That is not how it was in the 80's, as the author of this article mentioned. High-tech companies had more intelligent strategies then; they knew that people are the real value of high-tech companies, so it doesn't matter where you put them when you put them all together and give them the tools they need to be creative and build. Why not let them build something in areas with cleaner air, less crime, and more physical room to grow?

All of the companies he mentioned own the land and buildings in these 'burbs where they grew their companies. That is why Apple is building their space ship HQ today... they established equity and are now sitting on more piles of cash than they know what to do with. Their employees own their homes in the areas surrounding them, thus building affluence. In fact, it could probably be further proven that when a company does own its land and buildings, it's inherently stronger and more likely to be able to withstand upturns and downturns in economic timelines (thus giving employees even more incentive to work a fledgling company out of hard times).

There's probably a neat little equation to be written to pithily show the relation. Maybe I will write something up later and post it on ecosteader...

Something about the summation of rents (Sigma) paid by all team members (T[x]) in a startup as a function of runway building. To lengthen the runway, the Sigma cannot grow faster than a company's ability to acquire the top talent needed to build out that runway. There's an inflection point somewhere where you can neither grow, nor afford to attract and hire the top talent because of the wasted and sunk costs in rents and achieving "brand recognition" by being in a place like San Francisco. You can't pay the best people enough to relocate there when the probability of overall success is hinged upon getting more and more VC to sustain there.

> Renting has been the standard model for suburban office parks too. Most companies do not own their own office buildings

For small business, sure. But is that really true in SF for mid-size to major companies? I know this is a midwest-skewed perspective, but most mid-sized and large companies really do own their suburban office buildings / HQ buildings here.

The only office space I know of that they rent, is the expensive monopolized spaces downtown. Which would seem to reinforce parent posters point.

> most mid-sized and large companies really do own their suburban office buildings / HQ buildings here

I'd love to see some statistics on that because it doesn't jive with my experience in large companies in the midwest. Ownership of land was considered a major negative when I was working in large companies but its definitely been a while and the sample size is small.

A lot of companies (or at least the owners of the company) do own the building they are in, through a holding company of sorts that the company then rents from.

Thats clearly true of smaller companies. And there are larger companies that have significant real estate holdings as that is a major component of their business (McDonalds for instance).

But office/operations space being owned was generally viewed as inefficient for large companies that didn't have real estate ownership as a core function because its a pretty bad asset for a company both as a store of value and as an investment in innovation.