TechCrunch has always been a distributed company. we have employees and contractors all around the world – Silicon Valley, New York, Seattle, Chicago, Japan, China, London, Brussels (lol), Paris and Tel Aviv. I think one of the CrunchGear guys lives in Detroit or Reno, but I’m not sure and WE try not to associate with them much.
But our headquarters has always been in Palo Alto, the heart and soul of Silicon Valley. For the first four years of TechCrunch, since June 11, 2005, we worked out of my home near Palo Alto, California. That was a great place for our small company, and the commute from my bedroom to “the office” was about ten feet. We threw some epic parties there, the biggest topping 600 people (remind me to tell you the story about the drunk venture capitalist who lost his keys and slept on my couch – keys were in his pocket it turned out). And the occasional entrepreneur would occasionally break into my house and post video of the experience.
But that all ended in early 2009 when the city of Atherton decided they didn’t want TechCrunch in their neighborhood any more – citing some obscure regulations about how having fifteen cars in my front yard just wasn’t reasonable. So we moved the company down the road to downtown Palo Alto, in a beautiful little building on Lytton and Bryant.
But we knew it would be short term. As nice as the building is, it lacks some essential structural reinforcement that effectively turns it into a death trap in an earthquake. So they’re tearing it down and we needed to find a new home.
And boy does the Palo Alto business real estate market suck right now. Our rent would be doubling for a space the same size but not as nice. Meanwhile, San Francisco is less than half the cost of Palo Alto right now for office space. And most of our team actually lives in San Francisco anyway.
So as of next week we’re moving. Our new building is at 410 Townsend . We’ve doubled our space and have a massive new video studio to build out TechCrunch TV. The train station is two blocks away, an easy way to get back down to Palo Alto.
We’ll have an event at our new place shortly. I’ll even fly down from my secret undisclosed location in Seattle to attend. See you soon.
