Afternoon:
10°c
Supplicants to the VC gods on Menlo Park's Sand Hill Road have a swanky new place to stay. The luxurious Rosewood Sand Hill has just opened, right next to some of the most-famed VC offices in the region. Rooms are gorgeous but pricy; more for the hedge-fund crowd than boot-strapping entrepreneurs.
Still, those stiff room prices mean higher room-tax revenues for its host city. "We're ecstatic to have this here," enthused the mayor of Menlo Park at the opening. The place also provides 250 new jobs, many of which have gone to locals.
The Rosewood adds to a trend of upmarket accommodations opening in the moneyed northern part of the Valley. East Palo Alto now has a Four Seasons and Mountain View announced plans last week to develop its first full-service hotel near Google's HQ.
That leaves Palo Alto conspicuously without a decent new hotel. Instead, the city that likes to think of itself as the entrepreneurial heart of the Valley has been losing rooms to new houses, replacing tax earners with net drains on their services.
Will Menlo Park's new hotel thrive, though, in a down economy? You bet. Among its biggest customers are likely to be VCs themselves. Some are already preferring the Rosewood to Bucks in Woodside and Palo Alto's Il Fornio for power breakfasts.
They're also booking the business suites to meet with the boards they sit on and hiring the function rooms for their children's weddings. They're even likely to stay there with their spouses for the occasional child-free, recession-friendly "staycation".
What's less clear is whether the Rosewood, or its fancy competition, will help Silicon Valley in its eternal, but so far unsuccessful, efforts to sell itself as a tourist destination. Do people ever come here except to see family or do business?
* On Monday, local auction giant eBay announced it was selling the recommendation website Stumble Upon back to its two co-founders. We all thought it was about to do the same with Skype. But instead eBay has announced plans to float the online phone service it bought four years ago. So we have a big, juicy IPO to look forward to in 2010.
* Rumours persist that Twitter will sell to Google. Or maybe it will sell to Microsoft. Or no one. Who knows? Not even Kara Swisher of technology blog All Things D, one of the most-connected journalists in the Valley. Swisher got Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone on camera this week and asked them about it point blank, but they weren't talking.
