Silicon Beach

Above is a photo of the Binoculars Building, designed by Los Angeles starchitect Frank Gehry for the Chiat/Day advertising agency and completed in 1991.  It is located on Main Street in Venice, CA, a short walk from Venice Beach.  Chiat/Day merged with another firm and moved out some years ago.

Google acquired Binoculars around 2011 as the signature building for a much larger development in the area. Since then, Googlers have been moving onto the growing campus, which is known locally as Silicon Beach.  

When completed, Silicon Beach will be Google's third national hub after the Googleplex in Northern California and a full city block in lower Manhattan.    

(All of these locations are expensive, but all are attractive to the young technical workers whom Google wants to hire.  And Google can afford it. Its balance sheet holds $58.7 billion in cash and marketable securities.  Company shares now are priced around $38 with a P/E multiple of almost 39, evidence that, big as Google is, the market believes it has plenty of room to grow.)

Venice itself has seen its fortunes turn in the last 20 years after decades as a downscale, high-crime Los Angeles neighborhood.  The once-rancid canals (which gave the area its name) now have water flushing through again, and canal-front housing prices have rebounded handsomely.  Fashionable, individually designed square homes are popping up on formerly modest residential lots.  Abbot Kinney Boulevard, which runs through Venice, is at the moment the hottest retail/restaurant street for millenials in all of Los Angeles. The Venice boardwalk -- still raffish with musicians, beggars, marijuana doctors' offices and Muscle Beach -- has become a destination stop for Los Angeles' increasing numbers of foreign tourists.  

The only apparent  drawback afflicting Venice is its inclusion in the Los Angeles Unified School District, an embarrasingly awful behemoth that just may be unfixable.  Most Googlers are assumed to be young singles, however, and so this may not be a deterrent to the company's Silicon Beach ambitions.

In the Venice and Santa Monica neighborhoods near Silicon Beach, real estate agents are salivating at the prospect of highly paid techies settling in the area.  Home owners receive regular solicitations to list their properties at tantalizing prices.  Values are estimated to have increased by a minimum of 10 to 15 percent in the last year.

A Google description of its Silicon Beach offices notes the usual company amenities -- "a game room, a climbing wall, a bike and surfboard station, a farmers' market and a large cafeteria stocked with locally sourced food and snacks, part of Google's pledge to be a good neighbor," in addition to a "gallery-styled commons area" featuring the work of area artists.

Local estimates are that the Silicon Beach hub eventually will employ 7,000 techies.  Google does not say directly how many people it has working there now, choosing to report it thus:  "Fewer than Nicola Tesla's birth year divided by three."

Google describes employment levels at other facilities in similar fashion:

     "Number of London Googlers: About three times the third perfect number"

     "Number of Dublin Googlers:  About as many as the number of zeros in a                   septingentillion"

     "Number of Mountain View Googlers:  About as many as the number of vacuum tubes in an ENIAC computer"

     "Number of New York Googlers:  About one-half of Kaprekar's constant"

How to describe the above?  Coy? Precious? Smart-alecky?  Certainly it is Googly and not "evil," but it is hard to believe that an efficient company would devote well-paid employees' time to coming up with such preening obfuscations. 

But Google is that rich.  Current expectations suggest that some of this wealth will slop over to the benefit of the general Silicon Beach neighborhood.