Innovation

Gallery: A look at the original headquarters of your favorite tech brands

By // March 17, 2017, 8:22 AM PST // bviglia

Image 1 of 11

  • Everyone begins as a startup

    No money, second-rate equipment, not enough employees ... those are just some of the trials that a tech startup has to go through to make it in Silicon Valley. It takes a lot of hard work, determination, and a healthy dose of luck to end up moving out of someone else's house and into a real headquarters.

    Sometimes you even move backwards--at least Silicon Valley's Pied Piper did, returning from its own office back to the incubator that slightly undercooked it.

    That road isn't unique, especially when you see where some of the giants of tech started off.

    Image: HBO

  • Amazon

    Jeff Bezos started Amazon purely as a book sales website, and it was headquartered in his Seattle garage. That was 1995, and now 12 years later Amazon is the ecommerce site to beat.

    Image: UCLA Anderson School of Management

  • Apple

    The maker of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac, and other products started off in a much humbler place than 1 Infinite Loop: Steve Jobs' garage.

    Apple got off the ground in 1976, and the rest is history.

    Image: CNET

  • Box

    Aaron Levie, like many a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, started Box in his dorm room. After college the Box team moved into a Palo Alto garage, which doubled as Levie's bedroom.

    Image: Aaron Levie

  • Dell

    Michael Dell famously spent a single year as a pre-med student at the University of Texas. In his spare time he would build and soup up computers in his dorm, Dobie Center room 2713.

    After one year at UofT Dell got $1,000 in capital from his family, which he used to build Dell, Inc.

    Image: Harry Cabluck/AP

  • Facebook

    In 2004 Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in room H33 of Kirkland House dormitory at Harvard University. It's still lived in to this day and reportedly not a hot item due to the regular foot traffic of people wanting to get a glimpse of the famous six-man suite.

    Image: Business Insider

  • Google

    Sergey Brin and Larry Page started working on Backrub, as Google was then known, out of their Stanford dorms in 1995. Their first official office was the garage of of Susan Wojcicki's Menlo Park home.

    Now Google is massive--the scale of all the tech they influence and how we interact with the world today is largely due to Google's pioneering search engine. Just imagine if it never changed its name.

    Image: Google

  • Hewlett-Packard

    William Hewlett and Dave Packard started HP way back in 1939 when Palo Alto was little more than a home for Stanford professors. The one-car garage, where Hewlett also slept, was attached to the home where Packard lived with his wife and is now considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

    Image: Wayne Hsieh

  • Intel

    Intel started in 1968 right in Silicon Valley, and they skipped the humble garage or dorm, proceeding straight to an actual office. Intel founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore (of Moore's law fame) were able to secure $2.5 million in funding before opening up shop.

    Image: Piero Scaruffi

  • Microsoft

    Bill Gates and Paul Allen originally started Microsoft in Albuquerque so they could be closer to MITS, a computer manufacturer who agreed to distribute Altair BASIC, Microsoft's original product.

    It took four years for Microsoft to pack up and move to Bellevue, Washington. They landed there in 1979 and have continued to change the world since.

    Image: Softpedia

  • Samsung

    Now one of the biggest electronics companies in the world, Samsung had humble origins in the early 20th century as a trading company in Daegu, South Korea. It wasn't until the 1960s that Samsung entered the electronics game, and now their phones are some of the most popular in the world.

    Image: Samsung

Everyone begins as a startup

No money, second-rate equipment, not enough employees ... those are just some of the trials that a tech startup has to go through to make it in Silicon Valley. It takes a lot of hard work, determination, and a healthy dose of luck to end up moving out of someone else's house and into a real headquarters.

Sometimes you even move backwards--at least Silicon Valley's Pied Piper did, returning from its own office back to the incubator that slightly undercooked it.

That road isn't unique, especially when you see where some of the giants of tech started off.

Image: HBO

Related Topics:

Innovation Start-Ups Digital Transformation Artificial Intelligence Internet of Things Smart Cities Hardware

By Brandon Vigliarolo

Brandon writes about apps and software for TechRepublic. He's an award-winning feature writer who previously worked as an IT professional and served as an MP in the US Army.