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Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
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After sitting vacant for more than two years, a new tenant for the former Sunset Publishing headquarters has been announced: finance tech startup Robinhood.
“The space will accommodate our growing team as we continue to democratize America’s financial system,” according to company spokesperson Lavinia Chirico.
Robinhood, which offers free stock trades, will be relocating its headquarters from Palo Alto to the Menlo Park building located at 85 Willow Road. The company currently has about 100 employees and plans to expand – its website listed openings for 19 positions in Palo Alto and more at an office in Orlando, as of March 19.
Menlo Park Mayor Peter Ohtaki said he was glad the former Sunset headquarters won’t sit vacant and that he hopes the company preserves the gardens.
The company was co-founded by two former Stanford roommates, Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, and launched its app in December 2014. According to the Wall Street Journal, it is going through a new funding round and is in the final stages of securing around $350 million from a group of investors led by Russian firm DST Global. The publication reports the company is now set to be valued at about $5.6 billion.
In February, the company launched trading for the cryptocurrencies bitcoin and Ethereum in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, and New Hampshire, according to the company’s blog.
Sunset gone
The company’s new headquarters has been vacant since the 120-year-old Sunset Publishing Corp. left Menlo Park for Oakland and Sonoma in December 2015. In 2017, the company was sold by Time, Inc. to Regent L.P., a Los Angeles-based private equity firm.
Sunset’s seven-acre campus was purchased by Embarcadero Capital Partners in December 2014, after Menlo College had briefly explored the option of buying the land to preserve and use for additional student housing. As of January 2016, the property owners planned to complete interior renovations but leave the existing building intact.
Robinhood expects to move in to the new offices when renovations are completed, sometime in the spring.
When asked whether the company would continue Sunset’s tradition of an open house for the public to access the gardens annually, the company stated it was not familiar with that tradition.
DST Global includes backing from the Russian government. DST was an investor in Facebook and Twitter.
Yuri Milner the head of DTS is also an investor in one of Jared Kushner’s businesses and considers himself a business associate of Kushner. Milner is a close friend of Mark Zuckerberg. Milner has a $100 million home in Silicon Valley.
Some news sources have described Milner as Vladimir Putin’s proxy.
Then perhaps you folks need to do more background work. Took me less than min using Google to find numerous articles with everything I included. NYTimes etc. Just try searching DTS Global, Yuri Milner, Milner and Putin, Milner and Zuckerberg, etc etc. It’s really quite a simple process.
That was less than “15 minutes” and also included info from LATimes and The Guardian.
And here’s the info again for you to check out.
DST Global includes backing from the Russian government. DST was an investor in Facebook and Twitter.
Yuri Milner the head of DTS is also an investor in one of Jared Kushner’s businesses and considers himself a business associate of Kushner. Milner is a close friend of Mark Zuckerberg. Milner has a $100 million home in Silicon Valley.
Some news sources have described Milner as Vladimir Putin’s proxy.