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After a long vacation, TechCrunch Cribs is back! But as TechCrunch alum Jason Kincaid left us with some pretty big shoes to fill, for our first installment we decided to start with a company that knows the Cribs drill already — enterprise cloud storage company Box.
It was just eight months ago that Box last got the Cribs treatment, but lots has changed since then: Its employee count has doubled in size to a staff of 400, they dropped the “.net” from their name, and they moved into a bigger and better new headquarters in Los Altos, California.
Watch the video above to see Box CEO Aaron Levie and enterprise general manager Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck give us a tour of all three floors of Box’s new office: We took the elevator and steps up, the slide back down, and a scooter all the way back home.
Welcome back to Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that takes you inside the offices of the industry’s hot companies to see what it’s really like inside the belly of the tech innovation beast (and check out the free food and fun perks that often help power it.)
In this episode, we visited the downtown San Francisco headquarters of Airbnb, where we received a tour from co-founder and CTO Nate Blecharczyk. Now, I have to admit that our expectations were pretty high — after all, by running possibly the most well-known online marketplace for booking short-term accommodations, I figured that the folks at Airbnb have seen their fair share of interestingly designed interiors.
I’m happy to report that the Airbnb office did not disappoint. The company has actually re-created rooms from some of the coolest properties available for rent on the site, and uses them as conference rooms. This means that there are replicas of spaces in Hong Kong, Berlin, New York City, and elsewhere that are accurate down to the smallest details, which was pretty neat to see.
Watch the video embedded above to see those re-created Airbnb spaces for yourself, along with a particularly historic Skee-Ball machine, surprisingly tasty looking gourmet raw food, some very unique bathrooms, and more.
Romotive is one of the most buzzed-about companies in the quickly growing Downtown Vegas tech scene, so it was great to have co-founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo give us a tour of his company’s digs and give us a hands-on look at the “Romo” robot. While the Romotive team has built hundreds of Romos themselves right there in its Sin City headquarters, the company just recently signed a production contract with an Asian manufacturer that will help the company scale up its output dramatically. That means that Romos will now be poised to enter the homes (and hearts) of millions of people across the globe.
We’re back with a brand new Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series where we go inside the gates of the hottest tech companies and get a grand tour of what the day-to-day work life is like — warts, perks, and all.
A big part of what makes our Cribs series so fun to make is going behind closed doors to get a real glimpse at how a company works (and plays.) But it’s not every day that Cribs take us behind a second set of closed doors — ones that are completely hidden — and enter into top secret rooms.
This time, we headed to the shiny new San Francisco headquarters of HotelTonight, the company that makes the popular mobile apps for booking same-day hotel rooms at discounted prices. HotelTonight is very choosy about the hotels it offers on its platform, showing deals only from higher-end places with strong reviews and good design. Being that the company’s staff is on a first-name basis with some of the most gorgeous hotels in the world, HotelTonight had a pretty high bar to meet when it came to designing its own digs.
It’s unfortunate, but true: Since venture capital funding rounds often provide a straightforward time to meet and report on growing tech companies, awesome bootstrapped startups sometimes slip under our radar here at TechCrunch.
Just like Walt Whitman, the tech industry contains multitudes, and we try to represent it all in Cribs. That means that in addition to touring bootstrapped startups, we also like to go inside established tech giants — and it was pretty amazing to have the chance to take an in-depth tour of LinkedIn, the professional social network that’s grown from its 2002 inception in Reid Hoffman’s apartment to a staff of thousands, a user base of hundreds of millions, a hugely successful initial public offering, and continued stock market success.
DotCloud’s office is smack in the middle of the financial district of San Francisco, but when you step inside it feels like you’re in the middle of a jungle — albeit a very well-connected jungle with desks, computers, and intensely-focused programmers. That’s because DotCloud has decorated its office with dozens of plants in every space possible, on the floor, on desks, and even hanging from the ceilings. The greenery provides a very cool juxtaposition with the cityscape outside DotCloud’s 16th floor windows — a blend of Gordon Gekko’s office and Jurassic Park that somehow works really well.
This time, we headed about 30 miles south of San Francisco to the leafy, sunny, startup-happy paradise that is Palo Alto, California. There we visited Houzz, the startup that brings inspirational home design ideas to the web. Given Houzz’s focus, we expected to find a nice-looking office — and we certainly weren’t disappointed.
For this latest episode we headed straight to the heart of San Francisco to the headquarters of Kiip, the startup that runs a rewards-focused mobile advertising network. Kiip is situated in a part of the city that has a lot of auto repair shops — and in fact, the company’s office was a former garage — so there’s certainly a tough industrial theme there that contrasts nicely with the digital realm that Kiip’s products live in.
You’d expect something special from an L.A.-based company with tight ties to fashion, and Mulu delivered on those expectations and then some by striking the perfect balance between cozy and super cool. Watch the video above to see how Mulu created a space that’s just as fun for its grownup employees as it is for their pint-sized offspring, with a tricked-out kid’s room, a very lucky company pet, and a secret roof deck with a gorgeous view of that famous Hollywood sign.
From the outside, Pinterest is known for being one of the Internet’s go-to places for beautiful things. But on the inside, the company is also killing it from an engineering perspective — and tech folks have sometimes been known to neglect decorating their own work spaces to focus on making great products for their customers.
It’s not often that a tech company’s office can be described as “romantic,” but that’s exactly the theme of the decor at the Santa Monica, California headquarters of online matchmaking pioneer eHarmony. As you’ll see in the video above, eHarmony likes to keep its users front and center, so the office is covered with photos of smiling happy couples (many of them in wedding attire) who have met each other using the website.
Typically, TechCrunch Cribs goes inside tech companies to show a side of them that cameras don’t often see. But this episode took us to the San Francisco office of CreativeLIVE, the online education startup that broadcasts daily lessons its classrooms live to a worldwide audience — and here, cameras are literally part of the furniture.
Last month, a number of us TechCrunchers grabbed our passports and jetted to Berlin for our first-ever Disrupt Europe conference. The tech scene in Berlin is very hot at the moment, so while we were in town, we knocked on the doors of a couple of the city’s startups for TechCrunch TV’s Cribs series.
Berlin is buzzing with entrepreneurial energy at the moment, and SoundCloud is one of the companies that has emerged as an anchor to the city’s growing tech startup scene. So when TechCrunch TV was in Berlin recently to cover the Disrupt Europe conference, we made sure to stop by SoundCloud’s office to check it out for ourselves.
There are a few extra special Christmas gifts that can’t be wrapped and don’t quite fit under the tree — love, family, happiness… and new episodes of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV show that takes you inside the doors of the tech industry’s hottest companies to see what day-to-day life is like for the people who work there!
Welcome to a brand new episode of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that goes straight into the heart of the action at the tech industry’s hottest companies to see what it’s really like for the people who work there.
Summer is just about here and the time is right for another episode of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that takes you inside the tech industry’s most buzz-worthy companies to see what it’s really like for the smarty pants people who work there.
More and more jobs deal in the virtual realm, and are done by people sitting down at desks at computers. Desk work can be made interesting in its own ways, but it’s always fun to visit a company that’s actually making physical stuff.
Welcome back for a new episode of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that goes inside the offices of the tech industry’s hottest companies to see what day-to-day life is like for the whiz kids who work there.
Welcome back to a new episode of TechCrunch Cribs, the video series that steps inside the gates of the hottest technology companies around to get a good look at the places, people, and oftentimes pets behind the web’s most popular products.
