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This campus is unique in that it includes a luxury on-site apartment building. The live-in campus was the brainchild of Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd as part of his Class Of program.
Hurd was inspired to create the program by a dinner he had with his daughter and her friends a few years ago. They had just graduated from college, landed sales jobs and were rooming together. They were chattering about their lives which consisted of selling stuff and partying.
"They had this infectious enthusiasm and I thought we should do the same thing at Oracle," Hurd told Business Insider. People inside Oracle's legendary competitive salesforce were not happy with the idea at first. Hiring untrained college grads was a big change for the software giant who had "historically hired from competitors," he said.
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Undeterred, in 2013, Hurd began to hire thousands of college graduates to sell Oracle's cloud. He had to figure out how to train them and support their career growth until they could handle territories and clients on their own.
Today, the grads spend a few weeks in training, are tasked with cold-calling, then they shadow sales people. It takes three years of graduated training and work to get their own territories.
Then he decided Class Of employees need state-of-the-art facilities and help with affordable housing.
So in 2015, the story of this Oracle campus began, when Hurd hopped on a plane with Oracle founder Larry Ellison to Austin, and they walked along the river in search of the spot for the live-in campus.
The new campus is on 40-acres of prime riverfront property, mostly undeveloped.
The story goes, after seeing a few properties that were too small, Ellison and Hurd were walking along the river when Ellison turned the real-estate agent, swept his hand out and said, "how much for this area?"
The agent nearly choked. Ellison was pointing to acres and acres of premium land, one that included a partially finished apartment building.
Here is the front of the Austin Azul apartment building. My guides today are Oracle's senior director of real-estate Lindsay Pomeroy (left), Oracle's director of building services Ron Skipper Jr. (center), and a PR director, Greg Lunsford (right).
My tour guides also included four Class Of participants who work in the new facility.
They are (from left to right) Matt Cox from Boston College; Lauren Mosley from Baylor (originally from Southern California); Iesha Brown from Xavier University of Louisiana; and Jack Roberts from University of Virginia.
There are 294 units in the apartment building, ranging from a $1,505/month, one-bedroom to a $2,055/month, two-bedroom/two-bath unit. The apartments were available to the public and all of them rented out quickly, with 55% of them going to Oracle employees, Skipper tells me.
The amenities are bountiful, and include this giant recreation room ...
... an office and meeting space ...
... a big workout facility ...
... a media room ...
... and a huge pool, where everyone tends to gather on weekends to socialize and party. Because half of the residents work for Oracle, this is like "a grown up college," where "you know everyone," as one of the Class Of residents described the lifestyle.
The apartment building is only a short walk away from the office building. "I can go home for lunch and walk my dog," one person said.
That feeling of camaraderie is deliberate. Almost all the Class Of employees come from someplace else, as these college banners at people's desks show (Texas A&M, Michigan, and Southern Methodist University). The idea is to give them a social network in their new town — in addition to a job — at the start of their Oracle careers.
Here's a shot of the main office building. Oracle plans to build more offices on campus as well as a commercial restaurant that will be open to the public.
Inside the offices, there is state-of-the-art tech everywhere — from these curved monitors ...
... to giant screens that greet you in the lobby. Oracle is also building a center here, where customers can come in and get demos on Oracle tech.
This facility is still under construction. Just above those windows and to the right, Oracle is building a massive fitness center. Eventually employees will get workout equipment, basketball courts, a flag-football field and a ...
... sand volleyball court. At Oracle's Redwood City headquarters, pictured here, that sand volleyball court is a big deal.
The main lobby is massive. Look closely and you'll see a Starbucks at the far right-side corner (that brown, wooden counter). Hurd is a huge Starbucks fan (they are Oracle customers). He buys a grande vanilla non-fat latte every morning at his local Starbucks and he requested a Starbucks be built in the new Austin offices.
Starbucks not only agreed, but created a special Oracle drink menu, just for this location. Here it is.
There's an employee restaurant on-site. The food isn't free, although it is affordable ...
... and the restaurant uses Oracle's new touchscreen machines for ordering and paying.
Oracle bought the company that made these restaurant devices, Micros, in 2014 for about $5 billion. Oracle is eating its own dog food in Austin, or, perhaps, eating its own restaurant food.
The campus is also filled with art from local artists like this mural near the stairwell.
In fact, the big thing with this campus is murals that represent Austin. Here's a race-track game modeled after the only Formula 1 race track in America, called Circuit of the Americas, located in Austin.
We took a break from the tour and played with the race track. That's me in front, (losing). The tall man next to me is Downs Deering, SVP of Oracle Digital, and that's Lunsford smiling big because he won.
There are murals representing Austin's water parks ...
Locations of the city's many famous BBQ restaurants.
There are Rubik's Cubes-type murals, and ones that depict famous landmarks, the towns where employees are from, and many others.
Here's a better picture of Deering. He is basically responsible for managing Austin's cloud sales force, which mostly consists of young Class Of employees.
And here's Pomeroy, one of the people who oversaw the construction of this building, interacting with another art installation.
The Austin campus includes its own Genius Bar where employees can come in for tech support. The IT guys there were really nice. One of them was poached from Apple's Genius Bar and he loved all the new tech he gets to work with, especially ...
... the giant touchscreen wall, where self-help videos can play, along with other tutorials.
But the true gem of this campus is its outdoor space, right on the river. The river is to Austin what the beach is to California.
Oracle built a big outdoor patio, for lunching and parties.
Here's another shot of the patio.
The campus is just a few steps from Austin's river bike trail.
Oracle isn't the only company building a live-in campus for employees. Facebook is doing the same. But this site is unique in that it's aimed at college grads as a way to bridge the gap from school to a high-end sales career.
The program is clearly Hurd's favorite project. He throws a party for every Class Of class hosted at his Atherton, California, home, where he meets every grad.
He says of these young employees, "It's infectious, right? When you are around all that enthusiasm, it's infectious to the whole company."
