It’s a cold fall morning in Hayward, and I’m staring into a technicolor abyss of Herman Miller replicas neatly crammed inside a 50,000-square-foot warehouse.
Next to them, vintage Barcelona loungers, live-edge coffee tables and mid-century desk lamps idly sit, waiting to be claimed by savvy interior designers and young startup managers on a budget. My co-worker, who’s on site to take photos, beelines for a floral print monstrosity of an armchair, which may have very well once belonged to a high-powered executive at Meta’s New York offices. Though it might seem like some sort of rare corporate relic, at Better Source — which is in the multimillion-dollar business of liquidating failed Bay Area tech companies — there’s plenty to go around, and for much cheaper than you think.
Founded in the early 2000s, with multiple locations in Hayward, Silicon Valley and San Mateo, Better Source has spent the past two decades working with some of the biggest names in the industry. Pinterest, Google and Facebook are just some of its many clients, which have downsized and laid off thousands of people over the past several years. When I show up to one of the retailer’s massive warehouses along a lonely industrial corridor in the East Bay, employees tell me that they’re the biggest used office furniture dealer west of the Mississippi — and it’s hard not to believe them.
Office chairs are stacked up on shelves at Better Source, a warehouse that liquidates furniture from Bay Area companies and sells it at a discount, in Hayward, Calif., on Oct. 28, 2024.
A branded Zendesk cushion is among the office furniture fills the showroom display at Better Source, a warehouse that liquidates furniture from Bay Area companies and sells it at a discount, in Hayward, Calif., on Oct. 28, 2024.
Office furniture fills the showroom display at Better Source, a warehouse that liquidates furniture from Bay Area companies and sells it at a discount, in Hayward, Calif., on Oct. 28, 2024.
“We really don’t play in the lower-end world,” says CEO Darryl Denny of the company’s Hayward outlet, comparing it to a luxury car dealership. The idea came to him when he witnessed the first dot-com meltdown in the Y2K era, back when Silicon Valley felt like a capitalist utopia: At the time, VCs threw money........