I grew up in New York City. My first job out of school was as an urban planner. When my wife and I (and kid) moved from San Francisco to the peninsula further south, my requirement was walking distance to a downtown area. I am a big fan of the urban and town spaces.

While the towns along the San Francisco Peninsula (e.g. Burlingame, San Mateo, San Carlos, Menlo Park, and Palo Alto) are pretty great for shopping, eating and socializing, they are terrible for a growing business.

Biz360, where I am founder and chairman, started in downtown Redwood City. That downtown turned to be too quiet (barren) for my tastes so we moved to downtown San Mateo. Everyone at Biz360 loved it. We had all sorts of lunch options, coffee options, shopping options and park options. Our location was feasible for employees from San Francisco to San Jose to the East Bay.  The office we had was pretty poor “B” space and parking was a pain and not free, but when I did a survey of the employees, they were more than willing to make the tradeoffs.

It was pretty clear, however, that when we started to grow beyond 25 people, we would have to move out of San Mateo and into the only place on the SF Peninsula that can handle growing businesses: the office park. That’s just too bad. Besides the obvious spike in lost time and the waste of more traffic (to/from lunch, to/from chores), I think an office park gives a workplace a sad, isolated feeling. I find this to be true of almost all office parks, whether it is the current Biz360 offices, the Googleplex or Yahoo-ville.

Redwood City has an opportunity to solve this problem as it is revitalizing its downtown, which is quite large and has lots of infill areas to create a vibrant social downtown that can support the growing tech business. 

The plan calls for accommodating “small-scale office buildings (5,000 to 10,000 square feet)” and while that helps a company up to about 50 employees, growing to any larger than that gives us the choice of the office park (or tough Bay Area commutes to the cities of San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland).

It’s a shame.