Soon, Salesforce will occupy nearly an entire SoMa intersection with three separate offices, one of them of course being the sky-high obelisk, Salesforce Tower.But back in 1999, founder Marc Benioff and his three employees worked out of an apartment on Telegraph Hill, right next to Benioff's own home. "We didn't have furniture, so we used card tables and folding chairs," Benioff writes in his book about the company founding. (Tech companies love little more than talking up their threadbare origins.)Note that units in this same Telegraph Hill cluster now sell for $6.5 million.

Is there any Silicon Valley success story more iconic than the storied founding of Apple in a mere garage in Los Altos? The founding Steves (Wozniak and Jobs) assembled the first Apple I board in a carport workshop in 1976. A far cry from the Norman Foster designed UFO ready to land sometime in 2017.

Of course, Apple's founding Steves knew that they weren't the first would-be computing giants to take the garage path to success. David Packard and Bill Hewlett put together their first machine in a barn-like garage next to the Palo Alto house where Packard and his wife rented rooms for $45/month. Mind you, this was back in 1938. HP bought up the old place in 2000, preserving it as a museum of not only their own origins, but those of Silicon Valley as a whole. It's also a registered California landmark.

Ebay (then called AuctionWeb) started up in founder Pierre Omidyar's living room in San Jose in 1995. It's first proper office to speak of, though, was a small suite on Hamilton Avenue. And they're still there--they've just branched out a bit. The old office is now known as "building number six" on the Ebay campus.Rumor has long held that Omidyar founded Ebay to help his wife with her Pez dispenser collection. But the company now says this is a myth; which is a shame, since few things have as much micro appeal as Pez.

A hat trick for Silicon Valley garages, as Sergey Brin and Larry Page also put heads together in a carport in Menlo Park, rented from a future Google employee who in those days was just looking for some extra money to cover her mortgage. Google, of course, is now as famous for its Willy Wonka-style office complex as its search engine.Tourists are so fond of photographing the place that the company asked the press to stop publishing the address. Problem is, people keep finding it on their own, via Google. Hoist by their own petard; oldest story in the book.

These days, the phrase "Twitter building" evokes not just an address but a lengthy catalog of associations about San Francisco, the tech industry, the housing market, and, for certain people, proletarian rage. But before they struck the defining real estate deal of modern startup culture, Twitter worked out of a single small office in the Obvious Ventures building in the Presidio. Who knew?

Point number one, Silicon Valley's favorite movie deliverers/streamers/makers started out not in Silicon Valley, but closer to Santa Cruz. Point number two, a company founded on the principle of delivering movies to your home started out with no home of its own, operating out of a Best Western hotel room. Room service might not be a bad amenity for present SV HQs to emulate.