The Obvious Offices are located in downtown San Francisco, near the Powell St. BART stop, just around the corner from the Apple store, which is convenient because everyone at Obvious uses Apple products. Macbook Airs, iPads, Magic Mice and Apple wireless keyboards: Tim Cook would not be disappointed.

The space is pretty much exactly what you’d expect a well-regarded San Francisco startup office to look like. It has that modern, industrial feel that is all cool California class: cement walls frame six foot glass windows, fat, exposed pipes and air ducts snake across the ceiling.

On the 8th floor of a building that also includes car service startup Uber, it’s a beautiful office with a beautiful view of downtown San Francisco, but the Obvious employees don’t seem to notice. It is quiet, they are heads down, almost all of the shades yanked down fully to shield the sun from splashing a glare across their monitors.

Josh Miller, the cofounder of Branch, shows us around the office. It is very quiet--you can tell everyone is intensely focused on whatever they’re working on. Some are sitting, some are standing: the matching desks, which are white and shiny and expensive-looking, are adjustable, so you can sit for one part of the day and stand for another.

We Skype this to our editor. “Of course they have adjustable desks,” she shoots back. We are definitely jealous.

Mr. Miller leads us to the end of the office, where a conference room full of windows gives us a breathtaking panoramic view of all of downtown San Francisco. If you look down there, you can kind of see the ferry building, he says. We squint: there it is!

When we look away from the view, Mr. Miller points out the fully-stocked premium wet bar that occupies one wall of the conference room. Top shelf liquors span the bar, and there is a moment where we feel intimidated by their labels: for Mr. Miller, who is just 21, Vladi’s or Franzia is more his style, he jokes.

Finally we settle into another conference room with large windows. There are racks for employees to hang their bikes on. Next to it, one lonely razor scooter--who would ride a razor scooter to work?--hangs sullenly.

“They have a fully stocked wet bar!” we Skype to our editor.

“So does the Observer,” she writes back.

“Nah, just kidding.”

Click through the slideshow to see some snaps of the Obvious digs.

Branch cofounders via bulletin.branch.com

When you've got Evan Williams, John Borthwick, and Max Levchin chatting it up on your "curated discussion platform," it's probably just a matter of time before the high-powered investors, incubators makers, and other loosely-defined collectives come a' calling.

Today, Branch, the startup that initially launched in New York City as group blogging service Roundtable, announced that is now partnered with Obvious Corp and picked up investments from Lerer Ventures and SV Angel. Although Branch has been working out of Obvious headquarters since the beginning of this year, the startup will move to Betaworks this summer. Cofounder Josh Miller's announcement is somewhat obliquely worded, but it sounds like Rick Webb, Lucas Nelson, Ryan Freitas, and David Tisch also joined the round.

The size of the round wasn't disclosed. However, this Form D SEC filing for Roundtable Media (the startup's original name) filed by Joshua Alexander Miller, seems to indicate that the size of the round was $1,999,997 and fully subscribed. The address on the Form D, for example, is the same address as Obvious Corp. According to the Form D, the funding was an equity round with seven investors and the date of first sale is listed as February 15th. We have reached out to Mr. Miller for confirmation.

In Obvious Corp's post about the new partnership, the company makes it sound like a Quora for experts:

The prototype, called Branch (formerly Roundtable), enables a smart new brand of high quality public discourse. Curated groups of people are invited to engage around issues in which they are knowledgeable. This service holds the promise of a new platform for dialogue on the web—a necessary departure from the monologues we have grown so accustomed to reading online. Obvious is thrilled to be partnering with such a friendly, gifted team on this project.

The "Branch" about the partnership announcement, for example, includes Obvious Corp's Evan Williams, Mr. Miller, and tech journalists like Eric Eldon, Sarah Lacy, and Claire Cain Miller. What, no Betabeat? Ms. Lacy didn't waste any time pointing out the competitive landscape:

"seems like several companies have tried to do closed, high-brow conversations as a reaction to mass communities that don't scale. none of them seem to catch on. thinking of things like gather and that one in so. cal now that i have used so infrequently i can even remember the name of it."

Mr. Miller's response:

"I spoke with Brian (Namesake) and Cody (Nerd Collider) months ago, and learned a lot about the hurdles they faced. One way we're different: we're focusing on the interaction between participants, not the interaction between participants and viewers.

But the starting point for us is this: every other publishing platform is centered around monologues, the conversation is always secondary. That doesn't seem right to us. So we're flipping that dynamic on its head."

Not invited to the conversation, but still wondering what sets Branch apart? You'll have a chance to pepper Mr. Miller and his cofounders Hursh Agrawal and Cemre Güngör when they move back this summer. As Mr. Miller writes, "We could not be more excited to rejoin the New York tech community."