Good. Shitty founder, shitty idea, shitty execution.
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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I feel like we’ve found the theme for this particular arc of history.
Tl;Dr? Don't know anything about the company or CEO. But I can see the value of shared workspaces for remote employees who want to work in an office away from home distractions.and I can see why the pandemic would fuck that business model sideways.
The CEO started a workshare in Manhattan....got invested got SoftBank or someone to invest...so the way the scam worked is the CEO would get loans from the company buy office buildings and lease them to we work. Hell he trademarked "we work" and sold it to the company...he got crazy rich though.
CEO was a classic god-complex character who thought everything that came from his ass was magic. They expanded way too quickly and never had a path to profitability. Pretty sure they were cooked before the pandemic, which is even worse.
He personally trademarked the word "we" and then sold it to his company for 5 million dollars. He also owned a lot of the buildings the company had signed absurdly long leases on. It was literally a company set up with the sole intention of funneling VC money into his pocket directly. Even for the shady-ass world of start ups and VC firms what he did was pretty blatant. That's not even getting into how he portrayed the company as a tech start up when it just simply was not. It's like how Tesla and Ford sell about the same number of cars but Teslas market cap is 17x higher because they call themselves a tech company. At least with Tesla you could probably argue they were a tech company at some point early on, WeWork was never a tech company at all. Neumann got his start renting the spare office space he had after his previous company failed and just decided to run with it.
Couldn't agree more.
Extremely shitty idea.
I love this. It shows how you can dupe investors by promoting yourself as a tech startup? (IWG is another coworking space rental)
Speedrun. The evaluation was in 2019. Ridiculous. Whoever had a stake in it might as well be trading penny stocks.
Elon: Hold my beer!
Is WeWork pulling a Twitter or is Twitter pulling a WeWork?
eh. WeWork never posted actual profits. They relied on venture capital to stay floating.
The venture capital is running out because, it turns out, venture capitalists like to see returns on their investments. it's different than twitter, IMO.
Spaces like this would never work for me in the first place. Why would I travel to a fake office building that my company has nothing to do with to work? I would rather work from home, a library, or even a fast food/coffee shop than go to a pseudo office.
I'll fuckin bet someone came out singing ! Why do we allow this to continue to happen to penny shareholders? And workers alike.
IIRC, the founder/CEO got paid $1B to go away.
Nobody ever paid me to fuck off and go away. I feel that all my years of being an annoying alcoholic were just wasted now....
I'll fuck off and go away for way less than than $1B
I'll do it for half!
The Good, Bad, Billionaire podcast did an episode on Adam Neumann in the not so distant past. Didn't really add anything I didn't already know from watching the Jared Leto show on him, but it was still entertaining.
Huh? I thought they had gone bankrupt for a while now