Garages of Bay Area

Google purchased the two-car garage of the Menlo Park home in which they opened their first offices.

The two-car garage and a few rooms served as the company’s headquarters for five months after the founders took leave of their graduate studies at Stanford University to focus on their search engine, now the most popular in the world.

Google bought the 1,900-square-foot home in September from Susan Wojcicki, a Google vice president, who had leased the garage to Brin and Page in 1998 for $1,700 per month to help pay her mortgage. The sales price wasn’t disclosed, but similar home

Google’s founders worked in the garage shoehorned between computers and boxes piled head high. In a list of corporate milestones, Google mentions its home in Menlo Park with its characteristic humor, saying “the office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub.”[Google buys garage, search engine’s home]

In the 70s, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started a company, their first offices were in the Jobs family garage. His father moved out his car restoration equipment and the garage served as Apple’s first manufacturing base. In 1938, Dave Packard and his wife Lucile move into the first floor flat of a house in Palo Alto. Bill Hewlett, his friend rented a shed behind the house and began work in the garage with a working capital of $538. Their association resulted in Hewlett-Packard.

Even after living in the midst of all these famous garages, I made the mistake of keeping the computer in the office room. Tomorrow, first thing, I am moving it to the garage, so that when varnam.org becomes a multi-billion dollar business, I can also claim that it all started in a garage.