Pinterest pays $89.5M to terminate San Francisco office lease

That's unlikely to happen as Pinterest is currently booming. Their global usage is growing fast for an already large social network. They have $1.7 billion in cash, with little to worry about financially for the next five plus years. Pinterest is likely to get a lot larger yet given their growth rate, they're up to 416 million monthly actives with zero serious threats in terms of competition. Facebook's attempt at building a competitor failed nearly immediately. As with LinkedIn, they occupy a niche in social media that they entirely own.

Go enable 'uBlock Annoyances' in the filter lists. Enable 'Fanboys annoyances' too.

Or if you just want to remove the results, add this to the filters - https://pastebin.com/MHbiNK9N

I don't like pinterest and I get the frustration but come on, there are better solutions than "this thing bothers me so let's get rid of it completely."

1. Pinterest images appear much less frequently in image search results

2. When they do, they can still be directly linked to

Pinterest is a nice place for collecting ideas (photos) related to a hobby, in my case architecture from around the world. It's also (more commonly I think) used for coming up with style ideas, at both personal and home scales.

I get that Pinterest has a dedicated userbase and get utility from it. But it's basically polluting search engines with spam at this point for non-users. I kind of don't get why it doesn't fall into the same problems that experts exchange did with showing google one thing and users a different thing for purposes of indexing. It resulted in them getting deprioritized and the main search working better as a result.

would you invest in wework if they become the biggest provider of these prefurnished, time-share offices?

Was it front-line managers who thought this or directors and VPs? Front-line managers have a better pulse on what their team(s) are doing by keeping an eye on Github/GitLab/VSTS checkins, PRs, and kanban boards than by seeing who has a butt in a seat. It's usually the more senior (and disconnected) managers who get nervous when they don't see their domain fully staffed between 9am and 3pm.

The fear many have is they already know they have problem people and that the option to work from home will not fix this problem and instead possibly make it worse. This means the lack of action on management's part beforehand is going to brought to the forefront, unless of course they want to continue to kick the can down the road and ignore people they should have dealt with already.

Plus my favorite, for those renting space it comes down to how prestigious the address is. Quite a few in management derive a lot of status from where they work. Then throw in the companies that own their sites, that investment is hard to part with and many have dolled up their interiors to impress both visitors but also employees.

Then comes the majority of people who have jobs which will never work from home. It would be interesting to run the numbers to see how many jobs in a country could even be done remotely.

On the last days before covid WFH I was still going into the office (against better judgement) because we had meetings

When I got to the meeting room I found I was the only one there. The other attendees were either in a remote location or WFH

Would you want everyone from the same team going i to the office on the same day during a pandemic? Probably increases contagion risk.

Would a company want everyone from the same team in the same location?

Also there might be some tax incentive if you can put the building down as an ongoing cost to your company.

By the way, it’s not just SF, it’s also the big chunks of the valley. The Facebook sign still says Sun on the back, and the Googleplex land is on lease from NASA. Question I’d like to know the answer to: who owns the land at Apple Park?

This law is enshrined in that fine document the California constitution, and can only be repealed by a simple majority of voters. Voters who own homes, or live for free in a home someone owns, or pay rent to live in a home someone owns.

Market cap often isn't a good metric for how large a company is operationally, nor a great indicator of its operational needs. This is especially true right now, given that valuations are often quite inflated.

Pinterest is worth $21 billion, however they only have 2,400 employees.

Shopify is worth $124 billion. They have ~5,000 employees.

Target is worth $75 billion and has 368,000 employees.

3M is worth $94 billion and has 96,000 employees.

IBM is worth $111 billion and has 356,000 employees.

GE is worth $57 billion with 205,000 employees.

And so on.

Then there is Visa, worth $473b, more than the valuation of all the publicly traded banks in the EU. Only 19,500 employees and comical margins (67% operating income margin, extreme to say the least). Versus, say, Wells Fargo with a $101b market cap and 265,000 employees. Obviously very different businesses within the financial world, however that's the point.

Or AMD, worth $100b, with close to 20,000 employees. Intel has 110,000 employees with a $214b market cap. Intel's operating business is ten times larger than AMD (one assumes AMD will enjoy increasing economies of scale from their products as they continue to grow). The market cap just typically doesn't tell you enough about the operations of a business to give you great insight into its office needs.

Office buildings are funded with mountains of cheap debt.

Pinterest is funded mostly with equity. Maybe debt later when the growth is more stable but mostly equity.

Financially, equity is jet fuel. It's expensive and you use it to build startups, movies, and other intangible-heavy things.

Real estate debt is more like gasoline or diesel. There's a lot more of it than jet fuel, it's cheaper, and lower-quality/energy.

If you try to run a gasoline engine (office space) on jet fuel, you'd likely destroy it and would definitely waste money putting something of too high a "grade" into the engine. Likewise, you can't run a jet engine (startup) on diesel. It won't run.

Getting back to the question at hand, it's more efficient to run the offices on cheap real estate funding, and have the Pinterest operating company lease the asset, than have it own the office directly. Sometimes companies will buy offices themselves (like Apple) but it's something investors put up with, not encourage.

"Zynga to Make $369 Million on Sale of Headquarters. That's far more than the company has ever made selling mobile games."

https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/05/29/zynga-to-make-369-...

Owning and managing physical property isn't what a tech company is good at. Some of the really big companies might own some of their buildings completely... but I feel confident in saying that most don't.

Owning and managing a physical property means also having staff that does maintenance, grounds keeping, electrical, plumbing, deals with the accounting on taxes, etc... That isn't party of the core competency of the tech company. If anything, it distracts the company from its revenue.

A company that I worked at in the late '90s and '00s in Sunnyvale bought the land, built the buildings... and then immediately turned around and sold them to a property management company and leased it back from them.

For me when I'm working remote the existing video chat stuff would be great if they could fix the latency.

Anything over a few hundred milliseconds means you end up talking over people accidentally, it's hard to have a naturally flowing conversation.

Honestly a big 4K screen on the wall with a good webcam on both ends and low latency would be great.