Silicon Valley’s 19 Coolest Places to Work

Silicon Valley has always been a wacky place to work, but new trends are quickly turning corporate campuses into playgrounds. The next-generation millennial workforce with its flexible schedules and awesome mobile productivity tools is putting an end to the 9-to-5 cubicle workday. Now when these young guns come to the office, they want shared workstations and open spaces to collaborate. They want places to unwind. They want colorful scenes that transport them — at least, artificially — away from the gray corporate dystopia.

Silicon Valley companies have traditionally brought oddities into the workplace, such as the ubiquitous foosball table. But Google took it to another level with a campus in Mountain View filled with all sorts of awesome amenities, the most famous being the Google cafeteria serving up free gourmet food. New Googlers often put on 15 pounds in their first year. In fact, you could argue that Google started the wacky workplace explosion.

An enterprise social networking company with the name Yammer just has to have a wild workplace — and it does. The San Francisco-based company has some fascinating furniture, such as a floating chair. There’s a game room and colorful chairs in breakout spaces. We’re guessing it’s Yammer time.

This slideshow is about wacky workplaces, and StumbleUpon in San Francisco fits right in. What’s behind the office design? A StumbleUpon spokesperson says: “The result is a building filled with a mix of inviting furniture, earthy/industrial elements, bold pops of color, and irresistible kitsch. In keeping with the company’s focus on discovery of the Web, we accessorized rooms with items related to famous scientists and their discoveries.”

StumbleUpon office photos by Custom Spaces

Pandora is known for serving up a variety of music over the Internet, but its Oakland offices are just as colorful, particularly its color-coded breakout rooms in green, yellow, orange, red, blue, violet, purple and indigo. Tables also fit inside giant letter blocks spelling out Pandora’s core service: R-A-D-I-O.

In Internet years AOL is ancient, but the company is trying to refresh its image in its West Coast offices. Here’s what Custom Spaces has to say about AOL’s design: “Their design features plain industrial surfaces with punches of color, custom graphics, and a mix of exposed and textured ceilings. The result — a design that embodies the qualities of the new AOL: transparency, collaboration, creativity, playfulness.”

Tech companies aren’t the only ones changing their office landscape. Kaiser Permanente has redesigned its offices in Oakland, particularly the ones for its IT group. Says a Kaiser spokesperson: “The open space floor design incorporates numerous progressive features that promote greater collaboration, creativity and productivity. These features include collaboration spaces, communication rooms, centralized café, wellness rooms and quiet labs, as well as open workstation arrangements, all designed to bring energy and greater interaction to our teams.”