A company based in the cloud
The influential US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, commonly known as a16z, which is based in Menlo Park, California, has just announced in a post on its corporate blog written by one of its founders, Ben Horowitz, that it is “moving to the cloud”.
Big deal, you might say, thousands of companies “are in the cloud”, in the sense that their computer systems, storage space, etc. are hosted by cloud providers that allow them to optimize their costs and let someone else deal with hardware problems. Cloud computing has been around for some time.
However, a16z isn’t moving its systems to the cloud — they’ve been there for many years — but something bigger: the company’s headquarters will be in the cloud, and it will open offices in various locations around the world to provide support and infrastructure for its partners and teams. In addition to the company’s existing offices in Menlo Park and San Francisco, it will be opening offices in Miami Beach, New York and Santa Monica, in order to configure the company’s ability to physically meet in different locations when needed.
Logically, the configuration of these offices is very different from that of a regular office, because the idea is not to provide a place for someone to sit for eight hours a day, but for occasional face-to-face activities: a meeting, a presentation or some other type of…
