Well, when humans try to explain a culture that was alien to them they tend to use examples from that encounter. I can very well see the founder proudly saying "Look at this cool 10 million dollar office we have!", and then this guy latched on to that statement as being representative of their culture. When I work at an office I don't know what it costs, I doubt he would have looked it up if they didn't tell him, so this explanation seems likely to me. Of course to you that is not a good representation of the culture, so you protest here. Which is good, now we all know a bit more how to state things so others can understand it.

We're not guessing, at least not randomly, we're using intuition. Applying experiences and subtle cues to create something more educated than a random guess.

I see you have something like a half dozen comments now trying to rationalize this all cross the comment section, but like yeah renting out a mansion for your startup does send out a "vibe".

If you don't realize that a) you're probably who they're looking for, and b) you probably have some room to grow when it comes to picking up on subtext.

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Not everything in life can be quantified in a neat little bullet pointed list. But part of being an experienced person is being able to pick out the more subtle aspects of situations.

To me a mansion as a startup HQ screams tech-bro 24-7 party culture with some major WLB issues.

And again, it's not like using a mansion magically causes that means that, but it strongly implies it.

It's like walking into an office and seeing everyone in suits and ties vs seeing everyone in sweatpants and baggy tees.

Technically the choice of clothes does not directly force you to behave a certain way, but your intuition should tell you that those are two very different cultures, and it should tell you a little bit about each.

tl;dr Ignoring intuition because it's not backed by unequivocal fact is not a super-power, and it's not really productive.

> Where else would you put your car tech startup in SF? Software engineers aren’t going to work out of a garage

At the same time as the $10m mansion place I interviewed for a self driving truck company and they had their office located in an industrial park in a shop that looks like it used to be an auto mechanic with upstairs offices. That place was fine but I didn’t feel like working for a 22 year old CEO who had just left college. Back in 2016 investors were dumping money on self driving car startups but I wanted something stable.

> Where else would you put your car tech startup in SF? Software engineers aren’t going to work out of a garage, and good luck finding a traditional office space with decent facilities for working on cars.

In…a garage. I’m serious - there are spaces big enough in SOMA and other places that can fit a garage space plus open office space plus some conference rooms (I’ve worked in several of them).

To me it seemed more expensive than renting a boring office building with few workshop bays with roll top doors. So to me, they were burning unnecessary cash and this made it seem like they were inexperienced. The CEO was some university researcher who had done some self driving car work and then had investors throw I think more than $10m at him. I just got the sense that this guy was feeling flush with cash and wanted to burn some on a luxurious multi level mansion with a pool and a hot tub.

I had just gotten out of a startup where the guy treated the place like his personal clubhouse and had a really controlling and abusive attitude. I wanted to steer clear of any company that seemed inexperienced.

It apparently doesn’t look that way to you, but that’s how it looked to me and I see other people here can relate.