The business of gutting failed Bay Area tech companies
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
I was hoping for some insight on capture and disposition of IP.
I would think failing gracefully involves reaching out to competitors (and customers and suppliers) for "mergers" so investors get some of the value of the company -- without somehow signaling that you're giving up (and can no longer be relied upon). What's the state of the art in that respect? It seems like a fantastically tricky process, which would mean high value for skilled practitioners.
(OTW (ahem) valuable employee stock goes to zero.)
the pictures in this article aren't particularly compelling though.
I remember in the post-internet-bubble seeing almost-new aeron chairs sold in huge quantities. Now it is less of a big deal. The aeron chairs are less iconic nowadays.
When Weird Stuff Warehouse was still around, it was like computer geology viewing the strata. You could go deeper into the store and back in time to see expensive machines of a decade ago sold for nothing. I remember thinking - that server would make a good end table conversation piece! I also remember them selling brightly colored silicon graphics workstations.
It was wild, I have a picture somewhere of a high-school-gym-sized room just filled corner-to-corner with plastic-wrapped Aeron chairs...
I think what was so interesting about that place was the homogeneous nature of the available furniture, since "fancy office furniture for tech companies" wasn't quite a thing yet, so everything was either Herman Miller, Steelcase and maybe a few others..
Hence the room full of hundreds of exactly the same chair..
I feel like today you'd have more of a mix of stuff since so many other companies got in on the action (and uniqueness/variety is more highly valued socially).
Adjustable displays and an adjustable standing desk were the other two. I had a standing desk at work and spent half my day standing. I later realized that my crappy office chair at work was why I needed to stand. With the Aeron and the desk adjusted to exactly the right height, I no longer experience chronic pain and feel no need to stand.
It was so, so surreal. For one thing they decided to consolidate on the second floor of a two story building, so to get to work each day you had to head through the dark and empty part of the building. And it was just like everyone just got up one day and left, at least for a month or two u til we could get all the equipment and stuff off the desks and into storage.
Storage was what had been the gym (or was going to be? Not clear to me), and I just remember rows and rows of tower computers and monitors awaiting a company to come and take it all off our hands.
They had also bought a ton of expensive networking gear (Cisco routers and switches) that they now no longer needed, they just sat in boxes in the server room.
Labs still entirely stocked with gear and computers, meeting rooms with whiteboards still filled with meeting notes, it was all so unreal, almost post-apocalyptic.
I helped get some stuff for a small business earlier this year, and picked up an Aeron for myself while I was there. It was in a legitimately bad neighborhood and there were multiple layers of electronically controlled doors to go through, then you sign in and wait from someone to come down and get you, and you ride a massive freight elevator up to the floorspace.
Same thing happened to cybersecurity in 2022-23 and will happen in the Generative AI space in a couple years.
There are always expansions and contractions in each sector.
Renewables (IRA), Battery Tech (IRA), Hardware (CHIPS), Defense (CHIPS), and AI/ML became better investments in the 20-21 period.
I’ve heard good things about Granite State Office Furniture too, if you don’t mind hoofing it up to Manchester NH.
You are probably going to want the least flashy of the results, as all that flash comes at an expense ;)
I know that there are at least 2 good ones in Chicago and another that sells used hotel furniture (which I am not sure that I would willingly go into, but apparently there is a market for such things...).
These places are very much business-focused; it's not like walking into an IKEA. You'll probably have to get buzzed in through many doors and then sign in, where you'll be asked for both your name and business. If you don't have a business they aren't going to throw you out or anything, but probably ask you to write something like "<First Name><Last Name> LLC" so they can put you in their system. You probably have to get escorted to the sales floor but are free to wander around. You have to pay in full for what you want, up front, but will get issued an invoice and bill of sale as if you are a business (from their point of view, they aren't selling anything to you, they are selling to the business you are representing).
My best finds for second hand goods were found by intentionally searching obscure marketplaces. Telling a few ppl on HN probably wouldn’t make much of a difference, making a viral TikTok video about it might.
You can pick up beverage glasses and cups, plates, silverware.
This is the place I generally use, but simply because it is most convenient for where I live (it's about 3 blocks south of I-290 at the Cicero Ave exit)
Aka second hand office furniture.
This should help in your search tbh. It is on the front page of that website. And don't forget to put the `hl=fr&` in your url search.
was the one I used
Picked out desks, chairs, wastebaskets, shop tables, storage cabinets, shelving, a flammable-materials cabinet, etc. They delivered everything the next day. It's the place to go when you're starting up.
Would you prefer people pop into the boxes to fart privately, or fart publically in the shared space?
At least using them for hotboxing covers up the smell of the farts.
Had to determine how to best part out a website (travel focused) that had a hotel inventory + flight planner that up-and-coming travel websites wanted to leverage to end their reliance on Expedia.
We essentially took questions and generated a informational "guide" for the buyers, mainly what assets could be sold off individually (think things like domains, images, review data) vs systems which mainly came down to marketing site vs inventory management software.
Tech wise we dug into details like dev/test environments, tech debt, potential challenges with integration into another company. Mainly worked to setup the whole environment from scratch, which was a mess due to being mid migration to cloud + terraform from on prem.
The one thing that has become a bit harder to find are lab and assembly workbenches. That stuff used to similarly cheap 20 years ago.
Another fun one is the usually poorly named "electronics recycler" - the kind of stuff rolling through these can be astounding, and they usually have people earning minimum or close to minimum wage dealing with it all - which yields strange pricing (some great deals, some preposterous) and a lot of stuff just getting dismantled/crushed/shipped overseas.
I bought a 6' and 12' assembly benches, complete with overhead lights, when Hayes Micro went under 30 years ago or so. Paid less than us$200 for them. Still going strong in my shop.
Excess Solutions also sold more of the furniture stuff, workbenches, and, strangely, hotel surplus blankets, lighting fixtures and wall coverings. My $20 living room couch came from there - I think it was originally from Ikea but it's still pretty solid. The fabric is faded with a particular stripe and I imagine had spent it's previous life in the lobby of some software company where the sunlight would find it's way through some half broken blinds to mark the passage of time by fading this couch.
Weird Stuff I know didn't have their lease renewed by the property owner (google) and most of it's stock was scrapped as waste.
As I remember,Excess picked up a big chunk of Halted stock, but I heard the Excess location in San Jose closed (eBay store still open). Anyone know current status?
Be prepared to pay like 50% of retail +/-25% depending on what the product is. You pay a lot for the convenience of them holding inventory so you can just walk in and buy things on any given day.
If you want real savings auctions and classifieds are where they're to be found but obviously there's tons of overpriced stuff there too.
If you want something desirable to a wide swath of people like a Herman Miller Aeron chair, yeah expect to pay for it. But if you are flexible, you can find deals. I got Steelcase Leaps for my workspaces when they were not well known for $200 and think they are a better chair than the more recognizable Herman Miller ones..
Auctions are great but they are by nature hit or miss. Preview access is sometimes limited so it's more of a gamble than even a used retail purchase and you may need to take and figure out what to do with a bunch of something when you wanted a smaller quantity.
We bought a desk and two chairs from there and it was fascinating. The warehouse was basically a condensed history of Silicon Valley office trends - we asked about Aeron chairs and the chap showed us his collection ordered by year.
He'd say things like "that corner's Yahoo!, over there is Sun Microsystems". He also had an excellent cat.
It looks like Desk Depot is still in business today: https://deskdepot.net/
I wonder what the record is for the number of times a piece of office furniture has gone through Desk Depot.
You can save yourself heaps of money by buying used Macbooks off of e-bay for a startup, but it becomes a nightmare at scale when you get an IT department that needs to manage it all with uniform security updates, and lifecycles.
For companies, there's a lot to be said for standardization though, for my last job, I just used my own phones and computer gear anyway so it was what I wanted and I controlled it (other than MDM latterly on the phone).
I doubt they'll ship you pre-MDMed devices from the refurb store, but you should still be able to add them to your account manually:
Buying isn't that hard.
A typical estate valuation of the contents of a home is around $900.
All the stuff you paid $$$ for in your home is worth next to nothing.
If the bankrupt startup had an office chair that they bought new for $1,000, they got paid maybe $100 for it in the liquidation, now the liquidator asks what? At least $200. That's 100% gross profit. Maybe $500? More?
Seems there would be room to negotate deals especially if you're buying a whole office-load of furniture.
That's a typical margin for a reseller (and it's gross margin, not gross profit). Back in the 80s, I was horrified that the mail order houses demanded a wholesale price that was half of retail. But I learned that's how things work.
Businesses have a lot of expenses. People who start one often think if they buy X for $10, and sell it for $20, they're counting the money they'll make. The reality is you gotta pay for everything else before you can count the profit.
I'd guess if it's a $1,000 item new, they buy at $100 and sell for $500 with $200-300 going towards operating costs and $100 of it to profit (so 20% of the price it's sold for).
I buy stuff from pawn shops and thrift stores, and you can buy expensive stuff for a song.
A liquidator selling wholesale to retailers is going to sell for less but would also avoid the expenses of retail sales.
Her family organized an estate sale, and netted $5000, most of which was for a couple items.
The rest went to goodwill.
If you browse goodwill, most of it looks like estate stuff.
All those collectors' items you have? They are worth nothing.
Surprising how reckless these dotcoms used to spend just because money was cheap. Have lived thru that era seen some of it first hand. Almost like burn it or you'll lose it.
Shore did, pardner!
Picks 'n shovels goin', real cheap! Walk up, walk up, walk up.
>Surprising how reckless these dotcoms used to spend just because money was cheap. Have lived thru that era seen some of it first hand. Almost like burn it or you'll lose it.
Lived (and was burned) through it too.
Like selling shovels and pick axes to gold rushers.
(Slightly) more seriously, I wonder how much repeat business they get. Have some items been in and out multiple times? Do they keep a database of the history of each item? In the future, will there be a collector's market for Aerons with interesting pedigrees?
He got a new GoPro and mounted it on his bicycle. That first trip he took with it he was hit by a car.
As he was recovering, I borrowed it for a motorcycle trip I was about to go on. Mounted it on the bike, and ended up lowsiding on a mountain pass. I'm sure it was the GoPro and not my fault at all.
There were only two recordings that GoPro ever recorded and both ended in injuries for the rider. I don't think it was ever used again.
Japan is still trying to make metaverse a thing.
While web3/metaverse as a branding concept flopped, the incumbents (roblox, fortnite, minecraft, gta creator mode) are growing strong with roblox leading the pack
https://web.archive.org/web/20070124113808/http://www.getafi...
I am aware that statement is essentially a joke, but it seems to be true.
What's an "office"?
The $20 million business “that could only exist in the bay area” seems to exist pretty much everywhere outside of it since companies giving up offices is actually also a thing in the rest of the world.
I hate this idea. That is not my job
https://www.kpetersen.com/jurychairs.htm
Solid, easy to clean, nothing really to break or wear out or fail, and reminds you to get up and walk around every so often :)
But as to open source furniture design ... I thought furniture was basically in the same position as fashion, where you can protect trademarks etc and particular patentable innovations, but that designs in general are not protected.
Found Ron Swanson's hackernews account.