Twitter is on the hunt for office space in Kendall Square for its East Coast headquarters. According to our sources, the company is in the market for around 30,000 square feet of space, which should translate into roughly 160 employees. In an email, Twitter declined to comment.
In Q1 of this year, Twitter made its two largest acquisitions to date, both in Boston, snatching up mobile crash reporting startup Crashlytics and social TV analytics startup Bluefin Labs. We’ve expected for a while that these two firms would end up sharing space, and the newly created @TwitterBoston proudly describes itself as:
Twitter’s East Coast Headquarters! (Sorry
@TwitterNYC 😉
Bluefin’s team was around 75 at the time of the acquisition, but a source with direct knowledge told us during our previous reporting that about a third of the team was let go as part of the deal. Crashlytics is substantially smaller, though I don’t have an exact headcount. So the space that Twitter is looking for suggests that its presence here will be substantially expanded in the coming months and years.
UPDATE 12:49p.m.: In addition to eight openings for Bluefin and Crashlytics, the Twitter site has an open position for an HR Business Partner in Boston.
There’s only one problem: finding space in Kendall is really difficult. (Kendall is working to change that, but it’s going to take a while.) We’ve known for a while that Facebook has been on the hunt for some space there, and no word yet that they’ve found anything. So it’ll be interesting to see what Twitter is able to come up with. No matter what, expect Twitter’s Boston presence to continue to expand and formalize.
I’ve said it before, but it’s hard to underestimate the importance of this. For all the empty rhetoric about Boston losing its game and whatnot, one of the most successful tech companies in the country has 1) made its two largest acquisitions here, and 2) settled on Boston as its East Coast headquarters even though it’s a media company. It’s great news for the ad agencies and – though some startups in competition for developers might deny it – for the tech ecosystem.
I’m on the record for NYC-Boston collaboration over competition, but this is still nice bragging rights for Boston.
If you know anything about progress Twitter or Facebook in finding local office space, let me know: walter [at] bostinno [dot] com.
Image: Bluefin Labs’ current office, via Bluefin
