There’s an unspoken rule virtually every startup in the last two decades seems to have followed: If you start hiring more people, lease or build bigger offices.
Just ask commercial real estate brokers, for whom tech growth since 2010 has created an unquenchable demand for more and more space. Once tech companies grow even larger, like Google or Facebook, they build huge headquarters and then create large satellite offices around the world, almost always in the downtown business districts of already-successful global cities.
And once they become giants like Amazon — whose more than 500,000 employees make it nearly 7 times bigger than Google and 23 times the size of Facebook — they don’t just create bigger offices. They also build a second huge headquarters. Amazon HQ2, I’m talking about you.
Of course, the guiding principle driving all of this is that having a bunch of employees clustered in the same space is a great thing and creates tighter bonds between coworkers.
But it doesn’t.