The business of gutting failed Bay Area tech companies

Pretty sensationalist title for used furniture arbitrage.<p>I was hoping for some insight on capture and disposition of IP.<p>I would think failing gracefully involves reaching out to competitors (and customers and suppliers) for &quot;mergers&quot; so investors get some of the value of the company -- without somehow signaling that you&#x27;re giving up (and can no longer be relied upon). What&#x27;s the state of the art in that respect? It seems like a fantastically tricky process, which would mean high value for skilled practitioners.<p>(OTW (ahem) valuable employee stock goes to zero.)

In 2001 (or 02?) I remember visiting a clearance warehouse like this in Ottawa during the post-dot-com-boom crash and it was where all the west-end startups and network tech companies had dumped their furniture after either going completely out of business or emergency-downsizing.<p>It was wild, I have a picture somewhere of a high-school-gym-sized room just filled corner-to-corner with plastic-wrapped Aeron chairs...

Years ago I was hired to do IT for a company that had just massacred like half its workforce. And when I say “just” I mean most of the people I interviewed with were gone when I got there - it happened just a few weeks after I interviewed.<p>It was so, so surreal. For one thing they decided to consolidate on the second floor of a two story building, so to get to work each day you had to head through the dark and empty part of the building. And it was just like everyone just got up one day and left, at least for a month or two u til we could get all the equipment and stuff off the desks and into storage.<p>Storage was what had been the gym (or was going to be? Not clear to me), and I just remember rows and rows of tower computers and monitors awaiting a company to come and take it all off our hands.<p>They had also bought a ton of expensive networking gear (Cisco routers and switches) that they now no longer needed, they just sat in boxes in the server room.<p>Labs still entirely stocked with gear and computers, meeting rooms with whiteboards still filled with meeting notes, it was all so unreal, almost post-apocalyptic.

There are warehouses like this in all big cites, and are open (ish) to the public!<p>I helped get some stuff for a small business earlier this year, and picked up an Aeron for myself while I was there. It was in a legitimately bad neighborhood and there were multiple layers of electronically controlled doors to go through, then you sign in and wait from someone to come down and get you, and you ride a massive freight elevator up to the floorspace.

Regularly attended the liquidations in Sunnyvale around 2002-2005 after I was laid off from my dot com but the only thing I could make any profit on was docking stations and the associated power adapters since at that time they were specific to each laptop model. I would think the overhead storing furniture is significant. A couple of times I got lucky such as when Casady and Greene closed down and I got a bunch of copies of Conflict Catcher 9 that was still in demand and when Apple closed down a TV studio in Cupertino and I bought the contents of the back storage room that had a bunch of valuable bits and pieces. Unfortunately reality TV was still in its infancy or I would have been a minor star:-)

Been to one of those warehouses, back when it was Consolidated Office Distributors, Inc. in San Jose. BetterSource seems to have acquired them around 2005. One building filled an entire city block. I went there to furnish a shop, entered through the wrong door, and spent half an hour wandering around before I found the sales office. This was in the heyday of the Aeron chair and the carpet-faced cubicle wall. They had huge supplies of both.<p>Picked out desks, chairs, wastebaskets, shop tables, storage cabinets, shelving, a flammable-materials cabinet, etc. They delivered everything the next day. It&#x27;s the place to go when you&#x27;re starting up.

I once did some work for a business that operated in this field. I&#x27;ll never forget the owner. He had done very well over the years and drove a Ferrari - an extremely rare sight in the industrial area. He spent all day selling very high end second hand and new office furniture to discerning clients - large contracts for whole buildings sometimes. But in his own office he sat on the very cheapest office chair that money can buy. One that he wouldn&#x27;t have been able to source from any of his suppliers. Never could figure out if it was a contrived statement, or not.

Seeing those privacy phone booths makes me so envious. Why must we have these open office hellscapes? Let me shut out the endless racket.

I&#x27;ve participated in a Chapter 10 bankruptcy sale at the software side.<p>Had to determine how to best part out a website (travel focused) that had a hotel inventory + flight planner that up-and-coming travel websites wanted to leverage to end their reliance on Expedia.

Every major metropolitan area has something like this because the market for used office furniture is ubiquitous and not limited to a small geography of tech companies. If you need some sturdy training tables for projects or some metal bookshelves they can be had for next to nothing at these places.<p>The one thing that has become a bit harder to find are lab and assembly workbenches. That stuff used to similarly cheap 20 years ago.<p>Another fun one is the usually poorly named &quot;electronics recycler&quot; - the kind of stuff rolling through these can be astounding, and they usually have people earning minimum or close to minimum wage dealing with it all - which yields strange pricing (some great deals, some preposterous) and a lot of stuff just getting dismantled&#x2F;crushed&#x2F;shipped overseas.

When I did YC back in 2011 their Mountain View office was just down the street from Desk Depot, who were in the same line of business as this article.<p>We bought a desk and two chairs from there and it was <i>fascinating</i>. The warehouse was basically a condensed history of Silicon Valley office trends - we asked about Aeron chairs and the chap showed us his collection ordered by year.<p>He&#x27;d say things like &quot;that corner&#x27;s Yahoo!, over there is Sun Microsystems&quot;. He also had an excellent cat.<p>It looks like Desk Depot is still in business today: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deskdepot.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deskdepot.net&#x2F;</a>

I feel like any (edit: small) company not outfitting their offices largely from cast-offs like this is failing their fiduciary duty.

The better website for Bay Area <i>tech</i> company dissolution is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;svdisposition.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;svdisposition.com&#x2F;</a> which gets actual high-tech equipment...

I bought my home office chair and under-desk cabinet from abettersource. Easy to work with. Equipment worked great. Prices were great. Very large variety too. Only thing was I had to load it myself into my car and I was lucky to have a hatchback big enough for it.

These kinds of stores are great. I&#x27;m sitting on the legacy of some old tech company right now, actually. I paid $250 for this very fancy office chair. I don&#x27;t care if it&#x27;s pre-sat!

Wonder if businesses trading in used mining gear existed in the gold boom era. I&#x27;m sure it did.<p>Surprising how reckless these dotcoms used to spend just because money was cheap. Have lived thru that era seen some of it first hand. Almost like burn it or you&#x27;ll lose it.

I knew it would be about Aeron chairs when I saw the title.

Checked out one of these in Alameda a few years back. Expansive warehouse - was fascinating to spend a few hours walking around.

Man sfgate is a scummy web site. Traps you so back button does not work and litters the page w obnoxious ads. Note to self, don&#x27;t follow sfgate links.

Must be good business!<p>Like selling shovels and pick axes to gold rushers.

2579 CE: The 97th AI Winter has just begun. The migration of the office furniture back to its warehouses begins, to await a new dawn when someone tries to make metaverses happen again in a year or so. 5% of the planet&#x27;s usable land area now warehouses startup office furniture. No-one has made new office furniture for 300 years; no-one even knows how. Not even the chatbots know how.<p>(Slightly) more seriously, I wonder how much repeat business they get. Have some items been in and out multiple times? Do they keep a database of the history of each item? In the future, will there be a collector&#x27;s market for Aerons with interesting pedigrees?

Is this a PR piece? Skimming the article doesn’t reveal anything remarkable about the business.<p>The $20 million business “that could only exist in the bay area” seems to exist pretty much everywhere outside of it since companies giving up offices is actually also a thing in the rest of the world.

biodegradable office furniture should be more of a thing. open source furniture design for an office and having staff contribute to building it could influence the culture in a positive way.

Do not touch used office furniture . Failure is contagious ..