Design like a billionaire: 7 workspace principles from Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs
San Francisco has a celebrated rep as the cradle of tech innovation, but it's also a hub for world-leading design—a city that shapes where and how things get made.
Levi Strauss patented the blue jean in San Francisco in 1853. After leaving Bay Area-founded Apple, Jony Ive—creator of the candy-colored iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad—stayed local, and now oversees OpenAI's future-forward creative from Jackson Square, one of the city's most historic neighborhoods.
SF’s spirit of designing the future is especially intoxicating in June, when international thought leaders from every industry flood the city's coffee shops, workshops, stores and coworking spaces during SF Design Week. This year, under the theme “Multitudes,” Michael Quesenbury will share how the romance of mid-century surf culture and coach builders Ferrari and Bugatti inspired him to perfect “The Art of Making Surfboards.” At Bang & Olufsen’s showroom, architect Craig O’Connell and guests from EMPIRE Records answer the question: What does a room sound like?
The program demonstrates that great work is never restricted to a single discipline or perspective. Neither is a productive working life: SF’s most successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders not only think of their offices, but also of their daily rhythm, experiences, and relationship to the city and its communities as where and how they work.
Here, CANOPY shares seven principles inspired by the world's most acclaimed entrepreneurs to help you design for success.
Pull down the walls
Yves Béhar runs Fuseproject, his San Francisco design studio responsible for myriad projects, including human-service-focused robots and Samsung's Frame TV, with no closed-off spaces and the kitchen as its social core. "I've never had a private office," he's said, dismissing any need to be isolated or separated. He didn't stop at his own studio: Béhar went on to co-found a design-forward coworking space in San Francisco, extending that no-walls philosophy to a broad community of professionals. Proximity, he wagers, flattens hierarchy faster than any org chart.
Across the bay in Emeryville, Steve Jobs had the Pixar headquarters built to promote, in biographer Walter Isaacson's telling, "encounters and unplanned collaborations"—routing the café, the mailboxes, and the campus's only restrooms through one central atrium so colleagues from different teams couldn't avoid each other. Your coffee bar, in other words, is a cultural decision that can accelerate connection and success.
Choose an inspiring location—ideally with a storied past
When Jony Ive left Apple to build his LoveFrom studio, he skipped building a gleaming tech campus for Jackson Square—San Francisco's oldest commercial quarter, a cluster of Gold Rush-era brick buildings that outlasted earthquakes, fires, and the lawless Barbary Coast. He's been candid about why: in a 2022 essay for the Financial Times, Ive recalled falling for the area on his first visit in 1989 and called its layered history the city's "bones." He has since assembled nearly a full city block there for a studio whose name invokes Steve Jobs' driving principle—that making something with "love and with care" is a way of expressing gratitude to humanity. The bet is likely commercial, too: real estate brokers dubbed 2024 the "Year of Jackson Square" as venture firms and designers crowded its streets—the same blocks where Béhar's coworking office operates a two-story location. A vibrant, walkable neighborhood workplace with texture feeds the work in a way a sterile office park can't.
Great ideas spark from a mixed crowd
When Salesforce founder Marc Benioff topped out San Francisco's tallest tower, he reserved the 61st-floor "Ohana" level not for executives but as a shared space open to employees, customers, nonprofits, and the public—a warm, residential-feeling design its creators dubbed "Resimercial."
This attitude toward the importance of public space is built into SF's blueprint. Since the city's landmark 1985 Downtown Plan, large downtown developments have been required to carve out publicly accessible areas—the plazas, atriums, terraces, and pocket parks known as POPOS—for the use of workers, residents, and visitors. The code even dictates how much sunlight each space must get and how well it must be shielded from wind.
The logic mirrors the Multitudes theme: When people of different disciplines, ages, genders and backgrounds gather in one place—and feel genuinely connected to the community and sense of place—they trade assumptions, spark unlikely combinations, and arrive at new ideas.
Surround yourself with what you make and sell
Airbnb, led by RISD-trained designer Brian Chesky, modeled its meeting rooms on actual apartments from its own listings, transforming conference rooms into the home experiences the company exists to rent. Chesky has explained the rationale plainly: In Y Combinator's "How to Start a Startup" lecture, he argued that to keep a team thinking like its customers, you have to "put your product in the building" so everyone is immersed in the world they are building for.
Levi Strauss & Co.—headquartered in San Francisco since patenting blue jeans in 1853—launched its redesigned headquarters at Levi's Plaza in 2025 with a working Levi's store right inside the building as a daily reminder of the vision the company is there to bring to life.
The best ideas arrive off the clock
In 2013, with his team down 8–1 and facing humiliation, Oracle founder Larry Ellison skipped the keynote at his own company's flagship conference to be on San Francisco Bay as Oracle Team USA achieved an incredible comeback, winning eight straight to retain the America's Cup. Ellison has always treated time on the water as essential rather than indulgent—and in 1996 he'd prescribed taking a sabbatical to burned-out protégé, Oracle vice president Marc Benioff.
Benioff decamped to Hawai‘i, and it was there, swimming in the open ocean among dolphins, that the vision for Salesforce came into focus: Building a company around his values. "I have gotten some of my best insights when I have been able to surrender myself to nature like that," he has said. San Francisco makes that surrender easy: Ocean Beach is one of Northern California's premier surf breaks and Crissy Field's Golden Gate winds draw world-class kitesurfers, while a Stanford study found that the simple act of walking measurably lifts creative thinking. Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey is a fellow believer, telling CNBC "If I'm with a friend, we have our best conversations while walking."
Make the meeting a meal and the city your network.
Serendipitous meetings spark inspiring conversations, as Maggie Spicer, founder of company culture firm WHISK, understands well. Maggie has taken brands from zero to launch and delivered world-class experiences to company teams and individuals. Her mission: to seek out the very best in every destination—singular places to sip and dine, design-forward offices and coworking spaces to ideate and collaborate. She recommends Parachute at the scenic waterfront Ferry Building for stellar morning pastries with conversation-sparking bay views, and Cotogna, a relaxed al fresco spot from one of SF's best chefs, for dinner. "Michael Tusk's rustic Italian trattoria in buzzy Jackson Square has been consistently excellent since it opened, which is rare. Coupled with its three-Michelin-starred sister restaurant, Quince, you can't beat it. Expect a wood-burning oven, good wine list, and pasta changes seasonally—don't miss the rabbit agnolotti."
The city and work are never finished—treat your city as your studio
San Francisco's defining habit is reinvention—it keeps reactivating its own buildings to spark fresh ideas and conversations. Exhibit A sits beneath the Transamerica Pyramid, where San Francisco-born artist Lily Kwong's Earthseed Dome—a 3D-printed living-soil structure embedded with seeds that bloom over time—is growing in Transamerica Redwood Park through July, with visitors invited to act as "human pollinators." It anchors the new nomadic model of the Institute of Contemporary Art SF, which gave up a fixed home to stage shows in the city's landmark spaces. Director Alison Gass's logic doubles as a question for anyone rethinking where work happens: "What if we find the right space for the right project?" The conviction that even a traditional office is provisional runs deep here—Chesky has called the concept "an outdated notion.”
This story was produced by CANOPY and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
