Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the co-founders of Twitter, have leased
three sprawling floors in a historic downtown San Francisco tower for
their low-profile start-up incubator, The Obvious Corporation.
Obvious
said Friday it leased 75,000 square feet at the busy 760 Market Street
location - known as the Phelan Building - in one of the city's larger
commercial real estate deals in recent months.
The downtown space
will be able to hold roughly 500 employees and signals ambitions at
Obvious, which was re-constituted when Williams and Stone both left
Twitter in 2011.
The incubator, with no more than two dozen
employees, has mostly stayed out of the press except when it unveiled
two new blogging platforms called Medium and Branch last September.
Although still thinly staffed, Obvious's new space is larger than start-up Pinterest's recently inked lease in the city.
"We
need the right space from which to grow the Medium team and position
Obvious to focus on bringing our new ideas to life," Obvious CEO
Williams said in a statement Friday about the new lease.
The
company will occupy the seventh, eighth and ninth floors of the
triangular building, which wraps around a central courtyard, said Jenny
Haeg, a real estate agent who has brokered leases for Square Inc,
Dropbox, Airbnb and other large tech startups.
© Thomson Reuters 2012