This section of the blog is for contributors’ experiences abroad – mostly from the perspective of entrepreneurship, although I’ll personally be including posts about subjects that I hope will be of general interest.

I’m starting off with a light subject – just a few picks and notes about a company that has become a daily part of many of our lives in recent years – Facebook.

During my stay here in Palo Alto, CA I’m living in College Terrace which is a very compact neighbourhood located right next to the Stanford University campus. Facebook is relocating its operations to a large office building just a few blocks away. As a community outreach effort, the company opened their doors for a few hours last Monday and gave people living in the area a glimpse of their new space.

For the past few years Facebook has been operating in several different building scattered around Palo Alto. Now that they’re relocating all 900 employees under the same roof, it will be interesting too see what effect, if any, it has on their operations. You’d expect that having people located closer together, especially with the type of open office plan they’ve chosen, would have a positive impact on communication and information flow.

We didn’t know exactly what to expect from the open house, but we had been promised free food prepared by Facebook’s head chef. Secretly I was hoping for the opportunity to discuss Facebook’s business model with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but I wasn’t that suprised to see that there weren’t many actual Facebook employees around. We got a very friendly greeting by people dressed in Facebook t-shirts at the main door. Other than the employees, the only evidence that we were in the right place was the large Facebook-blue rug at the entrance.

Welcome to Facebook

Otherwise, the 150,000 sq ft building was rather empty. Most of the furniture had not been moved in yet. The space was light and spacious, but it didn’t make a big impression as the headquarters of one of the world’s largest social networking sites. A friend commented that it was pretty “IKEA-like”, hopefully the employees moving in later this week will bring a touch of flavour with them.

Empty office space waiting for employees to move in

The food (sushi, cookies, olives, cheese, stuffed jalopenos, chicken fingers and other fried food) was good and the drinks free. I enjoyed a Facebook-sponsored beer and noted that many people seemed to have brought their whole family there for dinner. There was nice family-friendly, community feeling to the place with kids running around and people lining up for second helpings. The event was much like pre-house warming party. Do Finnish companies host these types of events for their neighbours?

All in all it was worth a visit, even though HQ didn’t quite live up to my expectations. The Facebook employees stationed as greeters at the front entrance seemed relieved to see all their visitors leaving and jokingly reminded me to “shutdown my MySpace account” as I passed them to exit.