SAN JOSE — The new Wrike headquarters underscore the hope by city officials that the future economic tapestry in the city’s urban heart weaves in many strands beyond Google and Adobe.
About 180 tech companies are located in downtown San Jose, according to city officials. And they all serve to create a wide-ranging economic foundation for the city’s urban core, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said Wednesday.
“What creates a thriving tech ecosystem isn’t just one or two giants,” he said. “It’s also hundreds of smaller dynamic companies like Wrike that attract talent and spur creative collisions that make downtown San Jose Silicon Valley’s city center.”
The Wrike offices, at 70 N. Second St. in what once was an old industrial building, function as a kind of micro transit village. They are perched on a light rail transit line and across the street from under-construction residences.
“It’s been an amazing journey to get here to downtown San Jose,” Andrew Filev, Wrike founder and chief executive officer, said during a ribbon-cutting event to formally mark the opening of the new offices. “We started in San Jose, moved to Mountain View and now we’re back in San Jose.”
Wrike, which provides software to help companies and individuals manage projects, also has appeared on fast-growing company lists and has raised an aggregate $26 million in venture financing, the company said. It employs about 75 in downtown San Jose, is in a hiring mode and has room to add more. Wrike plans to hire 40 more employees at the San Jose offices this year.
“We thought that we needed to move to Mountain View because for a while the conventional wisdom was that the tech talent was shifting north toward San Francisco,” said Frazier Miller, Wrike’s chief marketing officer. “But we soon discovered that there was so much talent to the south.”
Wrike also determined that by moving back to San Jose, the company could dramatically slash the commute burdens for its workers, which the company calls Wrikers.
“It turned out we could cut the commute times by an average of 15 minutes for our employees,” Miller said. “Our employers are delighted to be here.”
The 180 tech companies that were based in downtown San Jose in mid-2017 are up significantly from the 110 that were located in the central business district in 2013, according to a survey by city staffers.
“We are seeing a spectacular growth rate in tech companies in San Jose,” City Councilman Johnny Khamis, chairman of the San Jose council’s economic development committee, said during the event. “We want companies to start, succeed and stay in San Jose.”