WeWork has money to blow, so the $20 billion startup is putting some of it toward a second headquarters — this time in San Francisco instead of New York, Recode reports. The plan is to locate the HQ in the new 61-floor Salesforce Tower, which is slated to open next year.
WeWork will lease out three floors in the “Bay” area of the tower, which Salesforce Tower describes as “the best vistas to the City, Golden Gate and Bay Bridges.” The plan is for those three floors to serve as both a headquarters for the company’s employees and co-working spaces for WeWork customers.
WeWork, which recently raised a behemoth round of $4.4 billion from SoftBank, has several co-working spaces in San Francisco, so it might as well make its presence official with the opening of a new HQ. With the new headquarters in San Francisco, WeWork is hoping it will attract more potential engineers and ultimately be good for recruiting.
“WeWork has a very strong community in San Francisco, and as we look to the future, technology is going to become an increasingly important part of our platform,” WeWork Chief Product Officer Shiva Rajaraman said in a statement to TechCrunch. “That investment will show that WeWork is not just about bricks, but about pixels too, and the services we create will power a global community that transcends our physical walls. We are opening this new space inside Salesforce Tower in part to attract the best talent on the planet to help us do that.”
Back in July, SoftBank announced it would help WeWork launch some co-working spaces in Japan as part of a joint-venture. As part of the arrangement, SoftBank and WeWork will each own 50 percent of the joint venture, which will go by WeWork Japan.
WeWork Japan’s first location will launch early next year in Tokyo. In addition to the U.S., WeWork operates co-working spaces in 16 other countries, including Argentina, China, Israel, India and Germany.
I’ve reached out to WeWork and will update this story when I hear back.