Over the last 10 years, we have hosted or incubated awesome companies, big and small, in their journey to entrepreneurial greatness. This article is part of a series that features success stories we are happy to have been part of during each of these companies’ tenures at our office spaces. For this article, we will focus on three of our Silicon Valley heavy hitters.
Trulia came to our San Mateo office space in 2005. The company’s two co-founders, Pete Levine and Sami Inkinen, had just graduated from Stanford and wanted to build a better way to buy homes online, after being frustrated with their own stressful search for an apartment in San Francisco. They raised a little bit of money and quickly moved into our San Mateo community where they found not just a great place to work, but also the support of a community that had run businesses before and could give them valuable professional advice. Two years later, after raising over $20 million, they moved into their own workspace in San Francisco, although that was not the end of their relationship with us. We continued to provide financial support for them remotely long after they left our offices. In 2014, Zillow announced a deal to buy Trulia for $3.5 billion. Sadly, our services are no longer needed, but all “Trulians” will remain close to our hearts as special Pacific Workplaces alumni.
LinkedIn did not have enough space in their corporate offices to accommodate their significant growth spurt and therefore called Pacific Workplaces to come to their rescue. Our Palo Alto location provided them with a 50-seat touchdown space, that was staffed and furnished with Shoretel phones and plenty of bandwidth. The amazing part of this story is that all of this was accomplished with only three weeks advanced notice! We were thrilled to help LinkedIn out for the nine months that they were at our office space. Although their space was separate from the rest of our shared office space, we were pleased to convene with the LinkedIn employees from time to time, particularly at lunchtime, as they treated their employees with the best-quality catered food, which is a fantastic tradition for successful Silicon Valley companies!