It’s a three story glass and steel building, similar to a dozen others that line Page Mill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley. It could be HP, which is next door or any one of the established offices of world spanning tech companies that make their home here.
When you walk in the doors however, you’re not greeted by a sterile corporate space or a wood paneled entry. Instead, you’re greeted by a space that feels open and modern and somehow a bit informal. Bikes hang on the walls in an alcove, free for the borrowing and walkways lead off into work spaces from the entry. This is the new home of AOL on the west coast.
The offices were obtained in June of last year as a sublet from Google. The purchase was made to give AOL a place to get a fresh start on its flagging mobile and services divisions after a disastrous merger with Time Warner. The spin off of AOL back into its own firm in 2009 left the giant greatly diminished from its former glory and sadly out of touch when it came to the way that people were now using the internet.
A lack of focus
The fresh feel of the offices is no coincidence. It’s the work of studio o+a, the renowned design firm led by Primo Opilla and Verda Alexander whose previous work includes projects for Facebook, Paypal and Dreamhost. It was commissioned to give AOL the feel of ‘the largest startup in Silicon Valley’ says Brad Garlinghouse, AOL’s President of Applications and Commerce.
Garlinghouse, who leads the team at the Palo Alto office, was brought in by AOL from Yahoo in 2009. You may remember Garlinghouse for the Peanut Butter Manifesto, an internal Yahoo memo which was leaked to the press. In it, he criticized Yahoo for a lack of focus on individual products, saying that they were being spread too thin, like peanut butter. He stated in the memo, “I hate peanut butter. We all should.”
If there’s another company in the tech world that could relate to being spread too thin across too many products, it is AOL. AOL’s history is full of triumphs and failures, many of which are fresh in the minds of the company. This is illustrated in a mural drawn by employees of the Palo Alto offices on the white board in the main hallway. Amongst the designs you can make out an airliner, dropping discs from a cargo bay, with the phrase ‘No more CD carpet bombing!’ scrawled next to it. Bringing in an executive with a drive to create focus would enable it to shed the crusts of what didn’t work and focus on what will for the future.
To this end, the Applications and Commerce division started making changes and were rewarded with positive results from some major early decisions. They removed 60% of the ads from their mail product and their revenue from those ads went up 30%, they re-designed AOL’s mobile homepage and traffic went up 100%. The Patch product now produces 1,000 pieces of localized news and content an hour.
A fresh startup
When I spoke to Kelly Mayes from AOL’s Corporate Communications during a recent visit I asked her about the startups which occupy much of AOL’s first floor. She says that AOL plans to lease most of the building to other companies or startups, occupying the top floor itself. Some tenants, including SSE Labs, the Stanford student startup accelerator, are already in the building.
Mayes says that they plan on leasing most of the space for a greatly reduced amount of rent. This will provide the tennants with space to work in a gorgeous new building and it will provide AOL with the energetic, youthful atmosphere of a venture starting out fresh.
One of the startups housed in the building is Kitchit, a service that pairs people having dinner parties with master chefs and caterers. AOL hired a chef through the service to provide the catering for the open house for media. Brendan Marshall, the co-founder and CEO of Kitchit says that it has a growing network of chefs on its roster and is being advised by experienced culinary veterans like the former head chef of Google. The food is certainly top notch but the benefits of having startups like Kitchit in-house go far beyond culinary.
The upper floor, where AOL is housed, is home to a rec room with beer on tap, ping-pong tables and lounging space. When I was leaving the building at 7pm there were still games going and code being written, all powered by the youthful vigor that AOL hopes to tap to help them rebuild its online presence and reputation.
Wine and roses
That reputation has taken a pounding in recent months with criticism over the acquisition of high dollar properties like the Huffington Post and the leak of the ‘AOL Way‘, a roadmap for online content compiled by AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong. The document shot waves of indignation through the ranks of many writers in the industry with the way it handled blogging as a volume-based exercise that emphasized, not an article’s quality, but its ability to drive traffic independent of AOL’s home pages. This, coupled with the implication that editorial choices should be based not on the validity of the story but on its ability to drive traffic, made AOL blogger enemy number one almost overnight.
Speculation has run rampant in the community that the AOL Way is behind the recent exodus of many journalists from AOL properties. This is almost assuredly the case with Engadget which has famously lost much of it’s prominent editorial staff including Editor in Chief Joshua Topolsky and Associate Editor Paul Miller. Miller referenced the AOL Way specifically in his parting note stating “AOL sees content as a commodity it can sell ads against. That might make good business sense (though I doubt it), but it doesn’t promote good journalism or even good entertainment.”
Even outside of the publishing division AOL’s business hasn’t exactly been wine and roses for the past several years. The revelation by earnings numbers in January that 43% of their revenue still comes from subscriptions to services, the majority of which people may soon realize they don’t need just to read their mail, has led many to predict another year of poor profits for the company.
Where to now?
While the choices of the company as a whole will no doubt be borne out as good for business or yet another misstep by the bottom line, the Palo Alto offices are doing things a bit differently. The new beautifully designed working space, the presence of the startups and an investment by the management in paying attention to and polishing each aspect of AOL’s online empire. Those things set the tone here, not the troubles of waning subscriptions or Tim Armstrong’s publishing policies.
AOL's homepage in 2009
The homepage now
As mentioned above, the homepage of AOL recently got a revamp. In addition, most of the other properties have been getting them as well. The Moviefone website has been fully redesigned, the registration and login pages across AOL have also been stripped down and reincarnated as simpler and more modern versions of themselves. The revamp of web services across AOL’s properties has paid major dividends already.
Next: Mail, Mobile and the future of AOL
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