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Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

  In a story on Arthur Sulzberger, Mark Bowden wrote in 
  Vanity Fair, "Whether owing to hubris or sheer 
  distraction, the erection of a new headquarters often 
  seems to spell trouble for corporations."

http://www.businessinsider.com/poorly-timed-headquarters-200...

  Anecdotal experience tends to lead many people in the 
  technology industry to suggest that growth (or newly 
  “sexy”) companies rapidly head into difficulties at 
  about the same time as they move from the seedy garages 
  and crumbling buildings they started in to shiny new 
  office buildings.

http://www.ipglossary.com/glossary/new-headquartersoffice-sy...

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Depending on how you count, Amazon has made ~5 campus moves in the last 20yrs. So far, so good...

Amazon didn't build headquarters before the SLU move. Before that they rented pre-existing structures. That difference is the point of the predictive signal.

Well then in that case there have still been 2 new headquarters buildings :)

The problem with that correlation in this case, is that in all of the best examples of that phenomenon, the companies were no longer being run by their founders. I'd be willing to bet that's not a trivial factor in the overall situation.

And also regression to the mean (a constant factor in any of these attempts to predict the fall of a big company). When will a company want to, or need to, build a big headquarters? When things have been going very well and the sky seems like the limit.

I assume you have evidence backing up this correlation for large, mature tech companies, rather than startups?

For example, Zynga's office building is worth more than the entire company:

https://medium.com/halting-problem/zyngas-offices-now-worth-...

Was maybe. Zynga's cash is less than that even with the same valuation, so the math doesn't check out anymore.

This is a satirical blog. Please take a second to look at the rest of its content.

I first saw it reported in SFGate, they've since retracted the story:

Editor's note: SFGATE has removed this story after reviewing Zynga's company valuation. The initial report was based on the enterprise value of Zynga compared to its cash reserves and property value. The latest company financial data as of May 6th, 2016, however, indicates an overall market valuation of $2.2 billion, with cash reserves of $987 million, putting its enterprise value at $1.21 billion, which is significantly more than the projected value of the company's real estate holdings at 8th and Townsend Streets in San Francisco.

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