Vermillion Triangle. Purple Parallelogram. Coral Rectangle. If you can’t decide if these conference rooms’ names are more weird than cool, or more cool than weird, you’re probably in the office of Crimson Hexagon.
But the Boston-based social media analytics company has an unusual name itself, so let’s start with that.
In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, the Library of Babel is an infinite series of hexagonal rooms where books are written in every possible arrangement of letters. The only way to find meaning in this sea of gibberish is locating the Crimson Hexagon, the only room that contains a log of every other book in the library.
In an analogy to the special room in Borges’ story, the company’s name conveys the meaning that in the sea of apparently meaningless social media interactions, it can unlock relevant data and knowledge for their enterprise customers. The fact that the company was co-founded in 2007 by a Harvard professor, Gary King, and that crimson’s the official color of Harvard may have played a role as well.
By combining different shapes and colors, the company came up with its conference room names. The largest one - named Emerald Pentagon - is right near the entrance and it’s where the big meetings with executives usually take place.
The Harvard-born company currently occupies a two-story space of over 28,000 square feet in the Innovation District, only a short walk away from the new GE headquarters whose construction has been recently delayed. The first floor is the home of the service, sales and consulting departments. Upstairs, you can find the marketing, finance and IT people, as well as the engineers. The entire space is meant to encourage collaboration.
Here are some of the photos that I took during my tour of Crimson Hexagon.
