Facebook's Palo Alto years

Facebook was not founded in Palo Alto. It started in a Harvard dorm room in February 2004. But within months the young company had moved west. For the next seven years Palo Alto was its home. It grew from a handful of students in a rented house to more than 2,000 employees, spread across downtown offices and then a research park building, before leaving for Menlo Park in 2011.

This profile follows the company's Palo Alto addresses in order. For a walking route that includes the downtown sites, see our famous tech addresses tour.

Summer 2004: the rented houses

Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook at Harvard in February 2004. It spread quickly to other colleges. That summer Zuckerberg and a few classmates, including Dustin Moskovitz, came to the Bay Area to keep building it. Palo Alto made sense. Stanford was next door, engineers were easy to find and investors were a short drive away on Sand Hill Road.

The team rented a house on La Jennifer Way in Palo Alto. It has since become known as the original "Facebook house." Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who joined that summer and became the company's president, later described it as run like a frat house. Business Insider reported in 2017 that the house was being passed from one group of Stanford business students to the next.

Around the same period the team also rented a house in nearby Los Altos. When it came up for sale in 2022, news reports said Zuckerberg, Moskovitz and Parker had lived there, with Zuckerberg and Moskovitz staying about a year. Accounts differ on the exact order of the two houses. Both are private homes today. Please do not visit them or photograph the residents.

That summer Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, made the company's first outside investment. Zuckerberg did not return to Harvard.

471 Emerson Street, 2005 to 2006

In January 2005 the company moved into its first real office, at 471 Emerson Street in downtown Palo Alto, just north of University Avenue. It leased the space under the name "The Face Book." A marker on the building records the dates: January 10, 2005, to July 30, 2006. Later in 2005 the company dropped "the" and became simply Facebook.

The building is one of very few corporate history markers in downtown Palo Alto, which makes it an easy stop on a walk. You can read it from the sidewalk.

Spreading across downtown

Facebook opened to high school students in 2005 and to everyone over 13 in September 2006. Growth was explosive and so was hiring. The company added office after office around University Avenue rather than building a campus. By 2009 it was in about ten downtown buildings, according to reports at the time of its move.

Some accounts name 156 University Avenue as one of the main downtown offices. We were not able to confirm that address against a primary source for this profile, so we mention it only as commonly reported. The broader point is well documented: Facebook's headquarters in those years was a cluster of buildings in and around University Avenue.

Spreading across so many buildings had costs. As the company approached 1,000 employees, TechCrunch reported that it had outgrown its downtown offices and needed a campus.

1601 California Avenue, 2009 to 2011

In August 2008 Facebook announced it would move to Stanford Research Park. The move began on May 14, 2009. The new headquarters was at 1601 California Avenue, often written 1601 South California Avenue, in a building of about 150,000 square feet. It had been used by Agilent, the HP spinoff, until late 2006 and had sat empty for several years. Our Hewlett-Packard profile explains how many HP and Agilent buildings found new tenants this way.

The move brought nearly 900 local employees under one roof. At an open house that June, reporters described a far more open layout than the downtown offices, designed so that people could see the colleagues they worked with.

One point confuses visitors. Despite its name, 1601 California Avenue is not in the California Avenue shopping district near the Caltrain station. California Avenue continues southwest across El Camino Real into the research park. The building sits on that stretch. Our page on Stanford Research Park has a map of the area.

The move to Menlo Park

Facebook outgrew the research park building quickly. By early 2011 it had more than 2,000 employees worldwide. In early 2011 it confirmed plans to move to the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, on 57 leased acres with about one million square feet of office space. The Stanford Daily reported that the first staff would move in 2011 and that the company planned to keep its Palo Alto offices until 2013.

The move began in late 2011. The new campus took the address 1 Hacker Way. Facebook went public in 2012 and renamed its parent company Meta Platforms in 2021. It is still headquartered in Menlo Park.

Facebook in Palo Alto: timeline

How to see the sites

The downtown part is easy on foot. From the Palo Alto Caltrain station, walk northeast up University Avenue past High Street to Emerson Street. Turn left and 471 Emerson is in the first block, just north of University Avenue. The marker is mounted on the building. To see 1601 California Avenue, you need a bike or car. It is in Stanford Research Park, across El Camino Real from the California Avenue shops.

What Facebook left behind

Facebook's Palo Alto years shaped the company and the city. Its downtown offices helped keep University Avenue a favored first address for consumer internet startups after the dot-com bust. Early employees went on to found other companies, among them Asana and Quora. Our pages on Google's Palo Alto year and Palantir cover two other companies from the same streets.

For the full list of companies with a Palo Alto chapter, see our companies guide.

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