AOL Tries for Some Silicon Valley Cred - BusinessWeek

AOL: an odd landlord

Nothing is less cool than professing one's coolness, of course, especially if you're an Internet dinosaur evoking a bygone era of dial-up modems. AOL was a hot stock in the 1990s, only to become half of AOL Time Warner in one of the worst mergers in U.S. history. The company spun off in 2009 and has a market cap of $2 billion; that's a fraction of its value on the day the Time Warner merger was announced. Yet AOL's quest for cred may actually be working. There's a waiting list of startups that want to move in. "We really have tried to make our offices into centers of creativity where we can invite other people to come in and work with us," says Tim Armstrong, chief executive officer of the New York-based company. "The opportunity is to take some of the world's best entrepreneurs and technologists and have them work in a deeply engaging place."

AOL Tries for Some Silicon Valley Cred - BusinessWeek