Steve Blank: The Curse of a New Building – The Accelerators – WSJ.

“While our competitors furiously worked on regaining market share, we were arguing about whether the carpets should be wool or nylon. The result was not pretty.”

“We started to believe that the new building was a reflection of the company’s (and our own) success. We took our eye off the business. We thought that since we were in such a fine building, we were geniuses, and the business would take care of itself.”

Read more – one of the things we did at Adafruit is once we moved to our new location we added more space that came available as opposed to buying/building a new place, it allowed us to focus on the products, not carpet samples. Even when we were in an apartment, when we grew, we got an additional apartment until we could move to a location that was pre-existing, there was still work to be done, but not from scratch.