![]() Partners work at a communal table in the middle of the room instead of in offices. The trendy San Francisco office looks more like a startup than a VC firm, with high ceilings, exposed beams and modern artwork. Redpoint Ventures opened a South Park office last summer, and now partners split their time between South Park and the firm’s main Sand Hill Road office. Instagram later moved in, and now the space is used by URX, a mobile advertising startup. ![]() Walz pointed out Twitter’s old office at the far end of the park. “He told me, ‘Oh, you should start tweeting.’ “ “I met Jack Dorsey in the park when they had just 10 people at Twitter,” Walz said. But tech is part of the neighborhood’s history. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Shasta Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Accel Partners and GV (formerly Google Ventures) are among those that have opened offices there.īefore the VCs, South Park was mostly artists, designers and architects, said Google head of university relations Jeffrey Walz, who rents a room in the area that he uses as a studio for brainstorming and projects. “We didn’t want to go to Sand Hill Road because then you just look like every other venture capital firm.” ![]() We’re trying to be different,” said co-founder Phil Black. True Ventures was one of the first to set up shop in 2012. The people strolling the four blocks around the park on a recent Friday afternoon were mostly young men talking business and tech, and two were cruising on Razor scooters.Ībout a dozen venture capital firms have sprung up in the neighborhood over the past four years. Today, the enclave has become a tech hot spot. South Park, bordered by quiet, neighborhood streets half a mile from AT&T Park, is San Francisco’s oldest park, according to the South Park Improvement Association. “We raised most of our money from investors who were either in San Francisco or had offices in San Francisco.” “For our fundraising process, actually Sand Hill Road was not very important to us,” said Roger Lee, co-founder of startup Captain401, which helps small businesses offer 401(k) plans to employees. In recent years, the exodus from Sand Hill has included Benchmark Capital, Venrock (the Rockefeller family’s venture capital arm), Matrix Partners, Highland Capital Partners and Canvas Ventures. That means entrepreneurs no longer have to make the trek to Menlo Park - instead, VCs will come to them. “I think, in my mind, there’s sort of this mass exodus out of Sand Hill Road, for good reason,” said T3 Advisors Managing Director David Bergeron, who helps tech and VC clients find office space.Īs the venture capital market becomes increasingly crowded, VC firms are looking for a competitive edge by moving to or setting up second offices in trendier enclaves like downtown Palo Alto or San Francisco, where many of their portfolio companies are located. Just as Rodeo Drive symbolizes movie-star glamour and Wall Street represents corporate money, Sand Hill Road has long been synonymous with the bundles of cash backing the tech industry.īut the Menlo Park street that houses some of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture capital firms and has funneled money into the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram, is no longer the VC mecca it once was.
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