How shut-down Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear

There is (a collector's market) of course, the provenance can be hard to come by though. There has always been a joke in the Bay Area about buying the product you helped design and ship at the "DeAnza Flea Market" (which is actually the AVSRO flea market[1] but was held in the DeAnza community college for many years).

There is some nostalgia there, especially from former employees. But generally the 'premium' is limited[2]. Mostly because collectibles have to 'connect' with the collector in some way, and outside of a relatively small community a lot of startup stuff doesn't really make that connection.

[1] https://www.electronicsfleamarket.com/

[2] I have a super rare jacket from "First Person Inc" the wholly owned subsidiary Sun created for Project Green/Oak/Java that has an embroidered 'Fang' (the Java mascot) and the product name 'WebRunner'. Only given out to the original Java team. WebRunner was the name of the Hotjava browser before Sun's lawyers chickened out because Taligent had a similar trademark. I expect it is worth over 10 times what Bryan paid for the logowear t-shirt at Goodwill (0.25) :-). It would probably be worth more if was Gosling's jacket instead of mine.

heh - I bought a 17-year old Aeron in 2020 - 2nd best office purchase I ever made. (First was a Brother MFC office-class laser printer in 2016... still going strong, still gets driver updates for new OS's - and still allows me to use 3rd-party or refilled toner carts)

I recall the hosts joking about this on Oxide and Friends, as they worked at Sun in the 90s up through the Sun acquisition. Some of their finds are hilarious. I think Brian had found a "Windows on MIPS" shirt at a thrift store?

Great idea. Going to stencil "Property of Sun Microsystems" on some Aerons to instantly increase their resale value!

It might get difficult to acquire lots if they start doing that. I doubt an in-bankrupt-proceedings company wants the provenance of their office gear on the internet. Maybe they can agree to a time delay of X years or months, and only with permission. If they start doing it across the board they could lose significant business. I like the idea though!

Didn't theranos have a "no killing bugs" policy? I say let them keep the beanbag chairs.

The PawnStars show had a great bit about valuing a hypothetical "Bill Clinton's lawn mower". Famous names dont necessarily make everything more valuable.

I miss the times when stuff went to Weird Stuff for fun browsing.

This Aeron has an authentic Jeff Bezos head sweat stain.

The failed startups are a vital part of the Aeron economy, putting these back-savers into circulation at 1/3 of MSRP

There’s a place in London Bridge called something like ‘London office furniture’ that regularly sells Aeron chairs for about 100 quid

I live in Stockholm and there are _tons_ of stores like that here, Stockholm is one of the big startup centers of Europe. The difference is that most them just sell IKEA furniture because that is what all the offices buy...

Although to be honest the IKEA standing tables are quite good, I own one myself (bought from one of those stores). Some of the ikea chairs are good but not top-notch.

Do you think it's still there? I wouldn't mind getting a fancy office chair at discount.

We have office liquidation companies here as well, but unfortunately when I checked them out they basically just had Aeron chairs which I find incredibly uncomfortable. So it's a great deal but on something I won't enjoy using.

I only buy used high-quality office chairs. I have two Aerons that were essentially brand new, and seemingly fart free (maybe the mesh just let the farts pass through). One char I've had for over 10 years it is still good as new, though with far more farts.

Would you sit in such a "haunted" chair if you're just launching your own startup though?

Yeah! I don't know if it's still there but I kitted out my first company's office with chairs from there! It was a cool place.

There's also a junk shop, for want it a better phrase, just off the top of Brick Lane that is similar, it has office stuff but also way more general stuff too.

It doesn't even have a GM listing but it's here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/CWDZ3goLKXeJb3eAA?g_st=ac

The mural on the wall is of the guy who used to own the shop. He'd sit outside all day in his car. I can't remember his name now but he was famous locally.

> Taking the money of some clueless holder of money - optimistically calling themselves as investors, never as suckers for sure - and fraud away.

Generally, investors in early-ish-stage startups, that is those which are most likely to unexpectedly implode, scattering office furniture all over the place, know very well what they're getting into; they're specialist VCs who invest in, say, 50 startups in the hope that two or three will be worth something.

Though, the nature of the game is that sometimes, one of these will have a truly massive breakout success, by accident, and it will totally screw up their view of risk from then on, leading them to put vast amounts of money into things which could not possibly work. Looking at you, Softbank.

The "private planes" were liquidated from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Hydrogen - "The company's main product was intended to be a conversion kit to be retrofitted to existing aircraft to allow them to run on hydrogen fuel."

The "massive 3D printer" was liquidated from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Motors - "was an American manufacturing company focused on low-volume production of open-source vehicles and other products using multiple microfactories."

If an investor accepted the premise of the companies, these don't sound like outrageous assets to own.

This has been the way since the first internet boom in the early 2000s. The successes make too much money for it to be any other way.

Overt fraud (sometimes known as "long firm" fraud) is rarer than you think, but there are the Theranos companies out there. Then things with very questionable payment structures like WeWork.

This is also why "qualified investor" rules exist in the US. People briefly got into cryptocurrency (ICOs) as a way round this, which really is an all scam all the time economy.

I have a theory that extreme levels of VC investment mean, relative to whatever ownership shares the employees doing the actual work get, the original VCs have extreme ownership over whatever profits the business might generate (including from an IPO/sale).

Well, that’s just a fact. But my theory is that this ultimately incentivizes the employees to invest in their own skills and maximizing their salary-earning potential, rather than making the business succeed - the behavior you’ve described here.

If the market were sane, I think VCs would be averse to investing in already-highly-invested-in companies that don’t have clear paths to profitability. But, well… our markets aren’t really sane or sensible in that way. Many VCs and managerial types would rather crack whips or institute OKRs/other MBA-type nonsense than simply make sure employees are both adequately salaried and adequately invested in the success of the company.

Nobody is going through the significant work of raising VC and then TRYING to fail. All for the sake of temporarily using some fancy office furniture.

Yep, I think it's an open secret that many startups are known to be doomed from the beginning. That's one reason that founders tell such outrageous stories. Maybe it arises from the fact that tech changed and grew so fast that the non-technical asset class was unable to separate fact from fiction. You see that today with many of the AI startups that clearly have almost no meat on their bones but a really good pitch deck.

Investors are usually the ones that push you to spend as fast as possible. The goal is to find out the good company sooner and not having to dedicate time and effort on businesses that won't become outliers. You're either Facebook or dead, those two outcomes are preferable to a good mid size company that generates steady revenues (they call that a lifestyle business).

I mean does it surprise you at this point that it’s hard to find integrity in Silicon Valley? My current theory is that it’s a side effect of easy wins since the fall of the Soviet Union. There was no competition and only the US knew how to build software startups. It’s interesting where the next decades will go. I’m not saying the US will surely loose, but based on the products I see coming out of China, it’s going to be interesting. For example, in my local MediaMarkt, the most high-tech section is the drone section and these are all Chinese. Also, if you purely look at the specs, Chinese electric cars outperform all European and American brands (charging rate, battery capacity, and performance). Not only in the budget segment but in the performance segment as well.

A dynamic career condensed into 2 cracking paragraphs. Well done!

If you're in a major city, I suspect those chairs came out of a renegotiated/cancelled WeWork type building.

In my city, one of the WeWork copycats cancelled a brand new lease at short notice in May 2020. The building owner sold a lot of the furniture at the front door.

so funny I'm like wtf is an Aeron chair, I look it up I'm sitting on one now

Where do you find Herman Miller repair parts? I need an armrest for my Celle (20+ years, going strong except for a worn arm pad).

Rich Cellinthian Leather anyone?

No cell-cultivated leather office chairs.

There used to be some killer junk warehouses in San Jose filled with the detritus of electronics industry.

Triangle comes to mind.