VC Firm a16z Leases at Starwood’s Miami Beach Office Building
a16z founders Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen with Starwood Capital Group’s Barry Sternlicht and 2340 Collins Avenue in Miami Beach (a16z, Wikimedia via Christopher Michel, Illustration by Priyanka Modi for The Real Deal with Getty)
Silicon Valley venture capital firm a16z will open an office at Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group headquarters building in Miami Beach, as the city tries to attract new-to-market firms.
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s a16z took 8,000 square feet under a five-year lease at the Class A property at 2340 Collins Avenue, according to a Miami Beach news release. It will open by year-end, according to Alec Kirschner, who brokered the tenant’s deal with Brandon Charnas. Both are with Current Real Estate Advisors.
The expansion is part of a larger overhaul for a16z. The firm, with roughly 400 employees, is switching to a cloud-based headquarters, and is also opening offices in New York and Santa Monica, Calif. It will keep its Menlo Park, Calif., and San Francisco locations, a company news release says.
a16z, which is also called Andreessen Horowitz after its founders, cited the remote-work shift that started two years ago as the root of the decision to become virtually based. Horowitz wrote in the release that running a tech firm remotely “works pretty darned well.”
Founded in 2009, a16z is one of the nation’s largest venture capital firms, with $33.3 billion of assets under management. It invests in tech, cryptocurrency, fintech, game, bio+ health care and other companies, from the seed to the late-stage level, according to a16z’s website. It has backed Facebook, Airbnb and Foursquare, as well as crypto company Coinbase.
Sternlicht also will move his family office Jaws, which is tied to Starwood and focuses on e-commerce, software and tech investment, to his Miami Beach building, according to the city’s news release. Jaws will hire 10 employees at the office over the coming years.
Completed last year, the six-story property totals 144,430 square feet, including roughly 8,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. It has a 305-space garage.
In South Florida, Brickell, Wynwood, downtown Miami and downtown West Palm Beach have attracted Silicon Valley firms, as well as financial companies from the Northeast and Midwest.
Ken Griffin’s hedge fund Citadel and financial services firm Citadel Securities will move their headquarters to Miami from Chicago, with media reports tying the buyer of a waterfront lot in the Brickell Financial District to Citadel. The 2.5-acre development site at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive sold for a record $363 million in April.
In Wynwood, Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois’ Founders Fund, along with Jack Abraham’s Atomic, were among the first new-to-market firms to open offices last year.
OpenStore, a tech e-commerce joint venture backed by Founders Fund and Atomic, also has an office in the neighborhood.
Miami Beach city leaders have been trying to shake off the city’s reputation as a party destination, partly by encouraging office development in hopes that the projects would capture the company influx to South Florida. In November, city voters will cast ballots on a pair of proposals by two development teams – one led by Don Peebles and the other by Integra Investments and including Barry Sternlicht as a co-developer – to build offices on two separate sites near Lincoln Road.
