Yahoo may be considered a dinosaur among tech firms, but they’re one of the few companies that’s buying SF office space instead of unloading it, and they just scooped up an available floor at Third and Folsom streets.
As San Francisco’s downtown continues to struggle with record office vacancy, the optimistic thinking goes that AI companies will eventually arrive to save downtown, with their mountains of investor cash, and promises of exciting, world-changing technologies. Well, the latest company swooping in to buy SF office space does not exactly meet that description. The SF Business Times reported that Yahoo just bought up a whole SoMa office floor that was available for sublease, that is, the 14th floor at 680 Folsom Street (at Third Street).
They’re subleasing the 14th floor from the task management software company Asana, who themselves had subleased it from Macy's in 2022. According to the SF Business Times, Asana also took the 13th floor in that sublease deal, which they’re still trying to unload.
Our new Yahoo SF office opens in March at 3rd/Folsom. Always long on the Bay. https://t.co/8Qe969K37T
— Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) February 20, 2024
This deal apparently happened a while ago and has just become public now. In the tweet above, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone (and honestly, who had any idea who the CEO of Yahoo was these days?) indicated about a month ago “Our new Yahoo SF office opens in March at 3rd/Folsom. Always long on the Bay.” Per the Business Times, this deal closed “third quarter of 2023,” so this happened sometime between July, August, or September of last year.
So all of this begs the question… what does Yahoo even do these days? Well, they still own TechCrunch, Engadget, and (for what it’s worth) AOL.
It’s difficult to explain this to someone under 30, but Yahoo was once the undisputed tech champion of Silicon Valley. They were much a much bigger search engine than Google, and their homepage was a kingmaker of entertainment and politics. The company was unable to keep up with consumer shifts to mobile and social media, so they bought the popular social sites Tumblr and Flickr, but promptly ran them into the ground. Yahoo was sold to Verizon in 2016, and then turned into something bizarrely called Oath. Verizon sold Yahoo off to a private equity firm in 2021.
Who knows, maybe there are better days ahead for Yahoo. But I don’t see them putting one of SF’s best neon billboards back up again anytime soon.
Image: TMG Partners
