1. The Garage
The first office was a garage in Fremont with a door that never quite shut. Two desks, one of them a sheet of plywood on sawhorses, and a coffee machine I carried over from my mother's kitchen.
People ask when I knew it would work. The honest answer is that I never did, I just couldn't afford to find out otherwise.
We almost folded three times that first year. Each time, something small kept us alive: a late invoice paid, a stranger's email, one more week.