PUBLICATION: THE REAL DEAL
Landlords of the iconic Silicon Valley office strip rethink strategies in remote-work era.
There are only a handful of streets across the U.S. that are synonymous with entire industries. Wall Street and finance. Madison Avenue and advertising. K Street and politics. In Menlo Park, California, it’s Sand Hill Road and venture capital. When an upstart VC firm named Kleiner Perkins established its headquarters on the 5.6-mile stretch of Silicon Valley roadway in 1972, few could have predicted that the area would eventually become the center of the tech-funding universe.
Almost every prominent Silicon Valley company — Google, Facebook and Apple among them — has received early-stage backing from venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road. Wikipedia lists almost 50 VC firms along a one-mile strip connecting Stanford University with Interstate 280, including industry leaders such as Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z.
In a way, the area has beaten the odds to become one of the world’s most expensive office submarkets. Its building base is about 1.2 million square feet of mainly low-rise, woody walk-ups, most of them built in the 1970s and ’80s and situated between trees, rosemary plants and parking lots… READ MORE.