Denver-based SendGrid spent more than a year designing its new 22,000-square-foot office at 400 Spectrum Center in Irvine.
The mission: build a collaborate environment that boosts employee engagement and provides a cool space to showcase to prospective recruits.
The company established an internal selection committee to brainstorm ideas, outline important amenities, and list features that would muster the most employee satisfaction.
The top priorities: easy parking and access to public transportation, nearby restaurants and entertainment options.
The Denver-based company hired noted designer John Kembel to put the ideas in motion. Kembel is considered a pioneer in the design-thinking movement, an experience-centric approach that places product and office design at the center of corporate performance.
He facilitated a series of discussions to “really think how you live and work in this space,” SendGrid Chief People Officer Pattie Money told the Business Journal.
The new office is nearly triple the space of SendGrid’s prior digs in Orange and can accommodate a big hiring push over the seven-year lease.
Its local workforce has grown 50% in the past year to 60, primarily software engineers, though the company also has marketing and support staff here. SendGrid employs more than 400 and has other offices in Denver, Redwood City and London.
The software maker built a system that allows companies to reliably deliver high volumes of automated emails to customers.
It was attracted to the technology hub at the Spectrum, also home to Blizzard Entertainment Inc., Amazon and Vizio, as well as nearby schools, such as the University of California-Irvine.
“It gave us options in the tech pool,” Money said.
SendGrid established an OC presence in 2009, the same year it was established.
The company went through Boulder-based accelerator Techstars, where Irvine-based Cie Digital Labs Chief Executive Anderee Berengian is a mentor.
SendGrid has raised $80.4 million.
Lucky Him
Palmer Luckey was among the millennial business leaders who attended the recent Generation Next Summit at the White House.
The millionaire tech wonder boy live-tweeted during the March 22 event, which featured a candid Q&A with President Donald Trump.
“Lots of great information on how the administration is thinking about issues like vocational education, the opiod (sic) epidemic, and freedom of speech,” he tweeted to his nearly 58,000 followers on the social network.
Luckey earned the Business Journal’s Business Person of the Year honors in 2014 in the tech sector after selling Irvine-based virtual reality headset maker Oculus VR Inc. to Facebook Inc. for $2 billion, fueling a meteoric rise in a nascent segment that put him on the cover of Time magazine.
Last year he bought a marina in Huntington Beach and was pushed out of Facebook after word spread that he bankrolled a pro-Trump organization that put out memes, fake news and other criticisms of Hillary Clinton for months leading up to the election.
With a tinge of irony, Facebook is facing similar criticism in the U.S. and the U.K. for helping foster and monetize that ecosystem and for lax privacy protections for its 2 billion users.
A Cool $103M
Broadcom Ltd.’s Hock Tan clocks in as the highest paid chief executive of a public company, according to a recent Wall Street Journal analysis.
Tan, who took the helm in early 2016 after Avago Technologies acquired Irvine-based Broadcom for $37 billion and renamed the company, took home more than $103 million in the 12 months through October—the end of its fiscal year—according to a recently filed proxy statement. That’s up about 320% year-over-year.
Stock awards tied to performance benchmarks accounted for $98.3 million of that. His cash salary was $4.8 million.
His total compensation in the prior fiscal year was $24.6 million.
Tan has been lauded on Wall Street for trimming acquired companies and unloading noncore business lines in an ongoing roll-up strategy. He cleared out nearly the entire management team at Broadcom after the sale closed, slashed more than 700 employees at its Irvine campus, and divested two business units that were based at its University Research Park campus.
Tan’s strategy hit a roadblock last month when Trump halted Broadcom’s attempted $117 billion hostile takeover of rival Qualcomm Inc., signing a presidential order prohibiting the bid due to national security concerns related to 5G development.
The Wall Street Journal analyzed 10-K filings and proxy statements of the 133 largest public companies.
