 "factory loft")
Stephen Perlman, an inventor and tech executive, sold one of his first companies, WebTV, to Microsoft in 1997 for about half a billion dollars. At roughly the same time Perlman decided he wanted to create an incubator where artists, scientists, and engineers could create new technology.
He purchased two properties in a converted loft building in San Francisco’s South Beach neighborhood for what he estimates was about $1.5 million, and hired the architect Jim Jennings to convert the space. Given that he was building a space where people could invent things he’d never thought of (“you never know when you
