Technology History | 165 University Avenue — The Office Google Outgrew in Under a Year

Google's address after the garage was a second floor above a shopfront, and the company had outgrown it within the year.

The Menlo Park garage lasted about five months, from September 1998 into early 1999. It was a private home then and remains one now, which is why this building, and not that one, is the honest place to stand.

What Google took in 1999 was the upper storey of 165 University Avenue, on the block closest to Stanford, in space an outpost of Logitech had recently vacated.

Marissa Mayer joined as employee number 20 that year and started work on this floor, in a company that had just finished moving in.

By the end of the year the space was back on the market.

What followed turned an ordinary two-storey building into a local legend. PayPal took the floor, then Danger, then Milo, then Picaboo, and later tenants included WePay and Yummly — a run that earned the address its nickname as the lucky office.

The landlords are the Amidi family, Rahim and Saeed, who came to California from Iran in the 1970s and who eventually built the same instinct into Plug and Play Tech Center.

The luck framing deserves some resistance. This is the block nearest Stanford in a town where venture partners walk to lunch, so the tenants who found this floor had already been filtered by geography before anyone signed a lease.

In 2018 Marissa Mayer came back and leased the same second storey for Lumi Labs, the incubator she started after leaving Yahoo. She told the New York Times the space had good juju.

Nothing on the building records any of this. The ground floor is storefronts, the number 165 sits above the entrance, and a small board by the door lists whoever is upstairs this year.

The photograph, taken in June 2026, shows that entrance and that board.

Sources: IEEE Spectrum on the building's tenancy history and the 2018 Lumi Labs lease; Wikipedia's tenant list and ownership details; coordinate confirmed by Nominatim and by the cover photograph's GPS tag. Cover photo: BrokenSegue, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.