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Airbnb. Stripe. Coinbase. DoorDash. Reddit.
Combined, they're worth more than $500 billion. Today they lease over a million square feet of office space between them — some of the largest commercial real estate deals in the Bay Area.
Not one of them started in an office.
They started on air mattresses, in dorm room sublets, in live-work lofts where founders slept on the floor because there was nowhere else to put a bed. Here's exactly where — and what happened when the apartment stopped working.
Airbnb's First Office Was a 3 Bedroom Apartment in SoMa
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Where it started: 19 Rausch Street, San Francisco
In September 2007, Joe Gebbia's landlord raised the rent. Both roommates moved out. Brian Chesky drove up from LA to split the apartment with him — and the two were staring down $1,150 in rent with only $1,000 in the bank.
Their solution: three air mattresses, a website called AirBed & Breakfast, and three conference-goers paying $80 a night.
That apartment stayed Airbnb's headquarters for three years. At its peak, 15 people worked out of the living room daily. By 2010, there was so little space left that Chesky moved out and lived in Airbnb listings for months — he simply didn't have a desk to come back to.
Where it is now: 888 Brannan Street, a few blocks from the original apartment. The 2012 lease on ~170,000 sq ft ran up to $97 million over 10 years. In October 2024, after shopping the market, Airbnb renewed 250,000 sq ft through 2037. Somewhere inside is an exact replica of the Rausch Street living room — rebuilt as a conference room.
Reddit Was Built in Three Weeks in a Medford Sublet
Where it started: A furnished sublet in Medford, Massachusetts
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian found the place on Craigslist in June 2005. Their entire starting capital was a $12,000 check from Y Combinator's very first batch. Huffman built Reddit in three weeks flat. Their housemate — a Harvard physics PhD student who kept getting woken up by server crashes — taught himself to restart them. He's Reddit's CTO today.
Where it is now: One full floor (47,872 sq ft) of 303 Second Street, at a starting base rent of $3.35 million a year.
Stripe Started in a Palo Alto Cottage
Where it started: A tiny cottage off Ramona Street, Palo Alto
Stripe launched on a $20,000 YC check. Co-founder Greg Brockman has said the cottage was packed so tight he had to "climb over people" just to reach his desk — and it's still his favorite office the company has had.
Where it is now: Two headquarters. The US base is ~421,000 sq ft on the South San Francisco waterfront, a 12-year lease signed in 2019 estimated at $27.5 million a year. Every Stripe office since has been built around a central staircase — a deliberate design choice meant to force teams to run into each other.
Coinbase Started in a Live-Work Loft in SoMa
Where it started: A shared two-bedroom live-work loft at 1 Bluxome Street
Coinbase launched in October 2012, splitting the space with another startup to cut costs. Bitcoin was trading around $6. There was no boardroom, so the Series A pitch happened in space borrowed from LendingClub. Bitcoin meetups were hosted right in the apartment.
Where it is now: Coinbase became famous for having no office at all — its S-1 literally listed headquarters as "Address Not Applicable," and in 2023 it paid $25 million just to exit its San Francisco lease. In 2025, it came back: 150,000 sq ft in Mission Rock, San Francisco, plus an 11-year lease at One Madison Avenue in New York.
DoorDash Was Built in the Stanford Dorms
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Where it started: Stanford dorm rooms, as PaloAltoDelivery.com
The founders built the landing page in an hour, put their own cell numbers at the bottom, and delivered the first order — pad thai — themselves. After YC, the team crammed 15 people into a two-bedroom Palo Alto apartment. Tony Xu slept on an air mattress, and when a new hire showed up for her first day, he rolled it up so the place would look more legitimate.
Where it is now: 193,000 sq ft at 303 Second Street — the same building as Reddit — running just above $16 million a year.
The Pattern
Every one of these companies hit the exact same moment: too many people crammed in a space that isn't meant to be an office.
That moment always arrives faster than founders expect. And the traditional way to find office space — built for corporations doing 5-year strategic planning, not startups moving at startup speed — makes it worse.
That's the gap Tandem fills. We're an AI-native office brokerage built to help startups lease space at startup speed, compressing the search and cutting out the headache.
When your apartment stops working, let us search for you.
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