Spiceworks’ New Headquarters Opens, Expansion Planned Already

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Spiceworks held an open house Friday for its new headquarters at 3700 North Capital of Texas Highway, in the same Hill Country-adjacent neighborhood as Bazaarvoice. The company, which provides a free network management IT community, reports 2,000 new members a day and has roughly 360 employees in its Austin headquarters.

Scott Abel, founder and executive board member, said Spiceworks modeled the new space after it’s previous space. “We cheated and replicated the old space because people really liked it. It’s very open. We experimented with a mix of open spaces and private offices. We played with high cubes and low cubes and no cubes and people really seemed to love the low cubes, so we stopped asking.”

About 300 people can fit on each of the 50,000-square foot floors and Spiceworks has two of the floors in the building with an option on a third.

“There’s a rumor we might accelerate that option,” Abel said. “We’re probably going to end up growing a little faster than we thought.”

In addition to the open spaces where various departments congregate in one section, there are private meeting rooms with names like Badger Den, Rawr, and Spice Spice. There are also several very small rooms that can let two people work together privately.

Abel was the one who recommended having a single communal kitchen for all departments on the first floor.

“If you don’t force people to interact they won’t,” he said. While each area has a little station with coffee and water, the food is all down in the kitchen. “There’s all this cross department pollination,” he said. Employees tell him often how much they like it because it introduces them to people in the company they would never have met otherwise.

“Culturally it matters immensely and employees tell me about it all the time. There’s this comfort level, feeling connected,” Abel said.

Spiceworks, founded in 2006, has raised $111 million in five rounds from six investors, according to its Crunchbase profile.