Former Palo Alto startup Pinterest is returning to its hometown.
The growing social-networking giant, which just celebrated a $10-billion initial public offering on April 18, plans to open an engineering office in a portion of the three-story building at 395 Page Mill Road that also serves as the headquarters of analytics company Cloudera, a spokesperson from the San Francisco-based company confirmed on Thursday.
This will be Pinterest's first Bay Area office outside of San Francisco since the company moved its headquarters there in 2012.
The company confirmed that Pinterest is subleasing the space and will move into the building later this year, but provided no specifics on the number of employees that will work at the site. The company currently employs about 1,700 people in 23 offices around the globe, according to its website.
"We've been proud to be part of the SoMa neighborhood in San Francisco for years. It's where we are headquartered, and where our Bay Area employees work from at this time. But Pinterest started in Palo Alto. We know there's amazing talent and a vibrant community, so it was the right choice for our first office outside the city," the spokesperson told the Weekly.
According to the city's planning records, Novo Construction is making $850,000 in interior improvements to a 49,000-square-foot space in the Page Mill office building located four blocks from the California Avenue Caltrain station. Since 2016, Cloudera has leased the entire 225,000-square-foot building, subleasing 105,000 square feet of excess space to mobile game maker Machine Zone. A spokeswoman from Cloudera said Pinterest is subleasing the space from Machine Zone, not Cloudera.
After its construction in 2000, the property was leased by Google and later by AOL, which subleased space to Disney Interactive and Medallia and invested millions of dollars into adding a gym, cafe, auditorium and a ground floor incubator space for fledgling companies.
Pinterest's move into Palo Alto is the second real estate deal the company has made over the past two months. In March, the company leased nearly 490,000 square feet at 88 Bluxome St., a mixed-use project in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, marking the city's largest transaction since Facebook's record-breaking lease of 755,900 square feet at Park Tower in May 2018. The new office, expected to open in 2022, will have space for more than 3,000 employees, according to the San Francisco Business Times.
Pinterest, which was founded in a 4,600-square-foot, one-story office building at 635 High St. in downtown Palo Alto in 2010, relocated its headquarters to San Francisco two years later, citing reasonably priced office space and technology talent as reasons for the move.
The social media company allows users to collect photos and "pin" the images into categorized collections, or boards. Users can create multiple pinboards, which can be shared with followers.
Comments
Registered user
Downtown North
on May 3, 2019 at 4:18 pm
Registered user
on May 3, 2019 at 4:18 pm
The IPO established this company at its current market cap value of $18 Billion with a "B" but I agree with you if you are saying that based on profitability its true value is closer to $10 million with an "M".
I hope the landlords for their sake will get cash up-front.
Well, I just live here but obviously the sharks got in and out early, like Tim Draper in the Theranos documentary.
Where can I line up to give these people my money?
Palo Verde
on May 3, 2019 at 11:45 pm
on May 3, 2019 at 11:45 pm
@Mark, did you miss out yesterday on Beyond Meat's IPO?
Professorville
on May 4, 2019 at 2:36 am
on May 4, 2019 at 2:36 am
stay away honestly jut stay away...
Palo Verde
on May 4, 2019 at 3:47 am
on May 4, 2019 at 3:47 am
"With Pinterest, you can discover useful and relevant things that inspire you to do stuff."
( from the Pinterest Newsroom -- Web Link )
Registered user
Evergreen Park
on May 6, 2019 at 6:06 pm
Registered user
on May 6, 2019 at 6:06 pm
Each new comparatively well well paid employee looking to rent that a tech related company brings to the region displaces an existing resident who is less well paid, and so on down the line. Palo Alto/Stanford have too many jobs and not enough housing. New jobs are being created and work space occupancy densifying at a rate that completely outpaces the ability of local housing creation, especially in a city that is almost completely built out.
What critics of the slow pace of residential construction don't want to acknowledge is that Palo Alto meets our regional target of identifying and zoning the required number of parcels for residential unit construction. But with the high cost of land and construction, developers aren't interested in housing unless they can include profitable office space.
Unfortunately, including a little housing with a lot of office results in more jobs being created than are offset by the paltry number of residential units the developer creates. So the development minded members of the council majority and city planning department keep digging the hole deeper and deeper.
Leland Manor/Garland Drive
on May 6, 2019 at 7:05 pm
on May 6, 2019 at 7:05 pm
Outstanding! Only highly successful companies should be allowed to situate in Palo Alto.
That way the losers will either have to shut-down or relocate.
This is the answer to reducing office space.
Palo Alto should be for winners only.
Registered user
Evergreen Park
on May 6, 2019 at 9:43 pm
Registered user
on May 6, 2019 at 9:43 pm
Or not locate and expand here. There's no cheap land in Palo Alto because it is already developed and gentrified and in high demand with no empty land to expand on. .