On December 8, several thousand Adobe employees and their guests gathered around the arena at the Chase Center in San Francisco for the company’s 40th anniversary party. Beginning at 7 p.m., Adobe employees and their dates shot hoops in an arcade, got temporary bomb tattoos, and grabbed drinks and food (tacos, sliders, dumplings) from various vendors. One employee noted that the abundance of activities and refreshments was “like a music festival.”
At around 8:30 a.m., CEO Shantanu Narayen took to a stage on the arena floor to thank employees for their hard work and screen a company-produced video. Eighty-two-year-old Adobe founder John Warnock made an appearance, to much applause. The stage then turned into a fantasy land full of mushrooms and the surprise headliner of the night came out: Katy Perry.
For approximately 90 minutes, the pop star, dressed in a red latex leotard with matching fringed leggings, serenaded the crowd with her greatest hits – “Hot N Cold”, “I Kissed a Girl”, “Last Friday Night (TGIF)”, “Teenage Dream”, “California Gurls”. There were dancers and smoke effects, confetti bursts and beat drops, all for the enjoyment of a lucky group of technicians. One participant said: “People seemed ecstatic.”
And they had good reason to be: Unlike the rest of Silicon Valley this year, Adobe went big for its 2022 holiday party. inventory was higher and employees were showered with an embarrassing array of perks. In 2015, Yahoo would have spent $7 million at his “Great Gatsby” themed holiday party, which included a champagne tower, burlesque dancers and photo ops with a vintage Rolls-Royce. In 2018, Meta Platforms (then Facebook) transformed San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts into a winter wonderland, with an ice sculptor carving a block of ice with a chainsaw and fake snow falling overnight. Just last year, Salesforce employees wrapped up the year with a private Maroon 5 concert in Oracle Park.
Today, these parties represent a bygone era of excess.
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