TOUR: The Garages And Houses Where Giants Like Google, Apple, And Square Were Born

HP garage
The famous HP garage.
Hewlett-Packard is the original "tech company started in a garage." Since then, we've seen other billion dollar companies such as Apple and Google start there too.

But it's not only garages: famous companies have also been founded in apartments, houses, and living rooms.

Here's a sampling.


The house at 2066 Crist Drive, Los Altos, is where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first Apple computer. Apple is now worth $350 billion.


The Google guys rented the garage space in Susan Wojcicki's 2,000 square foot Menlo Park home for $1,700 a month. Sergey Brin also fell in love with Susan's sister Anne and ended up marrying her.


In San Francisco, the term "garage" usually means someone's living room. Craigslist began in Craig Newmark's home in Cole Valley. Newmark said he worked there from early 1995 through May of 2000.

Craig Newmark

Tesla's CTO JB Straubel tells us that his early engineering team worked in his living room in Palo Alto. Here in the garage, you can see when Tesla was doing the first Roadster battery test. Batteries are everywhere...


Square was originally built in a house in St. Louis. Square is a mobile payment company that allows people with an iPhone to accept credit cards.


Jack Dorsey told us "we built a prototype in TechShop and learned a lot there, but it was originally built in a house in St. Louis." (This photo is of TechShop.)


Although Box was founded from a dorm room, its early days were spent in a garage in Berkeley. Here's a picture of co-founders Dylan Smith (CFO) on the left and Aaron Levie (CEO) on the right.

This is their story as told to us:

High school friends Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith first got the idea for Box when they were sophomores in college in 2005, attending the University of Southern California and Duke, respectively. Using Dylan's online poker winnings as funding, they worked on Box that summer from Dylan's house on Mercer Island (near Seattle), and continued to grow the product and user base during the first semester of their junior year. In October, Mark Cuban decided to invest in Box after learning about the company when Aaron and Dylan cold emailed him. Twenty-four hours before leaving college for winter break they made a decision: they would pack up all their belongings, clear their dorm rooms, and take a leave of absence during the Spring semester to devote themselves to scaling Box full-time.

Having had little luck attracting investors in Seattle the previous summer, Aaron and Dylan decided to move to the Bay Area. They moved into Aaron's uncle's garage, where they both lived and worked. Because Aaron's uncle is a chocolatier, they had access to free chocolate, and the walls of the garage were decorated with chocolate posters.

In March, they convinced another high school friend, Jeff Queisser (now VP of Technical Operations), to leave college and join them, followed in July by another high school friend, Sam Ghods (now VP of Technology). The four of them worked around the clock, taking turns to sleep. By the end of October, they had hundreds of thousands of users and had expanded to five full-time employees, but didn't have room to house everyone in the garage. So they moved to their first "real" office in Palo Alto (where they also slept), after raising a Series A round from Draper Fisher Jurvetson.


This Redwood Shores house is where Halcyon Molecular was born. Co-founder Michael Andregg and his team of 5 built their first tech there. Typical day involved: start a robot, do laundry, complete the next steps in the experiment and then grab a nap before analyzing an experiment at 6 am.


Here's one from the future: Danny Kim of Lit Motors is building the world's first electric motorcycle that can't tip over from his warehouse in San Francisco.

Get the latest Google stock price here.

Get the latest Tesla stock price here.

More: Google Apple Hewlett-Packard Tesla