Facebook’s New Menlo Park Home

This morning, the final wave of employees walked through the doors of the new Facebook Menlo Park campus, and my team greeted them with coffee, snacks, and maps to help them find their new desks. For years, we’ve been moving from one building to the next, but now we finally have a home in this ten building campus. And while it’s a far cry from a Harvard dorm room, our relentless focus on staying small and moving fast means we’re still the same company at our core.

Some features of the campus might be familiar. We’ve always believed in “hacking out” our space—putting up posters and scribbling ideas on the walls—so we lined the hallways with chalkboard paint and put a box of chalk on everyone’s desk. Everywhere you go is stimulating and different. We’ve exposed the ductwork along the high-ceilinged corridors to give the place an unfinished feel and remind us that our work is never done. There are no private offices or cubicles. We tore down those unnecessary walls so that everyone could sit out in the open with their teams. We’ve scattered hundreds of conference rooms and “cozies”—little breakaway spaces filled with couches and brightly colored chairs—throughout the buildings. As people run into each other in hallways or at the micro-kitchens, it’s important that they can quickly duck away somewhere if they want to chat or hash out ideas. Every conference room features a glass wall or panel so that you can quickly see what’s going on inside. This is because we believe transparency and openness help us move fast, even as we grow.