A conference room at AOL’s West Coast HQ Mathew Scott for Bloomberg Businessweek By Douglas MacMillan The company has opened its sleek new Palo Alto offices to Valley startups, hoping some of the creativity will rub off “AOL is cool.” The phrase appears in big blue letters on a long whiteboard lining a hallway of AOL’s (AOL) newest outpost, in Palo Alto, Calif. Since the Internet giant signed a seven-year lease on a 225,000-square-foot building last August, it has thrown the space open to a wide assortment of startups, which work in close proximity to 170 of its own engineers. […]