73 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] thread
Just like these people posing as something else

Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler raped and killed boys on 14Jan2O19. President Trump did the same earlier that morning in Buffalo. Listen to each of them do this here. How did Schiff & Nadler become "impeachment managers" for Trump's "impeachment"? $1O6+billion in payoffs. See page 9,13,22-47,85, 131 \\thread.wait();\Wag The Dog: first was feigned impeachment hearings meant to obstruct, now an attack on Iranians in Iraq. Here is what they are trying to distract from & cover up to retain power. $100+ billion in bribes to the highest offices in this country. 815+ deaths from child rapes to prove loyalty!

See the latest PDF updates: FBI Director Wray, AG Barr, SoD Shanahan, & SoS Pompeo each raped boys and were paid billions in bribes for a Soros & Koch funded child rape org. So did Trump & his "impeachment" team Nadler,Schiff,Mueller.So did media moguls Redstone,Murdoch,Moonves. What are they trying to set up? Who can arrest them since they are all bribed and in on it ?

Their strategy to stay in every office and obstruct until forced to leave no matter what. Feigning impeachment: see page 13O.

\\if;Download the video/audio file, put on headphones and turn up the volume. You will hear these people committing these crimes. Audio was broadcast into my apartment by outdated surveillance equipment illegally embedded within my walls. This very same technology was being used to broadcast me to the internet for five years without my consent. I own this footage. Please use this to prosecute all found within. Note:: I am obliviously speaking throughout the video, and it can be quite loud at times relative to the desired content. The are dozens more links, including these, that can be found in this PDF last updated 30th Jan 2O2O:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W...

All members of the "Illuminati"; "....an underground organization of homosexuals and child rapists..." (from pg 26: Barack Obama with Jack Dorsey).

President Donald Trump:

Demands a $4 billion dollar bribe here at 10:18am 4thJan2019:

3JanCh3_900-1100.avi

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77...

3JanCh2_900-1100-avi

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LUmVygl_q0XVs8h2cWr8jZl-24f...

3JanCh4_1000-1100.mp3

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZpP1pJbJakBgg-y-MWNozTxp3wJ...

President Trump rapes and kills twelve boys, including five boys in a "who can rape five boys to death the fastest" game:

14JanCh3_600.mp3

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ufPmglde9Mep0m6xYMJ9c4TWTjj...

14JanCh2_600-700.mp3

https://drive.google.com/file/d/136qLJdEn8eCs9tI4QtIxl4opW_L...

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi:

Accepting a $3 billion dollar bribe at 1033 am on the 17th of Jan 2019 to ensure Asian boys can get through the border at "Monterrey" undocumented to be raped:

17JanCh3_949-1100.avi

Never really understood how WeWork was considered to be a “tech company” when in reality, at least to an outsider looking in, it was always a real estate company. I guess being a real estate company doesn’t attract as many investors and hype as a tech company does. Maybe I’m wrong and they are a tech company but it really does not appear like it. Makes way more sense for them to have some one with real estate experience run them rather than some tech exec.
By that note, Uber is a taxi company and Netflix is a TV broadcaster. Which is pretty much true.
yep, entirely fair statement. What defines tech companies is essentially low marginal cost of production as they scale and a defensible technological advantage.

It's becoming pretty clear that neither Uber nor Netflix have that. Uber's biggest costs are drivers, marketing and regulatory issues which keep piling up. Netflix biggest asset appears to be original content as the platform itself has plenty of competition, and costs for content seem to go up linearly.

However, for those, tech is an essential part of business, and it is not trivially replicable. (at the scale they operate at least)

Wework not so much it seems

Netflix was a tech company. Their web-based logistics was every bit as much tech as Amazon. Their streaming platform was groundbreaking - Video-On-Demand services had existed before, but they brought new scale and techniques to it, at a time when that was still very hard.

But no, Netflix is no longer special there - Their tech is tried and true, the problems are still interesting but well solved. They ceased being a tech player... five years ago?

Netflix is responsible for more than 10% of downstream internet traffic. Dealing with that is definitely not "off the shelf". (E.g. caching servers set up at ISPs).

That being said, only a small percentage of their market cap is related to their technology. They could outsource the whole thing to BAMTech and it probably wouldn't affect them much.

I think you and the person above you are underselling Netflix's innovation. Yes it's true, they mostly solved the problem of streaming video over the internet, and most changes there are incremental.

But they are currently innovating massively in machine learning and other data analytics. They are also innovating in "Hollywood tech".

Hollywood still uses old tech to move from capturing the actors performance to putting it in front of viewers. They mostly still track their assets with Excel (or on paper!).

Netflix can get a show from filming to viewers a lot faster than most of Hollywood can.

> But they are currently innovating massively in machine learning and other data analytics.

I bet I could find that exact sentence used somewhere to justify wework as a "tech company".

You probably could, but I would say their machine learning isn't a core part of their product that drives profits. The machine learning at Netflix has a huge impact to the product. Streaming drops 20%+ when the recommendations are offline.
True but on the other hand the technology they develop plays a central role in how they operate which sets them apart from the traditional taxi company/broadcaster.

WeWork seems to just rent out real estate and at least on the surface it does not look like tech is defining fundamentally how they do it.

It all comes down to demand for me. These legacy+tech companies create additional demand by virtual of their tech.

Uber services opportunities that couldn't be serviced by traditional taxi companies (on demand, low latency rides).

Which makes the crux of these businesses "Does your technology create enough additional, currently-unserved demand to hit your growth targets?"

They own a bunch of software companies like meetup and fieldlens. They were making a play to become the Creative Cloud or 365 of both building management and the gig economy workers.

That vision has been clipped now, before we ever saw a chance to see it finish playing out. If part of their valuation was future potential, then I agree they were worth more while trying to be something new, than they are as just a real estate shell.

The funny thing is that “value added economy-of-scale brand-driven tech-driven real estate” is pretty much just table-stakes real estate. The hotel industry has been doing this for decades and has never seen these kinds of multiples. The weird thing is that SoftBank should have known this years ago.
Remember when Amazon was just a bookstore?
That was before AWS came into the picture. Amazon is definitely a tech company that sells widgets on the side, seeing as AWS is where the majority of their profits are derived. By leveraging this large profit margin, they are able to sell at near break-even or even afford to lose some money to attract customers (like prime subscription discounts).

This is how monopolies are started.

I remember Amazon having its own search engine as far back as 2000. So they weren't just a bookstore even then.
Because no one would entertain these ridiculous valuations unless they were told it was a tech play. Apparently that has been successful if justifying valuations that have no basis in reality.
And the company now seems to be valued as a real estate -- not a "tech" -- business...

...which makes sense, because WeWork is a real estate business, albeit one with an unproven model.

Subletting is a pretty well proven business model. IWG, formerly Regus, has been offering office space in a substantially similar manner since 1989.

The model works, if the short term leases balance out the long term leases and other costs.

> IWG, formerly Regus, has been offering office space in a substantially similar manner since 1989.

Have you ever been to a Regus? Most souless depressing places on earth.

WeWork was substantially different in quality.

Regus is very depressing, I agree. Feels like a waiting room. I've never been to a WeWork (left corporate life before they became a thing), but I'm sure it's much better.
I've been to both, and WeWork is definitely much better. But I'm not sure how much that has to do with the benefits or the decor. I think it's more because of the people they attract vs Regus -- young and bustling. It gives the place a more lively feel.

OTOH, it could be because of all the fun toys that they attract that crowd.

Wework is just Regus with better branding.

Much like we now have up-market coffee shops. It's not innovative, just a perfected execution of an existing idea.

Right, it's a lot better. Isn't that enough to build a good business on?
Only if the unit economics make sense. It doesn't matter how "good" your service is when you lose money acquiring customers. Your only strategy is market domination, which may work for some businesses, but not one where any market downturn would screw you six ways to Sunday.
Depends on if there's enough demand for the service from people who consider Regus an unacceptable option.

Starbucks built an empire on the unserved masses of people who (1) wanted to be people who went to coffee shops & (2) were scared to go to actual independent coffee shops.

It seems a good path for WeWork to follow. Lower costs and broaden appeal, just enough to cater to people who won't use Regus.

Is anyone really scared to go to an independent coffee shop? Seems like they just didn't want to go bad enough. But since Starbucks is everywhere, you no longer have to cross the street to drop in at a coffee shop.
> were scared to go to actual independent coffee shops

Nobody's 'scared' to go to an independent coffee shop. This is a ridiculous snobby notion.

Well if u have an extreme peanut allergy for example.. in a big corporate place everything is in a packet, just made in a big factory and you can get a list of the ingredients.. Whereas in a small cafe, they may have made the cakes themselves + put a cake with nuts next to a non-nut cake on the shelf. Personally, having a nut allergy, I feel less stressed by soulless corporate homogeneous food. Though still jusy much happier never going to any place of that ilk and having my own food (wayyy cheaper too).
I took it to mean they were scared to be treated like they don’t fit in. That is a real thing. One example: There is a chain that sells “goth” and other pop culture lifestyle goods to mostly teens call Hot Topic, mostly in malls. They improved their business prospects by being friendly and professional to would-be goths’ parents and kids with parents and other “outsiders”. I’m sure they take biz from a lot of independent outlets that way. I.e., don’t be scary.
Is being one of the many, many coffee shops that serve better coffee in more enticing environments than Starbucks enough to build a good business on? Answer: yes, but probably not a business worth an order of magnitude more than Starbucks, and especially not a business whose growth is predicated on using VC money to give the coffee away for free whilst the ex-CEO milks it for cash. A lot of the many, many businesses reselling charmingly-decorated desk space without the hype and self-dealing should be fine.
Not a very defensible business model if you have massive competitors that need little more than some colorful paint and a few shared desks smashed together in the middle of the room.
Hmm I don't know. The fact that it never occurred to Regus to make the working environment even remotely pleasant makes me think they don't 'get it' in the way that WeWork do, and it's a more deep divide. They may be able to literally paint their offices now it's been pointed out to them by someone else how horrible they are, but they're probably still missing the point even if they do that.
Alternate hypothesis: Regus has successfully scaled and retained its customer base and makes a big profit per desk whilst not following the trend of the thousands of other spaces being sublet with trendier decoration and social spaces, most of them not by WeWork. Maybe it's not the company whose investors have written down 90% of their investments which is the one that 'gets it'

McDonalds makes terrible beefburgers too, but they're doing just fine.

I'm pretty sure it occurred to Regus to dress up their offices; perhaps they couldn't afford to do it on WeWork's scale because they actually focused on profitability as opposed to carefully threading emperor Neumann's garments with Softbank's money.
On the other hand, WeWork really isn't substantially different in quality from the many other businesses selling desks to startups.

Regus being bland is probably something they consider a commercial edge tbf.

One of the problems we encounter when comparing companies and their product/service offerings is when we compare a self-sufficient business to a venture that is subsidizing its offering with investment capital.

Uber was amazing in the early days, the cars were better than taxis, I remember getting driven around in a Mercedes and not having to pay a premium for the nicer car. And there were cars always available, because the drivers were getting good money for every ride.

It turns out that these nicer features weren’t a consequence of software and maps and efficiently matching rides with cars, it was as simple as raising billions of dollars, and running the business at a loss.

I suggest it’s the same with WeWork. Their nicer offices weren’t a question of vision or aesthetic taste or efficiencies from technology. They were nothing more than spending Softbank’s billions of dollars and running at a loss.

I accept that you feel they were offering a higher-quality experience, but we have to come to grips with the fact that it was an illusion. They were never going to magically reach enough scale that they could break even or make money offering that service at that price to that “demographic” of customer.

I feel like WeWork is in some way in a worse situation than Uber, DoorDash, and other “gig economy” businesses. Those businesses can squeeze their employees (that they classify as independent contractors in order to maximize the misery they can inflict).

Who can WeWork squeeze? Nobody. The gig economy is nothing more than rolling back any and all protections for workers, but dressing it up as technological progress.

What is WeWork’s story? There’s nobody to squeeze, no regulations to flout in order to cut costs. There’s no inefficiency that iPads and WiFi and digital services get rid of.

So naturally, now that the money hose has been turned off, the squeeze is on WeWork and its customers.

But I think WeWork can grow the market.

Before I'd never consider going to a co-working space. Might as well go and sit in a grotty cupboard. Now I'm inspired to give it a go.

Until they cut the quality enough, to achieve profitability, that you no longer want to go but they're still on the hook for their long term leases.
The question you should ask is: If Regus couldn't grow the market beyond where it's at, what gives WeWork a competitive advantage that it could.
> The question you should ask is: If Regus couldn't grow the market beyond where it's at, what gives WeWork a competitive advantage that it could

I already answered that - a pleasant environment - that's their competitive advantage. Regus aren't able (or don't want to) meet that part of the market.

From a business perspective, “a pleasant environment” is not a competitive advantage. For it to be a competitive advantage, we need to understand why, structurally, WeWork can offer this and Regus can’t.

By way of analogy, if we say that Amazon’s pricing is a “competitive advantage,” we can also explain what Amazon has done structurally that makes their pricing hard to copy. Anybody can set a low price on a product or service, but not everybody can do so and make money.

Same with WeWork. If a nice environment is a competitive advantage, we can point to something in WeWork’s structure that makes it difficult for Regus to duplicate.

If Regus can duplicate it without difficulty, then we need to rethink whether it’s an advantage, or simply something you happen to prefer, but doesn’t matter.

By way of a different analogy, consider free coffee in hotel rooms. Everybody prefers it, but for decades you got it in motel chains, but not from the big hotel operations.

Why idn’t they offer free coffee? Because their customers were actually corporations, and the things that mattered to corporations were centralized billing, locations close to airports and business centres, and so forth.

This allowed the big hotels to drag their feet on in-room amenities like free coffee or free WiFi. It wasn’t nearly the competitive advantage it appeared to be.

Another way to put it:

What’s easier? Regus learning how to offer free espresso and decorate their offices for the startup crowd? Or WeWork learning how to spend less money than it earns in revenue?

Is Regus struggling with so much excess capacity that they need to try to attract companies with 'startup culture'? I'd think they'd want predictable cash flows from tenants, rather than a VC-funded company that might cease to exist in 12 months.
My coworkers and I got a lot of good meals out of SpoonRocket, which would deliver to your home or office door in Oakland for $6, later $8, within minutes of placing an order. Their claim was they were cutting costs by offering one choice of meal per day, so they could put drivers on the road even before people were ordering (and also use economies of scale in meal prep). The latter was true as far as it went - we eventually learned that gig drivers would just park in our parking lot at 11:45 and wait for orders. But that didn't help with pricing. They were actually just VC-subsidized, and we all knew they'd shut down eventually.
I'm using this service called MealPal. It's ~GBP 5 for a meal, as long as your preorder it the previous evening (or same day early morning).

You can get meals that retail for GBP 8 using this service. So that's a 37% discount in an industry that is notorious for its tight margins.

My first thought when I heard of it was "oh wow, better sign up before their VC money runs out"

> WeWork was substantially different in quality.

WeWork is also substantially different in price.

In London, WW is probably 2x the price of a Regus office, for comparable location and surface area.

I'm currently in a Regus office space and it's horrible. It's extremely expensive, extremely dry air, bad air conditioning, even in winter it's always hot, bad coffee for 1€ minimum per cup from a bad cleaned machine. I hope my company will move fast.
I’ve really liked my wework space — recently I’ve started to see early signs of cost cutting ...

They’ve moved the cold brew downstairs so there is only one tap instead of two and replaced it with a much lower quality cold brew (the old one was extremely good — from a super high quality local source)... it’s small but feels like it’s probably the beginning of what is likely to be a long quality decline ...

Not in a WeWork anymore, but once was. A former co-worker said newly renovated WeWork's are also dropping the free beer, so another cost cutting measure.
I was at one in Austin for about 18 months. After the first few months we usually had to go ask them to unlock the taps ourselves. Some days there was nothing but Coors Light
For non-Austin readers, this is on par with a warcrime.

Probably a joke in there about Shiner Bock too.

Thats not whats happening. This guy is an angel of death (to landlords). His career skills/responsibility is going to be to basically renegotiate every lease to make it viable for WW. Its going to cause problems.
Now please treat Tesla as a car manufacturer instead of "Tech"
Makes sense because it's a real estate - not a tech - company
Granted, most "tech" companies probably aren't tech companies. We just consider them tech for the following reasons:

- They're headquartered in Silicon Valley or some city like San Francisco, Portland, or New York.

- They have an app.

- They are adjacent to actual tech in some way.

- They portray the image of being innovative in some way.

WeWork has all of those, making them a "tech" company in the eyes of journalists and the average person, though for the life of me I don't know why someone would install the WeWork app.

WeWork is clearly less of a tech company than even this, because their app (which every company has now) is essentially no more technologically interesting than doing it all on paper. Uber for example would never exist without the app and its GPS technology. A clear difference imo.
Only reason why Uber can't be on paper is due to the time factor inherent to the service: you need a taxi quickly and an office can be slower. I don't consider taxi companies as tech companies. Tinder also hasn't created any new technology AFAIK, could also work on paper.
Tinder's matching algorithms, regardless of your opinion on whether or not they work, couldn't be feasibly done in paper.
This new CEO looks like another Softbank shill and will be a blow for culture at WeWork.
Why would WeWork deserve to keep any of its culture?
The mass media pile-on to the WeWork story has been ridiculous and overblown.

I keep hearing references to Theranos and Enron as if the two companies are even comparable (they are not).

Theranos was an outright fraud. WeWork has over 500,000 paying customers in a fully viable real estate business as proven by Regus.

The supposed loss of “massive value on the order of Enron” was fictional as WeWork is a private company. This was the risk taking of a few institutional investors who wanted that kind of risk! Venture funds lose money on a majority of their picks. So obviously Softbank’s largest-in-history 100B venture fund is going to have largest-in-history venture losses.

It’s actually a good business at its lower valuation now! Ask Regus how valuable 500,000 customers with that kind of growth rate would be to them.

> Ask Regus how valuable 500,000 customers with that kind of growth rate would be to them.

I guess their 3bn market cap is a pretty good indication of what that kind of customer base is worth to them, given that they have acquired it without incurring massive losses per desk to do so. That's still a good deal north of WeWork's down round...

Regus is valued at 3b because they’re only growing at 5-6% per year.

WeWork was growing at 10x that, however who knows now that this PR disaster of the century has happened.

With the ouster of Neumann now and a sensible CEO I wish they had gone public so I could invest. It’s a perfect contrarian scenario. I doubt you’ll see this much negative sentiment about a growth-stage company again for a long time.

I feel the reason Regus is only growing at 5% per year being because of their insistence on charging occupants more than they rent the space for probably matters here...
Or...maybe it could be because nobody knew Regus even existed prior to all these articles about WeWork coming out and mentioning them.

And most people still don’t know they exist!

Regus owns Spaces, which I suspect a lot of people in the market for WeWork type space would have heard of (or would turn up in the first page of their search results).
I think a better comp might be to Movie Pass because both business were growing like mad but with negative gross margins. Both got huge and then ran up to bankruptcy because they no longer had cash to burn to sustain growth at negative margins.
I once interviewed at wework for an engineering manager position....the projects they were working on were.... asinine... I couldnt nearly keep a stright face on what I felt they were pissing money away on. Funny I didnt pass the first in person :).

Sorry I dont see value in spending millions in some ar rig to project how an office space may look. It would take thousands of buildings decked out to make.the cost worth it... how stupid...

Can you share some details of the projects?