the Cold War brought a

downturn to the industry in the 1990s, prompting many of those talented individuals to turn their attention elsewhere, leading to the creation of a number of tech companies that would become the forerunners of Silicon Beach’s internet-focused startups.

Now those legacy aerospace companies are starting to take cues from their younger, venture capital-backed brethren when it comes to innovation.

Take Northrop’s FabLab, profiled by Garrett Reim on page 1, a division within the company’s massive Redondo Beach

campus that prioritizes experimentation with new ideas and concepts as a way to – dare we say it, disrupt – conventional and perhaps outdated business practices.

That’s a strategy that could apply to almost all of today’s leading tech startups up and down the 405 freeway and east to downtown, Pasadena and beyond.

Consider Evan Spiegel’s comment to the Los Angeles Times in March, immediately following Snap Inc.’s initial public offering, in which the chief executive said a rigid pursuit of new users would not guide the company’s business approach.

“We’d rather inspire creation because we know a derivative of that is growth,” he said.

It might seem counterintuitive to think of aerospace companies such as Northrop

as part of Silicon Beach – an always vague term that has increasingly come to define L.A. tech companies as a whole rather than just those in Venice and Santa Monica.

Yet the evidence for that affiliation has always been there, staring us in the face.