Airbnb + Dropbox Studio Tour

Cody attended the Startup School this past weekend at Stanford. Startup School’s pretty picky about its attendees. I don’t blame them – We’re talking about an event that invites some of the biggest players in the silicon valley (Founder of Netscape, Zynga, angel investors, and Mark from facebook) as speakers. So, I’m proud of Cody that he got to check it out, but that’s not the point. The point is – Y-Combinator, who hosted the event, also organized a series of open house tours for some of their funded startups such as Addmired, Greplin, Stripe, Airbnb, and Dropbox..etc this past Sunday. It was a golden opportunity to add a few more offices into my collection.

The curious bunch:

Felt lucky that we actually got to take pictures of the office. By office, I mean the utopia for creatives.

↑ Michelle couldn’t get more than 6 feet away from the cafeteria. I don’t blame her.

With limited time on hand, we narrowed it down to two offices. First stop, Airbnb.
For those who are unfamiliar, they’re a worldwide platform for homeowners to list their homes for rent and tourists to seek a cozy (often time luxurious) place for a short term stay. Aside from that, their mobile app was the finalist for the South by Southwest Interactive Awards. That’s done it for me.

Greeted by a bowl of pins.

Used as one of their fundraiser campaigns – The Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s cereal.

Quick look at the roof.

↑Staff would come up for lunch – otherwise empty.

the Dome.

It’s got a sofa, a desk, some shelves, and a bed.

What do you do with $100+million in investment? You get whatever the hell you want – even a piece of a plane:

Airbnb’s still a rather small company that does tremendous work.

Amazing.

Towards the back of the studio, Airbnb has a couple of rooms for ideation:

“The Peace Room.”

That was that.

Moving on to the next destination:

The Dropbox office:

↑Also happen to be the only office worldwide. With their rapid expansion, they’ll be moving near AT&T park shortly.

I mentioned dropbox in my blog a couple of times before as one of the most frequently used program I have on my laptop. It’s a cloud service company, where they provide users with space to store their files online, making it easy to share and access the same files through different computers.

The dropbox office is lightly smaller than the Airbnb’s.

↑Seems like most startups today have open desks and open space. Decentralizing the company and promoting interactions between members. Keeping things flat also consumes quite a bit of space, hence the soon migration to the new venue.