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The business of gutting failed Bay Area tech companies
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoSeeing those privacy phone booths makes me so envious. Why must we have these open office hellscapes? Let me shut out the endless racket.
- sbarre 2y agoThose things are fart boxes, and they get unusable by lunch time.
- kridsdale1 2y agoAnd mad thermal.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoThey're supposed to have fans in them.
- sbarre 2y agoSome do have fans on top of them but they don't work that well because no one wants a noisy fan blasting in the office..
- DonHopkins 2y agoThink about it from the perspective of outside the box. Would you prefer people pop into the boxes to fart privately, or fart publically in the shared space? At least using them for hotboxing covers up the smell of the farts.
- ghaff 2y agoAnyplace I've been with private offices pretty much had an open-door policy. If you weren't doing something that required privacy, you kept the door open or at some point someone would almost certainly comment.
- stronglikedan 2y agoMy place of work is like that, but I'm allowed to keep my door mostly closed because they keep the place at subarctic temperatures and I keep a heater running all day. Gotta keep the heat in!
- havblue 2y agoI don't envy the prospect of talking to a future employer when you work in a public space. Every day, you frequently respond, "uhhh no thanks" or, "maybe... Hold on I'll call you back" while you step outside the room suspiciously.
- throwaway2037 2y agoIt's not such a big deal. You can always blow cover smoke by saying you were talking with your doctor, or a family member about a medical issue.
- petesergeant 2y agoI feel like any (edit: small) company not outfitting their offices largely from cast-offs like this is failing their fiduciary duty.
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoEvery startup I’ve worked at has bought furniture through one of these businesses.
- ghaff 2y agoFor a small startup, possibly. As you grow, like many things, it doesn't really scale well once you have to start paying people full-time to manage the whole process.
- dghlsakjg 2y agoTotally, After a certain point it gets silly to have a bunch of mismatched office furniture that is inevitably in various states of disrepair. You can save yourself heaps of money by buying used Macbooks off of e-bay for a startup, but it becomes a nightmare at scale when you get an IT department that needs to manage it all with uniform security updates, and lifecycles.
- mdaniel 2y agoBuying them off eBay is one thing, but for my own money I've had just stellar success with Apple's Refurbished selection, which comes with a warranty and one can purchase Apple Care for them <https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished> Regrettably I don't know if they're compatible with Apple's MDM but I couldn't imagine why not
- ghaff 2y agoFor yourself, it's totally an individual decision based on your personal priorities and risk calculus. I'm a bit skeptical about purchasing refurb computer equipment in general because the support window is ticking down but certainly I have nothing against used and refurb goods for the home in general. For companies, there's a lot to be said for standardization though, for my last job, I just used my own phones and computer gear anyway so it was what I wanted and I controlled it (other than MDM latterly on the phone).
- sbarre 2y agoIn 2001 (or 02?) I remember visiting a clearance warehouse like this in Ottawa during the post-dot-com-boom crash and it was where all the west-end startups and network tech companies had dumped their furniture after either going completely out of business or emergency-downsizing. It was wild, I have a picture somewhere of a high-school-gym-sized room just filled corner-to-corner with plastic-wrapped Aeron chairs...
- BigGreenJorts 2y agoThat's incredible. I wonder if that business still exists. Quite a few tech companies starting and busting in Ottawa still.
- sbarre 2y agoSadly I don't remember the name of the business, but I'm sure something like it exists.. A quick web search doesn't show anything obvious of that scale or type though.. I think what was so interesting about that place was the homogeneous nature of the available furniture, since "fancy office furniture for tech companies" wasn't quite a thing yet, so everything was either Herman Miller, Steelcase and maybe a few others.. Hence the room full of hundreds of exactly the same chair.. I feel like today you'd have more of a mix of stuff since so many other companies got in on the action (and uniqueness/variety is more highly valued socially).
- nsxwolf 2y agoI am currently sitting in a dot-com crash Aeron chair that I got for a very good price 25 years ago, behind the IKEA Jerker desk I bought at the same time. They are the best purchases I have ever made.
- Kon-Peki 2y agoThere are warehouses like this in all big cites, and are open (ish) to the public! I helped get some stuff for a small business earlier this year, and picked up an Aeron for myself while I was there. It was in a legitimately bad neighborhood and there were multiple layers of electronically controlled doors to go through, then you sign in and wait from someone to come down and get you, and you ride a massive freight elevator up to the floorspace.
- temporalparts 2y agoWhich one would you recommend for the greater Boston area?
- matthewaveryusa 2y agoThey're about to get loaded with a bunch of furniture from all the biotech firms downsizing
- Teever 2y agoWhy are Boston biotech firms downsizing?
- alephnerd 2y agoVC Funding dried up in the Life Sciences space by late 2021/early 2022 because there was too much investment during 2018-20 due to the "precision medicine" hype cycle. Same thing happened to cybersecurity in 2022-23 and will happen in the Generative AI space in a couple years. There are always expansions and contractions in each sector.
- rvba 2y agoDidnt it dry up due to the interest rates hike? No more cheap money.
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- motohagiography 2y agobiodegradable office furniture should be more of a thing. open source furniture design for an office and having staff contribute to building it could influence the culture in a positive way.
- ponector 2y agoYou can always opt out for a simple wooden chair instead of aeron. Just plain wood, no plastic, no fabric.
- SoftTalker 2y agoMy home office chair is what might be called a "jury chair." Simple wood armchair, similar to these: https://www.kpetersen.com/jurychairs.htm https://www.kpetersen.com/jurychairs.htm Solid, easy to clean, nothing really to break or wear out or fail, and reminds you to get up and walk around every so often :)
- myfavoritetings 2y agoI encourage you to try sitting in a wooden chair for 8 hours a day every day and reconsider
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoUp until say 70 years ago, wooden chairs were probably the norm everywhere.
- gampleman 2y agoI do! I genuinely find it much more comfortable than any office chair I ever had.
- ghaff 2y agoI do have an Aeron in my office. But since I largely stopped having video calls I confess I mostly work at my kitchen/dining room table in a wooden chair.
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- waynecochran 2y agoMan sfgate is a scummy web site. Traps you so back button does not work and litters the page w obnoxious ads. Note to self, don't follow sfgate links.
- esprehn 2y agoThe back button trapping is something browsers should fix. Chrome has so far refused to do so which is frustrating.
- graemep 2y agoTurn off JS.I do and have neither problem.
- waynecochran 2y agoI should have to cripple by browser, but maybe it will come to that someday.
- rsynnott 2y ago2579 CE: The 97th AI Winter has just begun. The migration of the office furniture back to its warehouses begins, to await a new dawn when someone tries to make metaverses happen again in a year or so. 5% of the planet's usable land area now warehouses startup office furniture. No-one has made new office furniture for 300 years; no-one even knows how. Not even the chatbots know how. (Slightly) more seriously, I wonder how much repeat business they get. Have some items been in and out multiple times? Do they keep a database of the history of each item? In the future, will there be a collector's market for Aerons with interesting pedigrees?
- potato3732842 2y agoWhether or not they track it there's zero chance the long term employees haven't identified some cursed items that are correlated with failure.
- jasonjayr 2y ago> John noticed a mark under the faded asset tag. Pulling it back, he found strange runes under the adhesive. As he ran his finger over it, he could see the runes glow in the darkened warehouse.
- malux85 2y ago> The runes burned with what looked like fire, but were cold to the touch. John felt a growing attraction to the chair, it MUST be his, he MUST keep it, it came to him! His all, his … PRECIOUS.
- vel0city 2y agoThis reminds me of a GoPro I borrowed from a friend. He got a new GoPro and mounted it on his bicycle. That first trip he took with it he was hit by a car. As he was recovering, I borrowed it for a motorcycle trip I was about to go on. Mounted it on the bike, and ended up lowsiding on a mountain pass. I'm sure it was the GoPro and not my fault at all. There were only two recordings that GoPro ever recorded and both ended in injuries for the rider. I don't think it was ever used again.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- simonw 2y agoWhen I did YC back in 2011 their Mountain View office was just down the street from Desk Depot, who were in the same line of business as this article. We bought a desk and two chairs from there and it was fascinating. The warehouse was basically a condensed history of Silicon Valley office trends - we asked about Aeron chairs and the chap showed us his collection ordered by year. He'd say things like "that corner's Yahoo!, over there is Sun Microsystems". He also had an excellent cat. It looks like Desk Depot is still in business today: https://deskdepot.net/ https://deskdepot.net/
- DonHopkins 2y agoI love the Desk Depot! The chap who runs it is really nice and helpful, too. So we'd call him the Desk Despot since it was so inappropriately slanderous. I got a huge desk for home there in 1990 when I worked at Sun. It's been opened since 1976! I wonder what the record is for the number of times a piece of office furniture has gone through Desk Depot. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12759801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12759801
- bearjaws 2y agoI've participated in a Chapter 10 bankruptcy sale at the software side. Had to determine how to best part out a website (travel focused) that had a hotel inventory + flight planner that up-and-coming travel websites wanted to leverage to end their reliance on Expedia.
- jakub_g 2y agoTell us more! Was it a "highest bidder wins" thing, or just finding anyone interested was hard enough? Did you reach out to potential buyers or they came by themselves?
- bearjaws 2y agoYeah it did come down to highest bidders. I am not sure how they were found, since it was a bankruptsy with many debtors involved, there was a few consultant companies involved so I figured it was them. We essentially took questions and generated a informational "guide" for the buyers, mainly what assets could be sold off individually (think things like domains, images, review data) vs systems which mainly came down to marketing site vs inventory management software. Tech wise we dug into details like dev/test environments, tech debt, potential challenges with integration into another company. Mainly worked to setup the whole environment from scratch, which was a mess due to being mid migration to cloud + terraform from on prem.
- KptMarchewa 2y agoI knew it would be about Aeron chairs when I saw the title.
- solarkraft 2y agoIs this a PR piece? Skimming the article doesn’t reveal anything remarkable about the business. The $20 million business “that could only exist in the bay area” seems to exist pretty much everywhere outside of it since companies giving up offices is actually also a thing in the rest of the world.
- Washuu 2y agoThere is a company in the big cities here called オフィスバスターズ(Office Busters) that sells used office furniture. I got an amazing chair from them for about 40% of the retail price.
- foobarchu 2y agoThey even say in the article it's the biggest one "west of the Mississippi", implying larger ones exist on the East Coast well away from the bay area.
- asdfman123 2y agoThese kinds of stores are great. I'm sitting on the legacy of some old tech company right now, actually. I paid $250 for this very fancy office chair. I don't care if it's pre-sat!
- ashoeafoot 2y agoDo not touch used office furniture . Failure is contagious ..
- rizenfrmtheash 2y agoI bought my home office chair and under-desk cabinet from abettersource. Easy to work with. Equipment worked great. Prices were great. Very large variety too. Only thing was I had to load it myself into my car and I was lucky to have a hatchback big enough for it.
- w10-1 2y agoPretty sensationalist title for used furniture arbitrage. I was hoping for some insight on capture and disposition of IP. I would think failing gracefully involves reaching out to competitors (and customers and suppliers) for "mergers" so investors get some of the value of the company -- without somehow signaling that you're giving up (and can no longer be relied upon). What's the state of the art in that respect? It seems like a fantastically tricky process, which would mean high value for skilled practitioners. (OTW (ahem) valuable employee stock goes to zero.)
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y agoIt’s also not really a bay era specific phenomenon here. Any reasonably sized city has a retailer that buys up used office stock for whatever reason at auction and resells it. And it’s not just “failed companies”, anytime a company upgrades its furniture it usually liquidates in a similar fashion.
- ghaff 2y agoYeah. For a company going under, probably selling off furniture piecemeal is somewhere near the bottom of their priority list. There are companies specializing in this sort of thing. Unless you're will to do this for free at a startup, that probably isn't a good priority.
- m463 2y agoI don't know, silicon valley has had some interesting things for sale. the pictures in this article aren't particularly compelling though. I remember in the post-internet-bubble seeing almost-new aeron chairs sold in huge quantities. Now it is less of a big deal. The aeron chairs are less iconic nowadays. When Weird Stuff Warehouse was still around, it was like computer geology viewing the strata. You could go deeper into the store and back in time to see expensive machines of a decade ago sold for nothing. I remember thinking - that server would make a good end table conversation piece! I also remember them selling brightly colored silicon graphics workstations.
- iancmceachern 2y ago
- kev009 2y agoEvery major metropolitan area has something like this because the market for used office furniture is ubiquitous and not limited to a small geography of tech companies. If you need some sturdy training tables for projects or some metal bookshelves they can be had for next to nothing at these places. The one thing that has become a bit harder to find are lab and assembly workbenches. That stuff used to similarly cheap 20 years ago. Another fun one is the usually poorly named "electronics recycler" - the kind of stuff rolling through these can be astounding, and they usually have people earning minimum or close to minimum wage dealing with it all - which yields strange pricing (some great deals, some preposterous) and a lot of stuff just getting dismantled/crushed/shipped overseas.
- kjs3 2y agoThe one thing that has become a bit harder to find are lab and assembly workbenches. I bought a 6' and 12' assembly benches, complete with overhead lights, when Hayes Micro went under 30 years ago or so. Paid less than us$200 for them. Still going strong in my shop.
- paddy_m 2y agoUniversity surplus stores are always fun to browse. Lab equipment, machine tools, great stuff.
- mNovak 2y agoThese are great for vintage lab gear too. In college I got an old flammable chemicals cabinet, which we refinished into a liquor cabinet.
- SoftTalker 2y agoA lot of that stuff is posted on govdeals.com as well.
- notmycomputer 2y agoWeird Stuff, Halted, Alltronics and Excess Solutions sold the electronics + misc. When I'd feel like I needed some inspiration, I'd often go and pick up some weird obscure failed (or prototype) project. Once I found a floppy disk carrier that belonged to a fellow employee (based on the handwritten label) from my first job, 20 years earlier. Excess Solutions also sold more of the furniture stuff, workbenches, and, strangely, hotel surplus blankets, lighting fixtures and wall coverings. My $20 living room couch came from there - I think it was originally from Ikea but it's still pretty solid. The fabric is faded with a particular stripe and I imagine had spent it's previous life in the lobby of some software company where the sunlight would find it's way through some half broken blinds to mark the passage of time by fading this couch. Weird Stuff I know didn't have their lease renewed by the property owner (google) and most of it's stock was scrapped as waste.
- Animats 2y agoBeen to one of those warehouses, back when it was Consolidated Office Distributors, Inc. in San Jose. BetterSource seems to have acquired them around 2005. One building filled an entire city block. I went there to furnish a shop, entered through the wrong door, and spent half an hour wandering around before I found the sales office. This was in the heyday of the Aeron chair and the carpet-faced cubicle wall. They had huge supplies of both. Picked out desks, chairs, wastebaskets, shop tables, storage cabinets, shelving, a flammable-materials cabinet, etc. They delivered everything the next day. It's the place to go when you're starting up.
- beambot 2y agoThe better website for Bay Area tech company dissolution is https://svdisposition.com/ https://svdisposition.com/ which gets actual high-tech equipment...
- DoneWithAllThat 2y agoYears ago I was hired to do IT for a company that had just massacred like half its workforce. And when I say “just” I mean most of the people I interviewed with were gone when I got there - it happened just a few weeks after I interviewed. It was so, so surreal. For one thing they decided to consolidate on the second floor of a two story building, so to get to work each day you had to head through the dark and empty part of the building. And it was just like everyone just got up one day and left, at least for a month or two u til we could get all the equipment and stuff off the desks and into storage. Storage was what had been the gym (or was going to be? Not clear to me), and I just remember rows and rows of tower computers and monitors awaiting a company to come and take it all off our hands. They had also bought a ton of expensive networking gear (Cisco routers and switches) that they now no longer needed, they just sat in boxes in the server room. Labs still entirely stocked with gear and computers, meeting rooms with whiteboards still filled with meeting notes, it was all so unreal, almost post-apocalyptic.
- tweetle_beetle 2y agoI once did some work for a business that operated in this field. I'll never forget the owner. He had done very well over the years and drove a Ferrari - an extremely rare sight in the industrial area. He spent all day selling very high end second hand and new office furniture to discerning clients - large contracts for whole buildings sometimes. But in his own office he sat on the very cheapest office chair that money can buy. One that he wouldn't have been able to source from any of his suppliers. Never could figure out if it was a contrived statement, or not.
- lippihom 2y agoChecked out one of these in Alameda a few years back. Expansive warehouse - was fascinating to spend a few hours walking around.
- kopirgan 2y agoWonder if businesses trading in used mining gear existed in the gold boom era. I'm sure it did. Surprising how reckless these dotcoms used to spend just because money was cheap. Have lived thru that era seen some of it first hand. Almost like burn it or you'll lose it.
- fuzztester 2y ago>Wonder if businesses trading in used mining gear existed in the gold boom era. I'm sure it did. Shore did, pardner! Picks 'n shovels goin', real cheap! Walk up, walk up, walk up. >Surprising how reckless these dotcoms used to spend just because money was cheap. Have lived thru that era seen some of it first hand. Almost like burn it or you'll lose it. Lived (and was burned) through it too.
- dave333 2y agoRegularly attended the liquidations in Sunnyvale around 2002-2005 after I was laid off from my dot com but the only thing I could make any profit on was docking stations and the associated power adapters since at that time they were specific to each laptop model. I would think the overhead storing furniture is significant. A couple of times I got lucky such as when Casady and Greene closed down and I got a bunch of copies of Conflict Catcher 9 that was still in demand and when Apple closed down a TV studio in Cupertino and I bought the contents of the back storage room that had a bunch of valuable bits and pieces. Unfortunately reality TV was still in its infancy or I would have been a minor star:-)
- DrNosferatu 2y agoMust be good business! Like selling shovels and pick axes to gold rushers.