The building at 165 University Avenue here has been so good to the Amidi family that Saeed Amidi says it is blessed with good karma. There are some high-technology entrepreneurs who would agree.
Over the years, the nondescript two-story building, which the Amidis have owned since the early 1990s, has been home to a series of Silicon Valley start-ups that became stars.
Like many other landlords in the dot-com boom, Mr. Amidi demanded a chance to invest in some of his tenants. One was PayPal, the online payment company, whose sale to eBay for $1.5 billion gave the Amidis a multimillion-dollar payout and a taste for more technology investing.
Logitech, the maker of computer peripherals, and Danger, which created the T-Mobile Sidekick smartphone, have also been tenants. And it was in that building that Google went from toddler to budding technology titan.
Old old news? I used to work there during my Paypal days and when PayPal ipo’ed they ran an article about the karma of the building. That was back in 2002. This is 15 years later and a repeat.
Really? I think I only stayed there for 3 months at most. X.com was located in another building and I started there. Then 165. Then we moved to another building in PA.
Former Yahoo CEO and Google founding team member Marissa Mayer is going back to her roots with Lumi Labs, a new tech incubator she is starting from a fabled Palo Alto address that she says “has a lot of good juju.”
If Costa Hawkins got repealed and the commies seize our rental properties, we should learn from 165 University’s owners:
“When startups need real estate, if you can help them get money and help them get their first clients, that’s where our real interest is these days,” Amidi said. “These days I consider real estate to be less than 10 percent of our offering.”
She doesnt have much of a good reputation, internally. She was not particularly sharp, probably above average is what i hear. Lets say right place, right time.
Her stint at yahoo was about distributing money through acqusitions to her neighbors and stuff. There was no theme for these acqusitions, all were really random.
