Office Space

I used to have an investment strategy centered on using the construction of an office campus as a contra-indicator for near term success. When tech companies start to build buildings everyone gets distracted. Employees moving offices is distracting. Divvying up the new shiny space churns up office politics. Senior level management spends time reviewing renderings and looking at swatches. Focus is lost. Apple nearly died after building Infinite Loop. I think the excite@home temple is still empty. SGI went splat after building their campus (although Google is doing well in the old SGI space). Yahoo!'s glory days were when they were on Central Expressway, not in their new digs in Sunnyvale (not to mention the Santa Monica debacle).

Foneshow is currently virtual and we intend to stay as virtual as we can for as long as we can (although it does look like we'll be subletting some space in the Old Port neighborhood of Portland in the near future). VC Confidential has a great post of the perils of start ups dabbling in real estate. There are a lot of great lessons in there.