Do you mean WeWork needs privacy or the users of WeWork need privacy? Regarding the latter, coworking has been a thing since before WeWork and will certainly remain a thing after WeWork.
WeWork's all-access hot desking plan is great, couple hundred bucks a month and you can work from any WeWork anywhere in the world. You can drink half that back in cold brew if you just used it as a coffee shop subscription.
The one I go to (Portland, OR) used to have Stumptown on tap (that was awesome). But since WeWork went public, they’ve been getting contracts with some SysCo-esque food provider for cold brew/kombucha/seltzer. I forget the name of it but the cold brew is OK, not great but definitely not terrible.
Just to clarify: I have a full office in a WeWork, and I've worked in the same office (along with some of my colleagues) for over 4 years. So I (and the company I work for) might not be the "typical" WeWork customer story. As far as workplaces go, it's perfectly fine: the office itself is nicely designed and has reasonable (but not especially fancy) amenities.
I haven't really engaged in the community, although there seems to be a somewhat active one. I know other people who have, including going to parties and social events that were organized by WeWork (I have no idea if these are as common anymore, but they seemed to be happening a lot in 2018-19).
We've done something similar, WeWork is "expensive for an office" if you've never paid commercial real estate prices before. Compared to an actual lease it can be quite competitive, especially as you only have to 'pay' for the office itself but get all the other "shared perks".
My experience with Wework in downtown SF has been pretty good!
Community? Ehhh not in my experience. As a social person, I'm pretty good friends with the employees there, security, and the neighbor office, but overall its just another office with a little more up to date styling. We like it a lot and it works for us, but its not worth anymore than a traditional rent an office.
Oh the dog friendly part kicks ass though! And many of us have use the essentially free (because they give you hella credits) hotdesk credits while working in remote locations. Was SUPER awesome in new york when we had 4 hours between checkout and flight. Snuck my gf into the nearest one for clean bathrooms, coffee, charging, ect.
As someone with a distributed team, I try to visit each of my engineers in person at least once every 6 months. Being able to pick up a WeWork for us to work out of when I'm in town is really nice.
We use WeWork On Demand for this. No recurring membership fees, just pay as you go. It's okay -- $30 to $50 / day to use the common rooms and amenities. Much better than ... a library / coffee shop / hotel room.
Their guest policy could be better though! You essentially cannot have guests with the On Demand membership -- just go to a coffee shop for that.
Flexibility is king, and while compared to a traditional office lease, WeWork et al. are flexible, they still lock you into a contract, albeit a shorter one.
We're a small business, we rent out a couple offices, but we've downsized. Especially with more WFH, a co-working space is criminally expensive for occasional usage.
In my area, a startup has formed[0] offering desks at an HOURLY rate. Consistent decor, internet, staff, etc. across all locations. At the end of the day we still need a place to meet up in-person occasionally, this works for our use case perfectly.
Flexibility is king for small operations - unless you're a restaurant. Moving a storefront to a new location loses half of your customers, and for restaurants that's even worse.
The tax you pay for wholesale goods includes the costs of logistics - the forethought, the scaling, the redundancy. If all of that were free then you'd get everything straight from the manufacturer for half the price.
It might be that there's a business model for a WeWork-style company that actually works, but I'm not sure this is it. There are a number of companies where most of their hard assets are real estate, and we joke about them being real estate companies masquerading as something else (eg, McDonald's, and Sears before malls died). If they owed buildings outright they might have something as well.
In many cities the number of landlords that own 80% of the available space is actually a pretty small number. What a WeWork would be doing is hiring charismatic people to build relationships with those companies to try to establish long term leases at a more favorable rate than you or I could ever hope for, particularly during a down economy when you can spin it as doing them a huge favor. Possibly by taking additional discounts for clauses like, "I can move you to a different suite in the same building in these situations" because maybe there will be a day when the guys on the fifth and sixth floor really want the fourth floor and meanwhile the tenants on the 3rd floor are downsizing. Some people will pay for those sorts of contingency.
If even half of that is reasonable, then you might be looking for a shared space company that's backed by a hedge fund, rather than VC's, because you're looking for a company that is watching the downward trends in the market, not the upward ones.
But I don't get the impression they did any of that.
> Possibly by taking additional discounts for clauses like, "I can move you to a different suite in the same building in these situations" because maybe there will be a day when the guys on the fifth and sixth floor really want the fourth floor and meanwhile the tenants on the 3rd floor are downsizing. Some people will pay for those sorts of contingency.
What's interesting is this is exactly what happened to me and my existing office lease. Every tenant on multiple floors wanted to downsize, landlord wanted to do a complete teardown and rebuild of my floor, and so we all played musical offices and we all got what we wanted.
No WeWork style contracts needed, it was all laid out in the office lease agreement, that the landlord could do something like this.
I wanted to get out of my office basement and into something that was close by, I went to a WeWork in my locality and while it was a nice space overall, I was astounded by both how expensive, and how empty, it was. For less I was able to find an office space that was closer to my house, owned and operated by a local company, and was larger.
They're not called co-working space. They're just regular old small office building. They typically don't have a flashy website, so you have to find them the old way. They may be on CraigsList or even LoopNet
Regus is a chain that has been doing this exact thing. I worked at a startup that used one of those. A lot of the other tenants were lawyers in solo practice.
Town of 40k here - we have 3 coworking spaces. I started the first one - just leased a small office building, and started subleasing spaces. Some private office space, some shared public/hotdesk seats. We're small - 12-15 people at a time, max. The others came later, and are larger, but we're all within a 5 minute walk from each other.
Their hot-desk monthly membership is around $300 without discounts. Not cheap but probably cheaper than most dedicated office rents.
Depends. The one thing that WeWord did was locate itself in the better, more desirable, more visible business districts.
If you don't mind having a Sam Spade-style office, you can rent one far cheaper than that. I almost leased one in Seattle's Chinatown for $100/month, but ended up getting a free sub-lease from a friend with extra room at his company in a downtown skyscraper.
I live in a city of ~160k and there's a fair amount of them.
They vary from larger 4-5 story office buildings with some shared space, to small single story parks with no shared space - usually with a door and a garage door to the outside.
For a period of time a friend let me use the front of the space he was renting - he was using it as a warehouse for his ecommerce shop. He employed about 3 or so people who would pick & pack orders to be shipped.
In Milan, Italy their renting price are too expensive (550€/month + VAT for a dedicated desk) and their space are almost empty.
For context, an house in same location costs 30€/sqm/month.
I don’t understand why the keep their price so high if nobody is going there.
I used it in São Paulo for a monthly subscription of BRL 750, something like $150. I also noticed that there weren't a lot of people there. I thought that was due to them focusing on leasing it to companies instead of individuals. But overall it was a pretty pleasurable place to be in, but they could definitely make it cheaper.
I was very recently at their central Milan location next to the cathedral for a few days and found it to be quite busy. In fact, some days I wasn't able to get a slot to use the shared space.
However, a not insignificant percentage of people in the shared space were students on a discounted membership who were there due to inadequate study space at the local university.
I also found their more central Madrid locations to be quite reliably busy.
Byju, one of Softbank’s flagship investments in India ($22B valuation at peak) is in a similar place. $290M worth of payments are pending to just AWS and a there’s a $1.2B loan left hanging.
The CEO of SoftBank Masayoshi Son (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayoshi_Son) also had really bad bets during the dot com bust and lost a tony of money. He got a second chance by betting early on Alibaba.
> As of September 2022, Son ranks 73rd on the Forbes list of The World's Billionaires 2022,[9] despite having the distinction of losing the most money in history (approximately $70bn during the dot com crash of 2000).[10]
I worked in Japan right at the beginning of the dotcom boom, and Japan was in the grip of a massive financial crisis at that time. And by crisis I mean people committing suicide with alarming regularity.
My boss got most of his money from people trying to find some place better to put their money. Since the DotCom boom only felt long to people who said words like "internet time", I imagine the whiplash on that was pretty bad for everybody there.
'WeWork, saddled with expensive long-term leases and more than $3 billion of debt, recorded a negative cash flow of around $4.3 billion between July 2020 and September of this year. It has been able to cover its losses partly with loans and equity investments from its biggest backer, SoftBank Group Corp. , which to date has sank more than $10 billion into the business.
WeWork has burned through nearly all of it. The company has $500 million in undrawn debt commitments from SoftBank and has said it expects to end 2022 with $300 million in cash, less than one-third of what it had at the end of 2021. Its debt contracts allow it to borrow another $500 million'.
As WeWork CEO, Neumann on multiple occasions purchased buildings and then leased the space back to WeWork.[56] Observers noted this as a potential conflict of interest and one that would not be allowed if WeWork were a public company.[57] During his tenure as CEO of WeWork, Neumann also purchased US$90 million worth of residences, including a 60-acre (24 ha) estate in Westchester County, New York, a 6,000-square-foot (560 m2) condominium near Gramercy Park, two homes in The Hamptons, and a US$21 million mansion in Corte Madera, California.[19]
Neumann has begun purchasing apartment buildings and, as of early 2022, owned some 4,000 apartments worth about US$1 billion, primarily located in the American South.[58]'
In 'Generation Hustle' someone is left holding the bag...
I'm not sure I understand the perspective that people like Neumann have anything admirable about them. All he has "discovered" is the one of the oldest lessons in the world -- it's pretty easy to sell something when you can lie as much as possible. Or put another way, that if you're willing to ignore the rules of society that most people agree to, then it's pretty easy to take advantage of the system.
Now I know that not everyone could be as convincing of a liar as Neumann, but most of us have the ethical boundaries to not really try. So all you can really say is that of the people who are morally bankrupt enough to try to steal as much money as possible, he seems better at it than average.
In a competition of Olympic divers, the one who wins and the one who somehow makes it there and then does a gigantic, hospital trip inducing, bellyflop are both notable.
The bellyflop is probably the one that will be remembered the longest though.
Don't get me wrong, he is not admirable. In my moral system his actions are fundamentally criminal.
But... as far as I'm aware he didn't hide any of this from his investors. They just handed over the cash no questions asked until the grift got too blatant (I think it was the trademark ownership/name change that was the straw that broke the camel's back.)
> But... as far as I'm aware he didn't hide any of this from his investors. They just handed over the cash no questions asked until the grift got too blatant (I think it was the trademark ownership/name change that was the straw that broke the camel's back.)
I find it interesting to try to derive rational explanations from seemingly irrational actions. If Softbank really are supposed to be some of the most sophisticated investors, did they get hoodwinked by an even more sophisticated conman or are they just colossally more stupid and failed to do basic due dilligence?
Though wildly speculative on my part, I can see a more cynical reason that would explain these seemingly incomprehensible actions. That is that Softbank knew Neumann was a conman from the start and they invested in him because he was conman. Why would they do that? Because the VC game has changed a lot in the 20 years since the first dotcom wave. Early stage VC firms no longer bet on making money from the long term health of the company. They can get their returns by selling to later stage VC firms. So it doesn't matter to them if the company's business model is bogus. They only need the company to generate enough activity and growth metrics to inflate the valuation into the stratospheric level and then dump it on late stage VC investors and then the public as the company makes its IPO. In this way it's not much different than a classic ponzi scheme. And in that case it's in Softbank's interest to find a conman who can pull off the charade long enough and well enough for them to make their exit.
The counter argument to that is Softbank didn't sell off a meaningful part of its position before WeWork filed its S-1. That's when everything really fell apart -- when the internal financials of the company were exposed and everyone could see what a house of cards the company was.
In that case maybe Softbank did get taken in just as everyone else did. Or maybe they just didn't expect Neumann to fumble the exit as badly as he did.
> that if you're willing to ignore the rules of society that most people agree to, then it's pretty easy to take advantage of the system.
That's exactly the thing. He didn't ignore the rules. It's expected that founders lie, and the super-rich in charge of these giant investment funds are supposed to be the smartest people in the world, that's what entitles them to command the huge resources they do.
The game we agreed to was that these fund managers were supposed to efficiently allocate capital to worthy causes. Neumann made it extremely apparent that there's no guarantee that some rich banker will allocate anything efficiently at all. The bankers already skewed the system, Neumann beat them at their own game.
That doesn't make him a saint, it doesn't even may him "good", but I still think it's nice that SoftBank got fucked.
@delusional 'the super-rich in charge of these giant investment funds are supposed to be the smartest people in the world, that's what entitles them to command the huge resources they do.'//
..Which makes me wonder if the 'super rich' were on some big money losing scheme that somehow made them money elsewhere, against taxes or similar?
it all makes sense in the aggregate, when capital is scarce. when capital is superabundant things tend to invert, and you get a lot of criminals just milking money from the system
I agree that he's not admirable, but I too am impressed by his incredible skill. Lots of people are amoral, greedy liars. But this guy was world class. It's sort of the same way I feel about toxoplasmosis or zombie ants [1]: I want to stay as far away as possible, but if I set aside my revulsion, it's fascinating. Especially in the way that it tells us about vulnerabilities that we might not otherwise spot.
I wouldn't give him that much credit. The last few years have shown us that when it comes to governance, anything that isn't legally locked down is fully in play. Too much seems to still be dependent on the honour system in a world that incentivizes not doing the right thing.
You never expect a CEO to personally buy PPE (Plant, Production Equipment) and lease it back to his employer. But hey, if it's not against the rules, and the board is stacked in your favour, why not?
I don't understand venture capital, but from my understanding, this startup cycle has hardly been futile.
- The founders made money
- The employees made money
- The customers made money in the form of steeply discounted products and services
So really, the only people to lose out were VCs, especially since a lot of these startups haven't really had a chance to IPO and grift out the little guy (at least in my market).
He seems to be misallocating another cool half bill of investor money into his pockets [1]. From pretty much the same investors. And with an idea that has suspiciously similar overtones.
At this point I don't know what goes through the VCs heads. Are they just in denial about the previous failure, and they are doubling down like a degenerate gambler at the casino? Are they confident that if they get on early, they will be able to pass the bag to someone else, so they don't give a flying fuck? Or is Neumann able to create alternate reality force fields around him, like Steve Jobs? (Unlike Jobs, it seems Neumann doesn't transform anything but the numbers of zeros on his bank account, though)
I literally don't have the faintest idea of how these people think.
I can't speak to WeWork, having not seen its books. It seems a more real business than FTX.
This is... not saying much.
The FTX collapse has been eye-opening on this front. FTX was a less serious business than the coffee shop your neighbor opened in 2018, in terms of the books it was keeping. The IRS will be up that coffee shop's ass at the drop of a hat if they claim a bedroom at home as an office, and your neighbor's coffee shop will have a thick packet of receipts and books accounting for every penny spent, at least after they learn their lesson after the first year. FTX could literally not answer the most basic of business questions with any specificity. I'm not talking projections, I'm talking past history. FTX's books were basically a one page napkin scrawl in Excel.
And the list of venture capital was not just long, but prestigious.
Jeepers, Sequoia, give me a billion dollars as an "investment" and I'll personally guarantee you that you'll lose no more than half of it. I've got a napkin right here that says "cryptocurrency" on it. Apparently that's enough for you; where lambo?
Crypto collapses taught me so much about media management and public perceptions.
When the rumors first broke out that 3AC was toast, no one believed it. Zhu Su was perceived as the smart, wise man of crypto. No way HE would be so reckless.
Then when FTX rumors broke out, no one believed it, again. He was on the cover of magazines, hanging out with Tom Brady, writing these thoughtful pieces about crypto, and was our torchbearer in Washington...
Ironically, the folks with the scammiest public reputation (Justin Sun, Tether folks, even CZ/Binance) are still standing.
VCs are notorious for being herd animals. We've been in (and are hopefully leaving) an era of easy money. I think people don't generally question what they're doing as long as it's working, and easy money plus a bubbly tech sector means that investing hasn't been particularly challenging.
So I suspect a lot of them have just been uncritically doing what worked for them in the past. And "worked" here isn't defined by building successful businesses, because that's a very long feedback loop, but by more immediate proxies like praise from bosses/colleagues, chasing clout in the industry, getting more money from LPs, getting paid themselves, and feeling smart when people listen carefully to what they think is wisdom.
All that is hopefully about to change. As Buffett says, "Only when the tide goes out do you see who has been swimming naked."
I think that if you have free/easy money, with low risk of a meaningful downside (e.g. going to jail), and there is increasing competition from other VCs with access to the same money, then you greatly increase the risks you're willing to take. It's a game of homeruns, not singles.
So to answer your question, I think this is way they think: "If this goes wrong, I don't have any real personal skin in the game, and there are a bunch of smart people at other firms that are putting their money in. I better be in because if I don't allocate this capital it goes away. And if I miss a big one, that's worse than losing."
And, while FOMO is often presented as an anti-pattern, another way of framing the same thing is that if everyone else thinks X is the hottest thing since sliced bread and I'm skeptical... Who am I to be so certain that I'm the smartest guy in the room?
Add the complexities of timing. In fact, even if you thought crypto (or various stocks) was bullocks, you could have made a whole lot of money if you got in and out at the right time.
There was a common sentiment that speed was everything in VC over the past several years. Due Diligence only slowed you down and made you miss deals. If you wanted gains, you had to invest first with conviction and trust the founders.
Amazing to see how efficiently some of the biggest grifters exploited this dynamic to funnel money straight from investors and into their own personal net worth, while building businesses that couldn't have possibly been profitable. It didn't matter, though, because they needed the sense of scale and growth to continue grifting investors.
WeWork, Theranos, and FTX are widely known examples. Two of those founders acted criminally and have been arrested. Neumann was shockingly good at perform open-book grifts that benefited himself, but investors looked the other way.
One of my favorite stories from this era is Pipe, a fintech company with a business model that didn't really make sense to anyone familiar with their industry. They raised hundreds of millions at multi-billion dollar valuations, then the entire founding team of 3 people just stepped down: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/22/pipes-founding-team-steppi...
They're trying to spin it as a narrative about being 0-1 builders, but it's hard to take them seriously when 3 people are stepping down simultaneously right after getting a huge bump to their personal wealth. Raising money was their goal, building a perception of a successful business was only useful as far as it supported transfers from investors to their bank accounts. Would be fun to see how much they sold in secondaries.
Out of curiosity, why wouldn't Pipe's model have worked? To my knowledge, invoice factoring has been around since ancient times, and became a key (albeit exploitative) part of the textile industry among others. If a SaaS has a degree of lock-in to the extent that churn rates can be modeled predictably, I don't see how churn risk couldn't just be modeled alongside the traditional risk that the customer becomes insolvent on existing invoices. Now, if Pipe was subsidizing those risk-adjusted prices with VC money, then squandering that by being an inexperienced operating team, I can see how they themselves may have failed. But is that a death knell for the entire model? Is it that VC backed companies are themselves at higher risk of default in a correlated way that wasn't being taken into account?
>… and into their own personal net worth, while building businesses that couldn't have possibly been profitable.
I disagree with this characterization of WeWork. Were they extravagantly blowing money on stupid things? Yes. Was the CEO directly enriching himself through his leadership? Yes. However, the business of being a landlord and renting office space is a pedestrian and profitable venture. It’s just not a sexy startup idea worth billions.
I recall someone on HN pointing out years ago a curious detail about financial metrics, and how they made food delivery apps look FAR better for VC capital than they in reality are. The underlying reason: pass-through billing.
The food delivery startups accept payments, take their cut, and pay out to restaurants & drivers. From a purely financial viewpoint they're paying out a lot of money, perfectly normal in VC land. But they are also taking in an absolute mountain of money, and if you squint, can all look quite a bit like top-line revenue. If you then slice open the business operating costs, and look at how much it costs them internally (accounting only for salaries, rents and operating costs) to service a delivery, the per-unit revenue/cost figures are off the charts.
Physical retail intake, and virtual goods unit production costs. What's not to drool over?
It was an interesting point - and being thoroughly cynical, likely based in reality.
Being a commercial office landlord can be an ok business, but that doesn't mean WeWork was ever viable. They were often not the building owner but a lessor on their own, taking long-term leases and subleasing in pieces with little or no commitment. That made them vulnerable to shifts in demand and rents. Given how cyclical the office space market has been for decades, I suspect they were always doomed.
In a recession a real commercial landlord has existing tenants on long-term leases, limiting their downside. But WeWork's big selling poing was flexibility, so even if the pandemic hadn't happened I think the next recession would have wrecked them. And that's before we get to how it was basically a giant bet against remote work.
> They were often not the building owner but a lessor on their own, taking long-term leases and subleasing in pieces with little or no commitment.
I put that as the CEO self dealing. He purchased buildings and rented them out to WeWork. Had WeWork purchased the buildings themselves, the model would have been on far firmer footing. Again, I agree there was too much glamorous spending and living in the limelight, but landlords can obviously turn a profit if they keep the expenses reasonable.
Sorry, what's your evidence that the bulk of WeWork's leases were with Neumann? My understanding is that they were leasing from many building owners, something the article supports.
I never said it was the majority? It was just an example of grift. The only correct number of buildings a company should be leasing from the CEO is zero. In a similar vein, the company should not be leasing the We branding from the CEO.
WeWork was not operated in a way to succeed. I am only taking issue with the notion that the core business model (renting real estate) is flawed. Had there been a willingness for modest, organic expansion and not jet-fueled-VC-hypergrowth, the company could have succeeded.
The WeWork core business model is not just "renting real estate". It's paying for long-term leases and then subleasing on short-term ones. The business model was always bad because office space is sensitive to the economic cycle and boom-bust cycles in office building. The closest it gets to working is a company like Regus, who services the fringes of the market, like companies that aren't big enough to get a regular lease, but they provide a bunch of add-on services.
> There was a common sentiment that speed was everything in VC over the past several years.
And for the VCs it has often worked out. If you're fast enough to get something IPOed before the bubble pops, who cares if there's a real business model?
Personally, as somebody who thinks actually delivering value is important, I'm delighted that this era of easy money and massive hype might be ending. Hopefully companies soon will have to be able to actually turn a sustained profit before IPO.
And I don't know about you, but I'm immensely enjoying WeWork's fall. It never made any sense, and since the wheels came off before the IPO, it's not retail investors who are taking the loss here.
> And I don't know about you, but I'm immensely enjoying WeWork's fall. It never made any sense, and since the wheels came off before the IPO, it's not retail investors who are taking the loss here.
I agree with everything else, but I'm not a fan of this modern era of schadenfreude that seems to be ever present on tech sites. Theranos and WeWork were certainly fraudulent enough to laugh at, but it's created this effect of fraud-voyeurism that feels more tabloid than news; more celebrity gossip than business news. It also encourages shallow misunderstandings. Real estate can be a profitable business, and certainly many developers turn a profit by reasonably financing and pricing their offerings. But a lot of people are opining about WeWork being unprofitable. Unprofitability is not the same as an exaggerated market cap.
Still, I hope Theranos and WeWork are good, cautionary tales of the downsides of easy money.
You may not be a fan, but that's not going to stop me.
I have spent years having to endure the horseshit from places like Theranos, WeWork, and the entire cryptocurrency industry. I knew it was horseshit. The people spouting it could have known it was horseshit if they had bothered, but they did what was in their short-term interests without regard to harm to others.
I am going to enjoy seeing them get whatever paltry and belated comeuppance that karma visits upon them. If they ever suffer as much pain as they've inflicted, I might change my tune, so feel free to come back to me then. But in the meantime, I will enjoy whatever sense of justice served I can extract.
Was it voluntarily, or was it the fraudsters polluting the news channels (such as this site) with their horseshit as a result/part of the hype they built around itself?
For sure. The whole "yet you participate in society" [1] retort doesn't impress me. Is my participation in society, in my profession, in my industry voluntary? In the sense that I have chosen not to fuck off to a remote cabin and live via backbreaking subsistence agriculture, sure. But I don't think I should have to cede my life, both professional and intellectual, every time fraudsters come around.
The issue I have is that both were not really tech companies but rode frothy tech hype and marketed themselves as such. Apps and pretty websites, by themselves, do not magically make a sector more profitable, and that era was peak “everything needs to be disrupted by tech.”
WeWork is unprofitable, but mostly because we’ve known for hundreds of years that paying long term liabilities (e.g. leases) with short term funding is a model that quickly goes belly up.
You are claiming that Theranos, which claimed to be using novel technology to revolutionize medical diagnostics, was not a tech company? That seems very "no true scotsman" to me.
Tech, and biotech, have one big major difference, namely the FDA and other equivalent regulatory agencies, which have strict standards and approval timelines measured in years. You see this in the differences in their balance sheets and valuations, and biotech is not generally part of the tech conversation from an investment perspective.
People had to endure the hero worship of people like Adam Neuman and SBF on the way up. Being as some people called it out as a bubble on the way up, they are probably entitled to a little bit of ‘schad when the wheels come off.
Except Neumann's a billionaire and isn't involved with WeWork anymore after all that, so I'm not sure there's even that much to be had. What's left is the little people who eked by to get a job at WeWork and then got boned by Neuman as well.
> but I'm not a fan of this modern era of schadenfreude that seems to be ever present on tech sites.
I equally don't like the schadenfreude as you, but I also equally don't like the propping up of ridiculous business models like WeWork and Juiceros of the world that the media does.
I agree. I think these business models do more harm than good for the variety of actors involved with them (employees, equity holders, real estate, naive investors, etc.) I just find a sober look at why they're injurious is a lot more instructive than sneering schadenfreude.
> but it's created this effect of fraud-voyeurism that feels more tabloid than news; more celebrity gossip than business news.
Publicity giveth, publicity taketh away.
The schadenfreude does not happen in a vaccuum. Silicon Valley is addicted to the Steve Jobs messiah narrative, which is why they constantly deify 'personality' CEOs like Holmes, Neumann, Kalanick, Musk, even out and out frauds like SBF.
You do not see gloating about people getting busted for PPP fraud, because those are anonymous nobodies, that have not had a PR machine behind them pushing Galt-esque tales about their exploits and soapboxing their bizarre ideas about the future of millions, dreamed up from their NYC penthouse bubble.
If you dress someone up as Superman, there will be chuckles when he's found out to be a guy in muscle suit wearing his underwear on the outside.
I have an unpopular opinion that tech workers, especially in the west, are increasingly being perceived by everyone else like investment bankers or consultants were in the 90s (or forever, honestly).
There's not a lot of clarity about what value they bring to the table (since the companies that pay their salaries are often unprofitable) and it's not always obvious what work they actually do (hence the prevailing meme that no one works at FAANG).
Of course, the reality is that numerically, most tech workers don't work for FAANG or hot startups, but public perceptions are usually colored by the most visible subgroup, which happens to be overpaid startup bros.
I would have less “schadenfreude” if it wasn’t Saudi blood money being lit on fire. Happy to see oil money from Saudi Arabia being flushed down the toilet.
It's worse than that. VCs are mostly investing other people's money and earning management fees. Even if all the investments go bust they do well If they've managed to amass a big fund.
> And for the VCs it has often worked out. If you're fast enough to get something IPOed before the bubble pops, who cares if there's a real business model?
It sure does give me a really good and warm fuzzy feeling about the stability of our economy to see VCs repeating the same hyped up exaggerated valuation and bubble that was already done in the 1995-2000 era "dotcom 1.0" boom and bust cycle.
> Personally, as somebody who thinks actually delivering value is important, I'm delighted that this era of easy money and massive hype might be ending. Hopefully companies soon will have to be able to actually turn a sustained profit before IPO.
2001-2004 or so was one of my favorite periods in tech. Most of the extractive people fucked off to wherever they came from and the people left were the ones sincere about building things. May we have another time like that, but longer!
> Amazing to see how efficiently some of the biggest grifters exploited this dynamic to funnel money straight from investors and into their own personal net worth, while building businesses that couldn't have possibly been profitable. It didn't matter, though, because they needed the sense of scale and growth to continue grifting investors.
Matt Levine had a great theory on this. It basically boiled down to:
"If I wanted to short the VC market how would I do it?"...and basically point to what Adam Neumann did:
I can’t quite say that Neumann improved the allocation of capital, but there are certain parallels. Neumann too … look, here I am speculating, and I don’t mean to speak for Neumann’s subjective experience of his WeWork career, but from the outside, in hindsight, objectively, one could describe it like this: He spotted a bubble in venture-subsidized fast-growing money-losing capital-intensive low-margin tech-adjacent companies, noticed in particular that SoftBank seemed to be on the long side of that bubble, and set himself up to profit on the other side—by raising money for his own ultra-unicorn, by setting up the governance of that unicorn in a maximally self-interested way, and by selling and margining a bunch of his personal shares. 6 When investors like SoftBank were frenziedly buying unicorn stock, he was frenziedly selling it. He set himself up to profit from the collapse of the unicorn bubble, and accelerated that collapse. Lessons were learned, and he taught them. Now he’s rich.
> while building businesses that couldn't have possibly been profitable
All of these businesse can easily be profitable. Shared offices have been a thing forever and easily turn handsome profits. As do cab companies, courier companies, restaurants...
What isn't possible is turning in enough profits to justify the mammoth valuations.
Not sure why we put WeWork, Theranos, and FTX in same bucket?
Holmes is in jail, SBF probably on his way, but that Adam Neuman, for what it worth, is apparently not accused in any fraud. He's "just" a failed founder that costed his investors $$$, not unlike many, many others.
Think he's suggesting bad faith is what they all have in common? Trying to get money from investors rather than by actually building a business, which can be done legally or illegally.
The venture campitalists are in on the grift too; They follow the FTX playbook fairly often; It's just legal.
They'll invest in a series of companies, as those companies are failing, they'll buy them out with one of their successful companies (possibly a later stage investment, cheaper in a less costly market) then the once successful company also can't survive.
On paper, it looks like they have 3-4 successes to balance out their one failure. For their personal portfolio, it's also great too, and helps them raise more money.
If they're really successful, they'll oust the CEO of one of the once successful but in down market companies, really boost their shares; and if lucky that investment will exit.
> As WeWork CEO, Neumann on multiple occasions purchased buildings and then leased the space back to WeWork.[56] Observers noted this as a potential conflict of interest and one that would not be allowed if WeWork were a public company.
Isn't it unethical? The VCs in the podcast All In and the firm a16z defended Neumann because he bootstrapped a real-estate sector into a billion-dollar business even before getting huge VC investment. I don't doubt that, but didn't everyone say the most the important thing in a leader is integrity? Yet I hardly see how one can trust Neumann again as he skimmed his own company's money.
VCs defend it because they were riding along w Neumann the whole time, throwing more and more money into the trash fire as the we work valuation rose to insane levels. And of course they were the first to get out with a profitable return before things come crashing down.
VCs talk a game about being ethical, but let's be real - if it works they probably don't care. Uber is a great example of this - the rules can be bent to serve the purpose.
There may be facts that make it not only reasonable but prudent for the equity holders and executives to buy assets for use by a business. For example, imagine the that the business can’t get a line of credit independently but the founder can individually. The founder could buy an asset and lease it back to the company. While there is a clear possibility of unjust enrichment by acting against the interests of the company there are mechanisms in corporate governance to review and sign off on these types of transactions by having the board review the details and ensure that the terms are the same as would be in place with a third party. For example, that the lease rate was what a random sample of similar market leases.
We now know that Neumann had access to large personal lines of credit from large banks secured by his we work equity. So these transactions allowed we work to have access to properties without taking on liability for a mortgage but enjoying perhaps a more reasonable landlord that wouldn’t terminate a lease or refuse to renew in order for extract the value of renovation (which is unfortunately really common).
I am not justifying any particular action or transaction, just saying 1. The facts matter in this situation because it could have been totally in the company’s interest 2. We should equivocate we work with others like FTX where the facts appear that they told customers they would safeguard assets as a custodian (which has a very specific legal definition and set of obligations FTX must abide by) but then used the assets for risk taking investments without disclosure or Theranos where they knowingly lied about their technology it’s efficacy and prospects for further advancement. Both of those were fraudulent misrepresentation.
We work was instead a related party transaction that arguably has a win-win for both parties and was signed off by the board after full and complete disclosure.
In American politics, one fails UP. People admire a bigtime scumbag. Since he proved he can con people out of money, that in itself is a virtue to many people.
Its amazing that we have reached this point. Time was when grifting/scamming were condemned but now people glorify these grifters/scammers so much. Seems like all it matters in the end is how much they made and not the means nor the ethics.
So how did Neumann personally have enough money for the downpayment on $1B worth of property?
Do mortgage providers consider it enough to show a signed multi-year tenancy agreement as sufficient collateral to offer a 100% value mortgage, and therefore Neumann didn't need to put in any cash himself?
> Do mortgage providers consider it enough to show a signed multi-year tenancy agreement as sufficient collateral to offer a 100% value mortgage, and therefore Neumann didn't need to put in any cash himself?
I'm pretty sure he didn't apply for a traditional mortgage through a traditional lender in the way that we plebians or even publicly traded companies do. He has a long history of using his charisma and star power to get private individuals to make completely idiotic deals that benefit him and leave them holding the bag.
I have always wondered how Neumann was able to afford all of this. Did he sell shares of WeWork to SoftBank? Obtained some loans giving illiquid shares as collateral? I really don’t understand how these founders get so rich with a money losing business without selling shares in an IPO. Sounds like a financial engineering orgy.
So he didn't cash out. Didn't pay cap-gains on those. Yet, generated cashflow from the shares.
As a common person, I've been looking into this myself with my RSUs and option grants. But there aren't credit lines that banks offer using equity as collateral for the common person.
I guess when your net worth is high-enough, you can pull anything off with the banks.
Yes. Ultra high net worth individuals actually have separate banks within the banks. They will have a private banker for their accounts. And the private bank often has a separate balance sheet and policies.
You have to be big enough that a bank will take time to work it out by hand; and I suspect the bank that gave him the loans was also prime on doing business with WeWork (and potentially an IPO).
The closest "normal" people can get to this is with real estate.
It's estimated prior to the IPO in 2019, he had cashed out close to $778m through late-stage private stock sales and consulting fees.[1] Then it was litigated, and he only got $480m + $50m in legal(!)[2]. Unclear if how much of those two are additive vs the same amount reported poorly over time. It was also rumored he sold more stock before those final rounds with Softbank.
Plus, he still has something like 88m shares still in wework[3]. Hopefully he didn't margin-loan those shares.
Safe to say, he did better on wework than anyone else - a rare moment where the founder of a failed company has a better outcome than the investors
He got the payout of $480m as a settlement for stepping down. But he also got a $1b when Softbank bought out shareholders:
"Neumann led WeWork to a failed attempt at an initial public offering in 2019 and was ousted shortly afterward. As part of the original bailout effort, SoftBank had agreed to buy $3 billion in stock from WeWork investors, including close to $1 billion from Neumann."
> Neumann has begun purchasing apartment buildings and, as of early 2022, owned some 4,000 apartments worth about US$1 billion, primarily located in the American South.
This is Neumann's "Flow" company that a16z backed with $350 million this summer. Scheduled to launch next year, will be interesting to see how it fares in this new interest rate environment.
Maybe after that tanks, they can hire him again as a Criss Angel impersonator. He does seem to have formidable powers of telekinesis, the money just flies into his pockets!
The funny part is that Wework built its valuation on the narrative that it's a "tech company", but the tech-side of the member experience has actually become worse or has been unchanged for years.
I want to offer contrarian take. I can't count number of founders who found refuge at WeWork, thrived there, met their co-founders, customers and first employees. We Work was an essential ingredient of gig culture and founding of countless new companies. Neumann's original vision was, and, in fact continues to be seductive and revolutionary. The incumbent players in these business were simply way too behind in meeting needs of modern startups.
Neumann used age-old strategy to ignite this business: throw VC money to create foundation for business while doing that at loss. When he signed the over the top leases, no one - and I repeat no one - ever thought we were going to be off of 0% interest rates. No one thought real estate will plunge. It made sense at the time and VCs threw even more money as everyone held same view. In alternate universe, COVID would have never happened, QEs would have continued for another decade and WeWork would have been highly profitable monopoly.
This is not to say Neumann acted in unethical manner. He used WeWork cash and assets as his personal property. But keep in mind VCs always thought of WeWork as his "family business" just like how they thought of Facebook as Zuck's family business.
As to your first point, I'm curious how much of this varies from market to market or how true this is. Where I live there's a big co-working space that has accelerator programs and ties to local universities that's been around for longer than WeWork, and a lot of smaller co-working spaces too - some trendy/modern looking and some not so much. When WeWork came to my area it seemed like just another one but with better name recognition.
Hmm... they have 300 mil in cash, 500 mil from Softbank, and another 500 mil from other commitments. So, $1.3 bln of accessible cash in total. I know they burn some money, but this doesn't sound like a tiny pool to me.
They have a nasty bug where if you buy "all access" membership now for say June next year (set start date in June) you'll get free access until then. You actually can't pay for on-demand while you wait for your membership to start. But you can book desks for zero credits. However many parts of the app don't work and it seems the wifi doesn't work - but you can use guest wifi.
> They have a nasty bug where if you buy "all access" membership now for say June next year (set start date in June) you'll get free access until then. You actually can't pay for on-demand while you wait for your membership to start. But you can book desks for zero credits. However many parts of the app don't work and it seems the wifi doesn't work - but you can use guest wifi.
Good job posting this publicly on a thread I'm sure at least one WeWork corporate employee is reading.
Expect to find a charge on the credit card you put down for your June purchase for all the services you have used. It is 100% legal for them to bill you for their price mistakes. Check the terms and conditions.
You seem to be exceptionally confident about an area where that is very rarely legally the case. Secondarily, the TOC don't define necessarily what's legal or not.
Do you have a source for your claims here? They mentioned a contract beginning in June of next year, if the company fulfils more than the contract generally that would be upon them, though it may be grounds for termination of the contract.
If you have some relevant law or legal reference to back up your statements on the matter, I'd be interested in learning a bit more about it personally.
Thanks for taking the HN-style approach of trying to call BS on me in the most civil manner possible.
All the core elements of a contract are there: offer, acceptance, consideration, and exercise. By making use of the services early, OP is materially expressing their intent to exercise the contract early, which gives WeWork the right to take consideration in kind, per the terms of the original boilerplate contract.
(And yes, clickthrough or shrinkwrapped TOCs often do not constitute an enforceable contract, especially when one party has not expressed any actual intent to form any contract and the offering party does everything they can to obscure the TOC and its implications, per Specht v. Netscape. But there is clearly intent to form a contract by the customer here, which means the entire TOC is as valid and enforceable as a rental car contract people sign without reading.)
This goes by different names, one of which is "contract by acceptance" (more common in the UK). In the US, see [Uniform Commercial Code § 2-207](https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-207):
> (1) A definite and seasonable expression of acceptance ... operates as an acceptance even though it states terms additional to or different from those offered or agreed upon, unless acceptance is expressly made conditional on assent to the additional or different terms. [...]
> (3) Conduct by both parties which recognizes the existence of a contract is sufficient to establish a contract for sale although the writings of the parties do not otherwise establish a contract. In such case the terms of the particular contract consist of those terms on which the writings of the parties agree, together with any supplementary terms incorporated under any other provisions of this Act.
Let me put it this way: A customer signs a contract to pay a company a rate of $X per month for unlimited usage of the company's services. The customer agrees that the contracted services will be exercised by booking through the app. The customer initially informs the company they want to start using these services and paying the monthly fee in June. They provide a credit card and sign a contract that authorizes payment for services rendered on a monthly basis, rolling until canceled by either party with X days notice.
Then before June, the customer uses the app to book services, then actually makes use of those services. The company observes that the customer is using the app to make use of the services, for which there is normally no additional payment required. This lack of an additional payment is in line with the "all-access" subscription (and note the app states it in 'credits', not dollars). While the company also offers a per-hour rate, the customer does not make any attempt to communicate their intent to enter into a different contract to pay for these services by the hour.
What else should the company assume? The customer's behavior and prior contract clearly signals intent to exercise the contract earlier than originally communicated. The company then actually provides those services to the customer, who materially benefits from them, at cost to the company. The company then charges the customer for services rendered at the monthly all-access rate, starting at the first day they made use of the services without any additional payment.
And the fact that this is a "mistake" by the app is actually irrelevant. It is the same as if you had a similar agreement with a gym, and show up earlier than you requested. You check in with the human at the counter. They let you in without saying anything other than "Welcome!" The gym starts to bill you the monthly fee. You can't complain.
You're right that I maybe shouldn't have said 100%, because these things are ruled on by human judges and juries.
Edit: Another relevant concept is that contract law assumes parties are reasonab...
At one point I was an independent tech consultant down the street from one of their spaces, basically their prime customer profile. It was way too expensive for what you got.
What some people may not realize is that "executive suites" have been around forever, however they were never looked at as a "hypergrowth" SV/hot startup. This is where you get a small office among many others and there's a shared receptionist.
When I looked at WeWork, sitting at a table all day with other people and no privacy was about the same price as executive suites. They've also apparently had a business model where they don't own the spaces, so the underlying landlords can squeeze them at any time.
Was this the company where the CEO owned the trademark and was leasing it back to the company?
In any case just a company that, with a cursory inspection, IMHO showed no promise from day 1.
I mainly agree with you but want to throw a different angle on it. There is a lot of value in marketing and brand awareness. Like, when you mentioned "executive suites" - it makes sense to me but isn't something that is on my radar as a human being.
So like let's say my house got too crazy to work from, without being aware of WeWorks, it would seem like something I just have to suck up and deal with, but with awareness of WeWorks (and the associated concept of co-working spaces) my mind would at least go there. So maybe I'd shop around from the different co-working options based on location and price but wouldn't even occur to me to look at exec suites.
So all that is to say - I agree with you on the business, but that the existence of WeWorks may have widened the audience for that type of service with We itself getting the largest share of that business (same as Uber gets the most rides just by being the most associated name with taxis right now)
None of this is to say that We is "worth it" in valuation or as a service, I have no idea. Just point out the impact of marketing/awareness.
> So like let's say my house got too crazy to work from, without being aware of WeWorks,
Is this a hypothetical? Because if you did run a business out of your home, you absolutely would know about short-term rental offices. Pre-covid, it was normal to meet in person at both offices if the size of the contract is large enough.
>What some people may not realize is that "executive suites" have been around forever, however they were never looked at as a "hypergrowth" SV/hot startup.
Regus was/is the main player in that space, and it certainly wasn't startup territory at all. WeWork took a very different angle to it, as they were looking to capture small startups that wanted to be in a kind of "incubator" type set up. The buildouts and the target clientele were different concepts than had been tried in that market. I'm not saying that WeWork didn't/doesn't have issues, or that the idea was profitable at it's core, but it was a different take and seen as quite "disruptive".
>They've also apparently had a business model where they don't own the spaces, so the underlying landlords can squeeze them at any time.
WeWork leases have single purpose entities on nearly all their leases with few guarantees from WeWork the company. That basically means that the landlord is holding nothing next to nothing. In fact, it's WeWork that could back out of a lease pretty easily leaving the landlord with little recourse, not the landlords that could squeeze them. And even then, the only squeeze the landlords have would be when renewing a lease, and landlords don't have the upper-hand there at all right now.
One of the things that WeWork did was buy up significant chunks of square footage in well located buildings that had trouble filling that square footage, then WeWork offloaded a lot of the initial capital expenditure for the buildouts onto the landlord. Some of these leases had break even points for the landlord outside of 5 years, which is quite long for leases that big.
So if WeWork goes under or backs out of a given lease, the landlord is left with a huge amount of space, that they likely can't lease, and will likely take a significant amount of capital to either A) break it up, or B) make it amenable for another company to lease out. That means that the landlords are likely going to give WeWork as long a leash as possible, because they don't want that space back.
The writing is on the wall though, and WeWork has been going downhill for years now. It was arguable whether it was a good business model before the pandemic, but I can't imagine it making sense in a post-pandemic world.
While WeWork clearly were squandering SV investor money, don't underestimate how much real estate fat cats made out on these deals. They got these seemingly sweetheart WeWork leases on the books, marked up valuations for the remaining space in the building, and sold the dream to other investment firms to make out like bandits.
> I can't imagine it making sense in a post-pandemic world.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I think it makes more sense. If companies would rather not get invested in holding real-estate long-term in an uncertain economic and work climate, then having a much more flexible office situation makes a ton of sense. If the business they're starting doesn't work out, they're not left holding the bag on real-estate that they'll then have difficulty unloading.
If you hired WeWork for a reliable context-switch to help you focus on work, a more affordable alternative could be virtual co-working spaces like https://www.flow.club/.
I know most of the time as an independent consultant, the physical space to get away from your house is the reason why you pay WeWork, but if it's about structuring your work day, more focus, more energy from other people around you, and potentially meeting a person or two, virtual co-working offers all of that.
I think Adam Neumann is the real life version of James Bond setting billions of dollars worth of Mohammed bin Salman‘s money on fire (by way of SoftBank).
Not surprising, especially given the current economic situation. They must have had a real boatload of cash to last this long.
I've tried a few coworking spaces and always come to the conclusion that they're a grift. Many people such as myself probably try them out, begrudgingly pay $300 a month for a few months, and inevitably cancel to make room for the next sucker.
In another time, this model probably worked, or at least was less unsustainable than it is now. Charge enough to have non-riffraff clientele that are dumb enough to fall for the grift but smart enough move on so another sap can take their place and repeat the cycle. Perhaps it's a good business to own when times are good (and easy money flowing in WeWork's case), but not when inflation goes up, wages stagnate, and labor force participation is down. $300 means something different than it did 3 years ago even though I was numerically making less than I am now without adjusting for inflation. There's no way in hell I'm throwing away $300 on that kind of experiment now, though part of me misses the days when I could and not feel bad about it.
It may be one thing if you're a scrappy business that has bootstrapped cash or a revenue stream, but coworking seems like a complete dud if you're just a professional who wants to work somewhere that's not Starbucks or the spare bedroom.
It makes sense if you're a team of like 5-10 people and you really need a physically space. Otherwise, why waste the expenditure when you can just work remotely and save yourself the lease.
They always sell networking as an advantage, but people aren't that chatty and the folks in there are in the same boat as you are, which limits the worth of that network if you're trying to find clients. Never made much sense to me if you have a home office or a space bedroom to turn into one.
The entire market is a dud in my mind. How many scrappy startups without funding that need co-work space really exist? I don't see enough for an entire multi billion industry across the world. Especially since the enviable outcome if those are successful is they no longer are a customer once they get a lease somewhere for less. They can't sublease at a better rate than a direct lease so again no business.
Also I tried one and they all center around the horrible ineffective for getting things done open floor plans. Yes they have private areas I know but they are the exception. The offices should focus on the needs of freelance professionals and provide a better workspace than the FREE library that is in every city.
Probably agree with you on directionality of that demand but maybe that's not the full picture.
For example, right now I work out of the spare bedroom in our house. If we have another kid, that bedroom is no longer spare. People in that situation have a few options (a) make it work (b) buy a larger house (c) go into the office.
Option C is probably not much cheaper than $300/m. I bet Option B became a lot less available to a lot of people now. Spending 3600 a year on a place to work may be a lot cheaper than moving house (heck, your real estate taxes may go up by more than 300/m alone)
None of this is to say that We is a good sustainable business, just building on your analysis to point out there are some cases where We has emerged as the more likely/affordable option.
In the summer, I actually do 50% of my work outside and probably could make it 100% if I needed to "not be in the house". But winter is different - how much can you really insulate and heat a shed so it's actually bearable to work from 8+ hours a day? Someone told me that in NYC, they bought a plastic tent and put on their balcony with some sort of heat, but I just can't see that be comfortable - you lose heat damn quickly sitting on a cold chair with your feet on the cold ground/shed floor/cement.
Meanwhile WeWork seems to be thriving in India. They have a large number of locations in bangalore. Each one of them is reasonably priced, adequately appointed in amenities, and generally pleasant to work out of.
I wonder what's the difference between the operations (India vs USA) that led to such a vast gap in outcomes.
I wouldn’t call it different in operations as much of difference in culture/environment. WeWork level office spaces/amenities are less common in india where it provides just a small level of improvements over other options in US.
Brit here, so it's always interesting to see how things operate across the pond. We have an AIM market in the UK, which is a junior market. There are some good quality companies on there, mixed-in with a hell of a lot of the worst dreck imaginable.
The US has a lot more entrepreneurship than the UK, and I think it is something that us Brits could well do more of. In the UK we're too conservative, whilst the US plays it much more fast-an-loose. The UK has its fair share of financial scandals, mind.
I get the impression that in the US there has been far too much money chasing after far too opportunities. Blasting through $10b in a single business seems, shall we say, "quite an achievement."
I mean, Juicero, what was that crap, anyway? And then there was the whole Elizabeth Holmes thing. It would have been a large-cap company by UK standards. It seems that there's a lot of US "businesses" out there who are looking to hoover a lot of that sweet sweet VC lolly. I'm not sure what "due diligence" the VC guys are doing, but it doesn't seem much.
Another thing I have noticed is that, fairly recently, VC has seemed to switch into reverse gear. Now growth seems to be de-emphasised. It's like the whole Venture Capital market has collectively woken up one day and decided that they are much more sceptical about funding growth opportunities. What has changed really, though? It seems that just because Facebook and a couple of other titans decided to have a round of layoffs, that everyone else should, too. It's not really logical when you think about it. Sure, there's the whole Covid and Russian conflict thing throwing a spanner in the works, but have things really changed that much? It seems more a case of a lack of "animal spirit" compared to formerly that is causing the problems rather than any real problems themselves.
Interest rates can change everything. This is a logical extreme but think of it this way - when you can get a 0% loan, does anything have a cost? Sure, there's a price tag but if you can finance it without any interest, you're only paying principle. Now, if you can continue finding more 0% financing to cover those principle payments, any profit the business makes at all is a good return since you put nothing into it.
While we weren't quite to that situation, the last decade of near zero interest rates put VCs precariously close to it.
Macro: We had exceptionally low interest rates creating a debt bubble coupled with unprecedented Fed printing. To put it into perspective: we printed $6-Trillion USD on COVID stimulus compared to FDR's New Deal at $1-Trillion USD (today dollars).
Micro: Bubble popping. Public price-to-sales ratios fell substantially. Declines in consumer spending, inflation, and supply chain hiccups compressed margin. Lending rates went up, liquidity went down, and commercial realestate is still bracing for impact. Late-stage mega funds slowed their investing in the face of redemption threats. IPOs and SPACs became unpalatable. So early stage funds sitting on loads of cash raised pre-2022 are waiting on the sidelines to see where it falls out & who emerges.
> I get the impression that in the US there has been far too much money chasing after far too opportunities. Blasting through $10b in a single business seems, shall we say, "quite an achievement."
Not just the US: the 2008 bubble and the tech bubble both had sovereign wealth funds chasing high returns. The US tech sector was good at convincing them that investments would perform highly but it’s always been amazing to me to see the kind of returns predicted for a cab or shared office space company, and it’s felt like big institutional investors were basically saying they had no idea what to do either but needed to put the money somewhere.
> "The US tech sector was good at convincing them that investments would perform highly"
Part of the issue is that the VCs got very good at convincing themselves that they were geniuses at picking winners, even though in hindsight they clearly had no clothes on.
Yeah, low interest rates and cheap money chasing returns definitely helped fuel a historic immolation of vast sums of money, but I feel like it'd be remiss to discuss this without pointing out the complete fecklessness of the VCs in general.
These people spent years talking up their thought leadership and their uncanny ability to pick winners, and how it made them Galt-like messianic figures. Any criticism or even just skepticism was derided as anti-progress luddites, or worse - corrupt agents of an evil incumbency.
They anointed themselves the heralds of progress itself, in a way that was plainly unearned.
I really hope (but am not holding my breath for) a changing of the guard this time around. So much human progress has been denied because we allocated capital so poorly - and chose such incredibly poor stewards for capital allocation.
People can argue that it was too expensive or over-designed. But I don't think the basic idea is as ridiculous as people make it seem. "You can just juice it yourself!" Sure, but the same can be said for a Keurig machine, and they're extremely popular. Having watched what it would take to juice the Juicero packs on your own and having made my own Keurig pods without a machine, my guess is it's probably easier to do your own Keurig (and the Keurig machines seem to be more susceptible to getting dirty than Juicero machines).
Keep in mind they weren't juice packs that were being squeeze, but rather they were pieces of fruit and vegetables that could have the juices readily squeezed out. I haven't tried the juice - just about no one has - but if it was able to give the taste of fresh squeezed juice in seconds time it seems it would at least be notable. There's not really a better solution at the moment (actual juicing takes a lot of time and is very messy and store juice isn't as tasty).
I am a very conservative person financially so the way WeWorks and other SoftBank-run companies are run doesn't resonate with me personally, but I totally get it.
I actually worked at an SB-funded company for over a year (I had a non-compete so it was a good time to branch out and try crazy stuff) and the way the company was run was explicitly poised to bet on high growth with acknowledgement that it was a very risky bet that had a high chance of blowing up.
We were one of the first notable companies to do the "we over-hired and now that the world is changing, we need to lay off" thing in this cycle, and got a tremendous amount of negative press for what is now just basically expected behavior across industries.
But anyway, neither company management nor SB were dumb. Everyone understood that we were playing a high-risk high-reward strategy and recognized that "high risk" means the company blows up if things don't go right. It's just a choice that people make about: where to invest their money, what kind of company to start, and where to work. Like, for some people working at the DMV makes sense (very steady, no growth or significant upside) and for some people working at a crazy startup does (not steady at all, some chance of hitting it big.)
The company I was in was very sensitive to rates. We bet that if capital remained cheap, we'd power our way to real scale and profitability. It was a reasonable bet. History showed that we bet wrong and paid the price (I doubt the investors will recoup their money, and my equity is likely to be worth nothing although the company itself still exists.)
But that's OK. My company made a bet at revolutionizing its industry (and to some extent, it did) as did We. If these companies completely die, well - that's the nature of the game we chose to play. If luck worked out the other way, it would be glorious.
My main point is you can't apply the same lens to an explicitly high growth/high risk company that looks to change the world (or die trying) as you would to a self-funded bootstrapped business that is looking to slowly grow (and avoid death at all costs) by taking only small incremental bets. As long as everyone knows who is playing which game (and I guarantee you that management, employees and the investors like SoftBank knows which game they are playing) it's all good.
Just canceled my membership because they closed the only location in San Francisco that had something resembling modern office bike storage.
The rest of their bike parking "amenities" seem to just be the bare minimum required by San Francisco law, which often means having to take a freight elevator which can take a very long time in a busy building, or put it in a shared cage in a parking garage that is open to the public.
Notably they didn't send me any notification regarding the office closure, I just opened the app and it was gone.
WeWork is the largest office tenant in many of the world's largest cities, including NY and London. If it stops paying rent, it will put many premium office buildings in those cities in a precarious financial situation, just as many other smaller tenants are reconsidering their office footprint. Yikes!
I am in a coworking space -- not a WeWork (only because they raised my rates to almost $3500/month for a single person office) -- and it currently has a 95% vacancy rate.
In 2019, they had a 99% occupancy rate.
The most successful coworking spaces near me have a restaurant, a bar, and nice multimedia event spaces with Satellite TV -- all expenses that I don't think Regus, WeWork, or Expansive would ever spend money on.
Those spaces, that have amenities that are not things that you could get at home, have waiting lists for offices.
I started using WeWork because it's close to my apartment and I need a change of pace from my regular work from home setup. It's wild how bad of a space it is to work in. Like plain uncomfortable chairs, with people talking loudly in public because all the phone call booths have people camped out in them for hours. I bought a portable laptop stand and keyboard and it's still way less comfortable than my home setup.
Maybe the space makes more sense for people who aren't coding and just need to check a few emails and write some documents, but even then it's pretty damn bad for your back to be hunched over your laptop.
Friend of mine works for a huge global consumer brand. They decided to launch an online ordering platform for their trade customers, with the aim of eliminating a lot of call centres etc.
Developers were going to need paying more than even a 10-year served exec in the UK with 200 staff under them. They couldn’t run it within their existing organisation - the salary disparity would have been unpalatable. So they were advised to set up a subsidiary, rent a whole floor of Wework in London and run it out of there.
Burned through £20m in a year - a decent chunk on contractors from the sort of IT brand you know. Nothing shipped. Wrote it off after a year. Fired everyone and surrendered lease.
That was Wework’s target market - not freelancers or startups. Big companies with deep pockets who could have leased the whole building but never created the buzz. Work from home killed that market and it won’t return.
> That was Wework’s target market - not freelancers or startups.
Great point, and a key issue in the PR narrative about WeWork and others like Uber and Airbnb. The PR is always about "helping the small guy", when the business reality is that enterprise whales are much better for the bottom line.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadTerrible business though.
[1]: https://commonwealthjoe.com/
Coffee beans
I haven't really engaged in the community, although there seems to be a somewhat active one. I know other people who have, including going to parties and social events that were organized by WeWork (I have no idea if these are as common anymore, but they seemed to be happening a lot in 2018-19).
Community? Ehhh not in my experience. As a social person, I'm pretty good friends with the employees there, security, and the neighbor office, but overall its just another office with a little more up to date styling. We like it a lot and it works for us, but its not worth anymore than a traditional rent an office.
Oh the dog friendly part kicks ass though! And many of us have use the essentially free (because they give you hella credits) hotdesk credits while working in remote locations. Was SUPER awesome in new york when we had 4 hours between checkout and flight. Snuck my gf into the nearest one for clean bathrooms, coffee, charging, ect.
Their guest policy could be better though! You essentially cannot have guests with the On Demand membership -- just go to a coffee shop for that.
Just a marketplace to rent on demand. Like AirBNB for office space
In a library being on a meeting flat out doesn't work
We're a small business, we rent out a couple offices, but we've downsized. Especially with more WFH, a co-working space is criminally expensive for occasional usage.
In my area, a startup has formed[0] offering desks at an HOURLY rate. Consistent decor, internet, staff, etc. across all locations. At the end of the day we still need a place to meet up in-person occasionally, this works for our use case perfectly.
[0] https://www.lauft.work/
Renting an office room by the hour/month has been a thing for a very long time. Regus/IWG was founded in 1989.
The tax you pay for wholesale goods includes the costs of logistics - the forethought, the scaling, the redundancy. If all of that were free then you'd get everything straight from the manufacturer for half the price.
It might be that there's a business model for a WeWork-style company that actually works, but I'm not sure this is it. There are a number of companies where most of their hard assets are real estate, and we joke about them being real estate companies masquerading as something else (eg, McDonald's, and Sears before malls died). If they owed buildings outright they might have something as well.
In many cities the number of landlords that own 80% of the available space is actually a pretty small number. What a WeWork would be doing is hiring charismatic people to build relationships with those companies to try to establish long term leases at a more favorable rate than you or I could ever hope for, particularly during a down economy when you can spin it as doing them a huge favor. Possibly by taking additional discounts for clauses like, "I can move you to a different suite in the same building in these situations" because maybe there will be a day when the guys on the fifth and sixth floor really want the fourth floor and meanwhile the tenants on the 3rd floor are downsizing. Some people will pay for those sorts of contingency.
If even half of that is reasonable, then you might be looking for a shared space company that's backed by a hedge fund, rather than VC's, because you're looking for a company that is watching the downward trends in the market, not the upward ones.
But I don't get the impression they did any of that.
What's interesting is this is exactly what happened to me and my existing office lease. Every tenant on multiple floors wanted to downsize, landlord wanted to do a complete teardown and rebuild of my floor, and so we all played musical offices and we all got what we wanted.
No WeWork style contracts needed, it was all laid out in the office lease agreement, that the landlord could do something like this.
Any tips on that? Currently looking for a place locally and it feels impossible. But this could be due to market size (city of ~200k).
The WeWork business model has been around for decades.
Depends. The one thing that WeWord did was locate itself in the better, more desirable, more visible business districts.
If you don't mind having a Sam Spade-style office, you can rent one far cheaper than that. I almost leased one in Seattle's Chinatown for $100/month, but ended up getting a free sub-lease from a friend with extra room at his company in a downtown skyscraper.
Probably won't get something much cheaper if you'll want something that is nicer than your kitchen table.
They vary from larger 4-5 story office buildings with some shared space, to small single story parks with no shared space - usually with a door and a garage door to the outside.
For a period of time a friend let me use the front of the space he was renting - he was using it as a warehouse for his ecommerce shop. He employed about 3 or so people who would pick & pack orders to be shipped.
I don’t understand why the keep their price so high if nobody is going there.
However, a not insignificant percentage of people in the shared space were students on a discounted membership who were there due to inadequate study space at the local university.
I also found their more central Madrid locations to be quite reliably busy.
https://themorningcontext.com/internet/byjus-is-in-the-throe...
> As of September 2022, Son ranks 73rd on the Forbes list of The World's Billionaires 2022,[9] despite having the distinction of losing the most money in history (approximately $70bn during the dot com crash of 2000).[10]
My boss got most of his money from people trying to find some place better to put their money. Since the DotCom boom only felt long to people who said words like "internet time", I imagine the whiplash on that was pretty bad for everybody there.
WeWork has burned through nearly all of it. The company has $500 million in undrawn debt commitments from SoftBank and has said it expects to end 2022 with $300 million in cash, less than one-third of what it had at the end of 2021. Its debt contracts allow it to borrow another $500 million'.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann
As WeWork CEO, Neumann on multiple occasions purchased buildings and then leased the space back to WeWork.[56] Observers noted this as a potential conflict of interest and one that would not be allowed if WeWork were a public company.[57] During his tenure as CEO of WeWork, Neumann also purchased US$90 million worth of residences, including a 60-acre (24 ha) estate in Westchester County, New York, a 6,000-square-foot (560 m2) condominium near Gramercy Park, two homes in The Hamptons, and a US$21 million mansion in Corte Madera, California.[19]
Neumann has begun purchasing apartment buildings and, as of early 2022, owned some 4,000 apartments worth about US$1 billion, primarily located in the American South.[58]'
In 'Generation Hustle' someone is left holding the bag...
Overall though his contribution to massive capital mis-allocation is a huge net negative for my opinion of him.
Now I know that not everyone could be as convincing of a liar as Neumann, but most of us have the ethical boundaries to not really try. So all you can really say is that of the people who are morally bankrupt enough to try to steal as much money as possible, he seems better at it than average.
The bellyflop is probably the one that will be remembered the longest though.
But... as far as I'm aware he didn't hide any of this from his investors. They just handed over the cash no questions asked until the grift got too blatant (I think it was the trademark ownership/name change that was the straw that broke the camel's back.)
I find it interesting to try to derive rational explanations from seemingly irrational actions. If Softbank really are supposed to be some of the most sophisticated investors, did they get hoodwinked by an even more sophisticated conman or are they just colossally more stupid and failed to do basic due dilligence?
Though wildly speculative on my part, I can see a more cynical reason that would explain these seemingly incomprehensible actions. That is that Softbank knew Neumann was a conman from the start and they invested in him because he was conman. Why would they do that? Because the VC game has changed a lot in the 20 years since the first dotcom wave. Early stage VC firms no longer bet on making money from the long term health of the company. They can get their returns by selling to later stage VC firms. So it doesn't matter to them if the company's business model is bogus. They only need the company to generate enough activity and growth metrics to inflate the valuation into the stratospheric level and then dump it on late stage VC investors and then the public as the company makes its IPO. In this way it's not much different than a classic ponzi scheme. And in that case it's in Softbank's interest to find a conman who can pull off the charade long enough and well enough for them to make their exit.
The counter argument to that is Softbank didn't sell off a meaningful part of its position before WeWork filed its S-1. That's when everything really fell apart -- when the internal financials of the company were exposed and everyone could see what a house of cards the company was.
In that case maybe Softbank did get taken in just as everyone else did. Or maybe they just didn't expect Neumann to fumble the exit as badly as he did.
That's exactly the thing. He didn't ignore the rules. It's expected that founders lie, and the super-rich in charge of these giant investment funds are supposed to be the smartest people in the world, that's what entitles them to command the huge resources they do.
The game we agreed to was that these fund managers were supposed to efficiently allocate capital to worthy causes. Neumann made it extremely apparent that there's no guarantee that some rich banker will allocate anything efficiently at all. The bankers already skewed the system, Neumann beat them at their own game.
That doesn't make him a saint, it doesn't even may him "good", but I still think it's nice that SoftBank got fucked.
..Which makes me wonder if the 'super rich' were on some big money losing scheme that somehow made them money elsewhere, against taxes or similar?
The Producers (1967) Official Trailer
https://youtu.be/z51xeox0Jlg
[1] Which are a real thing! Caused by a fungus: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(18)31602...
You never expect a CEO to personally buy PPE (Plant, Production Equipment) and lease it back to his employer. But hey, if it's not against the rules, and the board is stacked in your favour, why not?
- The founders made money
- The employees made money
- The customers made money in the form of steeply discounted products and services
So really, the only people to lose out were VCs, especially since a lot of these startups haven't really had a chance to IPO and grift out the little guy (at least in my market).
and the teachers' pensions that went into funding those VCs
At this point I don't know what goes through the VCs heads. Are they just in denial about the previous failure, and they are doubling down like a degenerate gambler at the casino? Are they confident that if they get on early, they will be able to pass the bag to someone else, so they don't give a flying fuck? Or is Neumann able to create alternate reality force fields around him, like Steve Jobs? (Unlike Jobs, it seems Neumann doesn't transform anything but the numbers of zeros on his bank account, though)
I literally don't have the faintest idea of how these people think.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2022/08/23/adam-neum...
This is... not saying much.
The FTX collapse has been eye-opening on this front. FTX was a less serious business than the coffee shop your neighbor opened in 2018, in terms of the books it was keeping. The IRS will be up that coffee shop's ass at the drop of a hat if they claim a bedroom at home as an office, and your neighbor's coffee shop will have a thick packet of receipts and books accounting for every penny spent, at least after they learn their lesson after the first year. FTX could literally not answer the most basic of business questions with any specificity. I'm not talking projections, I'm talking past history. FTX's books were basically a one page napkin scrawl in Excel.
And the list of venture capital was not just long, but prestigious.
Jeepers, Sequoia, give me a billion dollars as an "investment" and I'll personally guarantee you that you'll lose no more than half of it. I've got a napkin right here that says "cryptocurrency" on it. Apparently that's enough for you; where lambo?
When the rumors first broke out that 3AC was toast, no one believed it. Zhu Su was perceived as the smart, wise man of crypto. No way HE would be so reckless.
Then when FTX rumors broke out, no one believed it, again. He was on the cover of magazines, hanging out with Tom Brady, writing these thoughtful pieces about crypto, and was our torchbearer in Washington...
Ironically, the folks with the scammiest public reputation (Justin Sun, Tether folks, even CZ/Binance) are still standing.
VCs are notorious for being herd animals. We've been in (and are hopefully leaving) an era of easy money. I think people don't generally question what they're doing as long as it's working, and easy money plus a bubbly tech sector means that investing hasn't been particularly challenging.
So I suspect a lot of them have just been uncritically doing what worked for them in the past. And "worked" here isn't defined by building successful businesses, because that's a very long feedback loop, but by more immediate proxies like praise from bosses/colleagues, chasing clout in the industry, getting more money from LPs, getting paid themselves, and feeling smart when people listen carefully to what they think is wisdom.
All that is hopefully about to change. As Buffett says, "Only when the tide goes out do you see who has been swimming naked."
s/VCs/humans/
Social proof is a thing wherever you go, whatever you do?
So to answer your question, I think this is way they think: "If this goes wrong, I don't have any real personal skin in the game, and there are a bunch of smart people at other firms that are putting their money in. I better be in because if I don't allocate this capital it goes away. And if I miss a big one, that's worse than losing."
Add the complexities of timing. In fact, even if you thought crypto (or various stocks) was bullocks, you could have made a whole lot of money if you got in and out at the right time.
Amazing to see how efficiently some of the biggest grifters exploited this dynamic to funnel money straight from investors and into their own personal net worth, while building businesses that couldn't have possibly been profitable. It didn't matter, though, because they needed the sense of scale and growth to continue grifting investors.
WeWork, Theranos, and FTX are widely known examples. Two of those founders acted criminally and have been arrested. Neumann was shockingly good at perform open-book grifts that benefited himself, but investors looked the other way.
One of my favorite stories from this era is Pipe, a fintech company with a business model that didn't really make sense to anyone familiar with their industry. They raised hundreds of millions at multi-billion dollar valuations, then the entire founding team of 3 people just stepped down: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/22/pipes-founding-team-steppi...
They're trying to spin it as a narrative about being 0-1 builders, but it's hard to take them seriously when 3 people are stepping down simultaneously right after getting a huge bump to their personal wealth. Raising money was their goal, building a perception of a successful business was only useful as far as it supported transfers from investors to their bank accounts. Would be fun to see how much they sold in secondaries.
I disagree with this characterization of WeWork. Were they extravagantly blowing money on stupid things? Yes. Was the CEO directly enriching himself through his leadership? Yes. However, the business of being a landlord and renting office space is a pedestrian and profitable venture. It’s just not a sexy startup idea worth billions.
The food delivery startups accept payments, take their cut, and pay out to restaurants & drivers. From a purely financial viewpoint they're paying out a lot of money, perfectly normal in VC land. But they are also taking in an absolute mountain of money, and if you squint, can all look quite a bit like top-line revenue. If you then slice open the business operating costs, and look at how much it costs them internally (accounting only for salaries, rents and operating costs) to service a delivery, the per-unit revenue/cost figures are off the charts.
Physical retail intake, and virtual goods unit production costs. What's not to drool over?
It was an interesting point - and being thoroughly cynical, likely based in reality.
In a recession a real commercial landlord has existing tenants on long-term leases, limiting their downside. But WeWork's big selling poing was flexibility, so even if the pandemic hadn't happened I think the next recession would have wrecked them. And that's before we get to how it was basically a giant bet against remote work.
I put that as the CEO self dealing. He purchased buildings and rented them out to WeWork. Had WeWork purchased the buildings themselves, the model would have been on far firmer footing. Again, I agree there was too much glamorous spending and living in the limelight, but landlords can obviously turn a profit if they keep the expenses reasonable.
While they'd avoid having to pay rent in empty units, they'd still not any leases
WeWork was not operated in a way to succeed. I am only taking issue with the notion that the core business model (renting real estate) is flawed. Had there been a willingness for modest, organic expansion and not jet-fueled-VC-hypergrowth, the company could have succeeded.
Right, but that’s what Adam Neumann did for himself, then made WeWork his tenant.
Neumann is collecting the rent. WeWork is paying rent.
He took the profitable part out of the company and gave it to himself (for a subset of properties, at least).
That’s the scandal.
And for the VCs it has often worked out. If you're fast enough to get something IPOed before the bubble pops, who cares if there's a real business model?
Personally, as somebody who thinks actually delivering value is important, I'm delighted that this era of easy money and massive hype might be ending. Hopefully companies soon will have to be able to actually turn a sustained profit before IPO.
And I don't know about you, but I'm immensely enjoying WeWork's fall. It never made any sense, and since the wheels came off before the IPO, it's not retail investors who are taking the loss here.
I agree with everything else, but I'm not a fan of this modern era of schadenfreude that seems to be ever present on tech sites. Theranos and WeWork were certainly fraudulent enough to laugh at, but it's created this effect of fraud-voyeurism that feels more tabloid than news; more celebrity gossip than business news. It also encourages shallow misunderstandings. Real estate can be a profitable business, and certainly many developers turn a profit by reasonably financing and pricing their offerings. But a lot of people are opining about WeWork being unprofitable. Unprofitability is not the same as an exaggerated market cap.
Still, I hope Theranos and WeWork are good, cautionary tales of the downsides of easy money.
I have spent years having to endure the horseshit from places like Theranos, WeWork, and the entire cryptocurrency industry. I knew it was horseshit. The people spouting it could have known it was horseshit if they had bothered, but they did what was in their short-term interests without regard to harm to others.
I am going to enjoy seeing them get whatever paltry and belated comeuppance that karma visits upon them. If they ever suffer as much pain as they've inflicted, I might change my tune, so feel free to come back to me then. But in the meantime, I will enjoy whatever sense of justice served I can extract.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
You don't need to read the articles. Your sense of mistreatment seems out of proportion.
WeWork is unprofitable, but mostly because we’ve known for hundreds of years that paying long term liabilities (e.g. leases) with short term funding is a model that quickly goes belly up.
It was fairly obvious the musical chairs had stopped, and yet he managed to sell his standing-only-spot at chair-valuation.
SoftBank should be sued by its investors over that farce.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/15/wework-founder-adam-neumann-sc...
I equally don't like the schadenfreude as you, but I also equally don't like the propping up of ridiculous business models like WeWork and Juiceros of the world that the media does.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Publicity giveth, publicity taketh away.
The schadenfreude does not happen in a vaccuum. Silicon Valley is addicted to the Steve Jobs messiah narrative, which is why they constantly deify 'personality' CEOs like Holmes, Neumann, Kalanick, Musk, even out and out frauds like SBF.
You do not see gloating about people getting busted for PPP fraud, because those are anonymous nobodies, that have not had a PR machine behind them pushing Galt-esque tales about their exploits and soapboxing their bizarre ideas about the future of millions, dreamed up from their NYC penthouse bubble.
If you dress someone up as Superman, there will be chuckles when he's found out to be a guy in muscle suit wearing his underwear on the outside.
There's not a lot of clarity about what value they bring to the table (since the companies that pay their salaries are often unprofitable) and it's not always obvious what work they actually do (hence the prevailing meme that no one works at FAANG).
Of course, the reality is that numerically, most tech workers don't work for FAANG or hot startups, but public perceptions are usually colored by the most visible subgroup, which happens to be overpaid startup bros.
forgive the link, i guess the original tiktok was deleted.
The period of exuberance will return wearing different clothes.
It sure does give me a really good and warm fuzzy feeling about the stability of our economy to see VCs repeating the same hyped up exaggerated valuation and bubble that was already done in the 1995-2000 era "dotcom 1.0" boom and bust cycle.
You sound like me in 2001 or shortly thereafter.
Matt Levine had a great theory on this. It basically boiled down to:
"If I wanted to short the VC market how would I do it?"...and basically point to what Adam Neumann did:
I can’t quite say that Neumann improved the allocation of capital, but there are certain parallels. Neumann too … look, here I am speculating, and I don’t mean to speak for Neumann’s subjective experience of his WeWork career, but from the outside, in hindsight, objectively, one could describe it like this: He spotted a bubble in venture-subsidized fast-growing money-losing capital-intensive low-margin tech-adjacent companies, noticed in particular that SoftBank seemed to be on the long side of that bubble, and set himself up to profit on the other side—by raising money for his own ultra-unicorn, by setting up the governance of that unicorn in a maximally self-interested way, and by selling and margining a bunch of his personal shares. 6 When investors like SoftBank were frenziedly buying unicorn stock, he was frenziedly selling it. He set himself up to profit from the collapse of the unicorn bubble, and accelerated that collapse. Lessons were learned, and he taught them. Now he’s rich.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do...
All of these businesse can easily be profitable. Shared offices have been a thing forever and easily turn handsome profits. As do cab companies, courier companies, restaurants...
What isn't possible is turning in enough profits to justify the mammoth valuations.
Holmes is in jail, SBF probably on his way, but that Adam Neuman, for what it worth, is apparently not accused in any fraud. He's "just" a failed founder that costed his investors $$$, not unlike many, many others.
They'll invest in a series of companies, as those companies are failing, they'll buy them out with one of their successful companies (possibly a later stage investment, cheaper in a less costly market) then the once successful company also can't survive.
On paper, it looks like they have 3-4 successes to balance out their one failure. For their personal portfolio, it's also great too, and helps them raise more money.
If they're really successful, they'll oust the CEO of one of the once successful but in down market companies, really boost their shares; and if lucky that investment will exit.
Isn't it unethical? The VCs in the podcast All In and the firm a16z defended Neumann because he bootstrapped a real-estate sector into a billion-dollar business even before getting huge VC investment. I don't doubt that, but didn't everyone say the most the important thing in a leader is integrity? Yet I hardly see how one can trust Neumann again as he skimmed his own company's money.
VCs defend it because they were riding along w Neumann the whole time, throwing more and more money into the trash fire as the we work valuation rose to insane levels. And of course they were the first to get out with a profitable return before things come crashing down.
We now know that Neumann had access to large personal lines of credit from large banks secured by his we work equity. So these transactions allowed we work to have access to properties without taking on liability for a mortgage but enjoying perhaps a more reasonable landlord that wouldn’t terminate a lease or refuse to renew in order for extract the value of renovation (which is unfortunately really common).
I am not justifying any particular action or transaction, just saying 1. The facts matter in this situation because it could have been totally in the company’s interest 2. We should equivocate we work with others like FTX where the facts appear that they told customers they would safeguard assets as a custodian (which has a very specific legal definition and set of obligations FTX must abide by) but then used the assets for risk taking investments without disclosure or Theranos where they knowingly lied about their technology it’s efficacy and prospects for further advancement. Both of those were fraudulent misrepresentation.
We work was instead a related party transaction that arguably has a win-win for both parties and was signed off by the board after full and complete disclosure.
Do mortgage providers consider it enough to show a signed multi-year tenancy agreement as sufficient collateral to offer a 100% value mortgage, and therefore Neumann didn't need to put in any cash himself?
I'm pretty sure he didn't apply for a traditional mortgage through a traditional lender in the way that we plebians or even publicly traded companies do. He has a long history of using his charisma and star power to get private individuals to make completely idiotic deals that benefit him and leave them holding the bag.
As a common person, I've been looking into this myself with my RSUs and option grants. But there aren't credit lines that banks offer using equity as collateral for the common person.
I guess when your net worth is high-enough, you can pull anything off with the banks.
The closest "normal" people can get to this is with real estate.
Fidelity Fully Paid Lending Program [1]? not quite what you're looking for, but still generate cashflow from owned equities.
[0]: https://www.schwab.com/pledged-asset-line [1]: https://www.fidelity.com/trading/fully-paid-lending
Disclaimer: i am not a fiduciary, nor a financial professional. this is not financial advice.
Plus, he still has something like 88m shares still in wework[3]. Hopefully he didn't margin-loan those shares.
Safe to say, he did better on wework than anyone else - a rare moment where the founder of a failed company has a better outcome than the investors
1 - https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/01/04/wework-co-founder-... 2 - https://archive.vn/bBW2d 3 - https://fintel.io/n/us/we/neumann-adam
"Neumann led WeWork to a failed attempt at an initial public offering in 2019 and was ousted shortly afterward. As part of the original bailout effort, SoftBank had agreed to buy $3 billion in stock from WeWork investors, including close to $1 billion from Neumann."
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-02-26/softbank-s...
Neumann had lines of credit from banks secured by his wework equity. Kind of like a home equity line of credit but with stock instead of a home.
This is Neumann's "Flow" company that a16z backed with $350 million this summer. Scheduled to launch next year, will be interesting to see how it fares in this new interest rate environment.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/18/a16z-chris-dixon-adam-neum...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(real_estate_company)
Neumann used age-old strategy to ignite this business: throw VC money to create foundation for business while doing that at loss. When he signed the over the top leases, no one - and I repeat no one - ever thought we were going to be off of 0% interest rates. No one thought real estate will plunge. It made sense at the time and VCs threw even more money as everyone held same view. In alternate universe, COVID would have never happened, QEs would have continued for another decade and WeWork would have been highly profitable monopoly.
This is not to say Neumann acted in unethical manner. He used WeWork cash and assets as his personal property. But keep in mind VCs always thought of WeWork as his "family business" just like how they thought of Facebook as Zuck's family business.
Perhaps they should have pivoted to become an incubator!
August 2022 https://a16z.com/2022/08/15/investing-in-flow/
Good job posting this publicly on a thread I'm sure at least one WeWork corporate employee is reading.
Expect to find a charge on the credit card you put down for your June purchase for all the services you have used. It is 100% legal for them to bill you for their price mistakes. Check the terms and conditions.
Do you have a source for your claims here? They mentioned a contract beginning in June of next year, if the company fulfils more than the contract generally that would be upon them, though it may be grounds for termination of the contract.
If you have some relevant law or legal reference to back up your statements on the matter, I'd be interested in learning a bit more about it personally.
All the core elements of a contract are there: offer, acceptance, consideration, and exercise. By making use of the services early, OP is materially expressing their intent to exercise the contract early, which gives WeWork the right to take consideration in kind, per the terms of the original boilerplate contract.
(And yes, clickthrough or shrinkwrapped TOCs often do not constitute an enforceable contract, especially when one party has not expressed any actual intent to form any contract and the offering party does everything they can to obscure the TOC and its implications, per Specht v. Netscape. But there is clearly intent to form a contract by the customer here, which means the entire TOC is as valid and enforceable as a rental car contract people sign without reading.)
This goes by different names, one of which is "contract by acceptance" (more common in the UK). In the US, see [Uniform Commercial Code § 2-207](https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-207):
> (1) A definite and seasonable expression of acceptance ... operates as an acceptance even though it states terms additional to or different from those offered or agreed upon, unless acceptance is expressly made conditional on assent to the additional or different terms. [...]
> (3) Conduct by both parties which recognizes the existence of a contract is sufficient to establish a contract for sale although the writings of the parties do not otherwise establish a contract. In such case the terms of the particular contract consist of those terms on which the writings of the parties agree, together with any supplementary terms incorporated under any other provisions of this Act.
Let me put it this way: A customer signs a contract to pay a company a rate of $X per month for unlimited usage of the company's services. The customer agrees that the contracted services will be exercised by booking through the app. The customer initially informs the company they want to start using these services and paying the monthly fee in June. They provide a credit card and sign a contract that authorizes payment for services rendered on a monthly basis, rolling until canceled by either party with X days notice.
Then before June, the customer uses the app to book services, then actually makes use of those services. The company observes that the customer is using the app to make use of the services, for which there is normally no additional payment required. This lack of an additional payment is in line with the "all-access" subscription (and note the app states it in 'credits', not dollars). While the company also offers a per-hour rate, the customer does not make any attempt to communicate their intent to enter into a different contract to pay for these services by the hour.
What else should the company assume? The customer's behavior and prior contract clearly signals intent to exercise the contract earlier than originally communicated. The company then actually provides those services to the customer, who materially benefits from them, at cost to the company. The company then charges the customer for services rendered at the monthly all-access rate, starting at the first day they made use of the services without any additional payment.
And the fact that this is a "mistake" by the app is actually irrelevant. It is the same as if you had a similar agreement with a gym, and show up earlier than you requested. You check in with the human at the counter. They let you in without saying anything other than "Welcome!" The gym starts to bill you the monthly fee. You can't complain.
You're right that I maybe shouldn't have said 100%, because these things are ruled on by human judges and juries.
Edit: Another relevant concept is that contract law assumes parties are reasonab...
What some people may not realize is that "executive suites" have been around forever, however they were never looked at as a "hypergrowth" SV/hot startup. This is where you get a small office among many others and there's a shared receptionist.
When I looked at WeWork, sitting at a table all day with other people and no privacy was about the same price as executive suites. They've also apparently had a business model where they don't own the spaces, so the underlying landlords can squeeze them at any time.
Was this the company where the CEO owned the trademark and was leasing it back to the company?
In any case just a company that, with a cursory inspection, IMHO showed no promise from day 1.
So like let's say my house got too crazy to work from, without being aware of WeWorks, it would seem like something I just have to suck up and deal with, but with awareness of WeWorks (and the associated concept of co-working spaces) my mind would at least go there. So maybe I'd shop around from the different co-working options based on location and price but wouldn't even occur to me to look at exec suites.
So all that is to say - I agree with you on the business, but that the existence of WeWorks may have widened the audience for that type of service with We itself getting the largest share of that business (same as Uber gets the most rides just by being the most associated name with taxis right now)
None of this is to say that We is "worth it" in valuation or as a service, I have no idea. Just point out the impact of marketing/awareness.
Is this a hypothetical? Because if you did run a business out of your home, you absolutely would know about short-term rental offices. Pre-covid, it was normal to meet in person at both offices if the size of the contract is large enough.
Regus was/is the main player in that space, and it certainly wasn't startup territory at all. WeWork took a very different angle to it, as they were looking to capture small startups that wanted to be in a kind of "incubator" type set up. The buildouts and the target clientele were different concepts than had been tried in that market. I'm not saying that WeWork didn't/doesn't have issues, or that the idea was profitable at it's core, but it was a different take and seen as quite "disruptive".
>They've also apparently had a business model where they don't own the spaces, so the underlying landlords can squeeze them at any time.
WeWork leases have single purpose entities on nearly all their leases with few guarantees from WeWork the company. That basically means that the landlord is holding nothing next to nothing. In fact, it's WeWork that could back out of a lease pretty easily leaving the landlord with little recourse, not the landlords that could squeeze them. And even then, the only squeeze the landlords have would be when renewing a lease, and landlords don't have the upper-hand there at all right now.
One of the things that WeWork did was buy up significant chunks of square footage in well located buildings that had trouble filling that square footage, then WeWork offloaded a lot of the initial capital expenditure for the buildouts onto the landlord. Some of these leases had break even points for the landlord outside of 5 years, which is quite long for leases that big.
So if WeWork goes under or backs out of a given lease, the landlord is left with a huge amount of space, that they likely can't lease, and will likely take a significant amount of capital to either A) break it up, or B) make it amenable for another company to lease out. That means that the landlords are likely going to give WeWork as long a leash as possible, because they don't want that space back.
The writing is on the wall though, and WeWork has been going downhill for years now. It was arguable whether it was a good business model before the pandemic, but I can't imagine it making sense in a post-pandemic world.
While WeWork clearly were squandering SV investor money, don't underestimate how much real estate fat cats made out on these deals. They got these seemingly sweetheart WeWork leases on the books, marked up valuations for the remaining space in the building, and sold the dream to other investment firms to make out like bandits.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I think it makes more sense. If companies would rather not get invested in holding real-estate long-term in an uncertain economic and work climate, then having a much more flexible office situation makes a ton of sense. If the business they're starting doesn't work out, they're not left holding the bag on real-estate that they'll then have difficulty unloading.
We call this the library where I’m from and it is free and comes with expert help from librarians! :)
I know most of the time as an independent consultant, the physical space to get away from your house is the reason why you pay WeWork, but if it's about structuring your work day, more focus, more energy from other people around you, and potentially meeting a person or two, virtual co-working offers all of that.
I think Adam Neumann is the real life version of James Bond setting billions of dollars worth of Mohammed bin Salman‘s money on fire (by way of SoftBank).
I've tried a few coworking spaces and always come to the conclusion that they're a grift. Many people such as myself probably try them out, begrudgingly pay $300 a month for a few months, and inevitably cancel to make room for the next sucker.
In another time, this model probably worked, or at least was less unsustainable than it is now. Charge enough to have non-riffraff clientele that are dumb enough to fall for the grift but smart enough move on so another sap can take their place and repeat the cycle. Perhaps it's a good business to own when times are good (and easy money flowing in WeWork's case), but not when inflation goes up, wages stagnate, and labor force participation is down. $300 means something different than it did 3 years ago even though I was numerically making less than I am now without adjusting for inflation. There's no way in hell I'm throwing away $300 on that kind of experiment now, though part of me misses the days when I could and not feel bad about it.
It may be one thing if you're a scrappy business that has bootstrapped cash or a revenue stream, but coworking seems like a complete dud if you're just a professional who wants to work somewhere that's not Starbucks or the spare bedroom.
They always sell networking as an advantage, but people aren't that chatty and the folks in there are in the same boat as you are, which limits the worth of that network if you're trying to find clients. Never made much sense to me if you have a home office or a space bedroom to turn into one.
The entire market is a dud in my mind. How many scrappy startups without funding that need co-work space really exist? I don't see enough for an entire multi billion industry across the world. Especially since the enviable outcome if those are successful is they no longer are a customer once they get a lease somewhere for less. They can't sublease at a better rate than a direct lease so again no business.
Also I tried one and they all center around the horrible ineffective for getting things done open floor plans. Yes they have private areas I know but they are the exception. The offices should focus on the needs of freelance professionals and provide a better workspace than the FREE library that is in every city.
For example, right now I work out of the spare bedroom in our house. If we have another kid, that bedroom is no longer spare. People in that situation have a few options (a) make it work (b) buy a larger house (c) go into the office.
Option C is probably not much cheaper than $300/m. I bet Option B became a lot less available to a lot of people now. Spending 3600 a year on a place to work may be a lot cheaper than moving house (heck, your real estate taxes may go up by more than 300/m alone)
None of this is to say that We is a good sustainable business, just building on your analysis to point out there are some cases where We has emerged as the more likely/affordable option.
Meanwhile WeWork seems to be thriving in India. They have a large number of locations in bangalore. Each one of them is reasonably priced, adequately appointed in amenities, and generally pleasant to work out of.
I wonder what's the difference between the operations (India vs USA) that led to such a vast gap in outcomes.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/bonds/wework_companies_i...
I for one will happily pay a huge real estate premium for free* beer
The US has a lot more entrepreneurship than the UK, and I think it is something that us Brits could well do more of. In the UK we're too conservative, whilst the US plays it much more fast-an-loose. The UK has its fair share of financial scandals, mind.
I get the impression that in the US there has been far too much money chasing after far too opportunities. Blasting through $10b in a single business seems, shall we say, "quite an achievement."
I mean, Juicero, what was that crap, anyway? And then there was the whole Elizabeth Holmes thing. It would have been a large-cap company by UK standards. It seems that there's a lot of US "businesses" out there who are looking to hoover a lot of that sweet sweet VC lolly. I'm not sure what "due diligence" the VC guys are doing, but it doesn't seem much.
Another thing I have noticed is that, fairly recently, VC has seemed to switch into reverse gear. Now growth seems to be de-emphasised. It's like the whole Venture Capital market has collectively woken up one day and decided that they are much more sceptical about funding growth opportunities. What has changed really, though? It seems that just because Facebook and a couple of other titans decided to have a round of layoffs, that everyone else should, too. It's not really logical when you think about it. Sure, there's the whole Covid and Russian conflict thing throwing a spanner in the works, but have things really changed that much? It seems more a case of a lack of "animal spirit" compared to formerly that is causing the problems rather than any real problems themselves.
Inflation. :-/
While we weren't quite to that situation, the last decade of near zero interest rates put VCs precariously close to it.
Macro: We had exceptionally low interest rates creating a debt bubble coupled with unprecedented Fed printing. To put it into perspective: we printed $6-Trillion USD on COVID stimulus compared to FDR's New Deal at $1-Trillion USD (today dollars).
Micro: Bubble popping. Public price-to-sales ratios fell substantially. Declines in consumer spending, inflation, and supply chain hiccups compressed margin. Lending rates went up, liquidity went down, and commercial realestate is still bracing for impact. Late-stage mega funds slowed their investing in the face of redemption threats. IPOs and SPACs became unpalatable. So early stage funds sitting on loads of cash raised pre-2022 are waiting on the sidelines to see where it falls out & who emerges.
Worth noting that inflation-adjusted GDP was $1T in 1930 and $19T in 2019.
There's this weird historical effect represented by "Real GDP" that has the 1930s number being 10x that size (whatever that means):
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1031678/gdp-and-real-gdp...
Not just the US: the 2008 bubble and the tech bubble both had sovereign wealth funds chasing high returns. The US tech sector was good at convincing them that investments would perform highly but it’s always been amazing to me to see the kind of returns predicted for a cab or shared office space company, and it’s felt like big institutional investors were basically saying they had no idea what to do either but needed to put the money somewhere.
Part of the issue is that the VCs got very good at convincing themselves that they were geniuses at picking winners, even though in hindsight they clearly had no clothes on.
Yeah, low interest rates and cheap money chasing returns definitely helped fuel a historic immolation of vast sums of money, but I feel like it'd be remiss to discuss this without pointing out the complete fecklessness of the VCs in general.
These people spent years talking up their thought leadership and their uncanny ability to pick winners, and how it made them Galt-like messianic figures. Any criticism or even just skepticism was derided as anti-progress luddites, or worse - corrupt agents of an evil incumbency.
They anointed themselves the heralds of progress itself, in a way that was plainly unearned.
I really hope (but am not holding my breath for) a changing of the guard this time around. So much human progress has been denied because we allocated capital so poorly - and chose such incredibly poor stewards for capital allocation.
> [progress]
how would you allocate our economic surplus in a better way?
People can argue that it was too expensive or over-designed. But I don't think the basic idea is as ridiculous as people make it seem. "You can just juice it yourself!" Sure, but the same can be said for a Keurig machine, and they're extremely popular. Having watched what it would take to juice the Juicero packs on your own and having made my own Keurig pods without a machine, my guess is it's probably easier to do your own Keurig (and the Keurig machines seem to be more susceptible to getting dirty than Juicero machines).
Keep in mind they weren't juice packs that were being squeeze, but rather they were pieces of fruit and vegetables that could have the juices readily squeezed out. I haven't tried the juice - just about no one has - but if it was able to give the taste of fresh squeezed juice in seconds time it seems it would at least be notable. There's not really a better solution at the moment (actual juicing takes a lot of time and is very messy and store juice isn't as tasty).
I actually worked at an SB-funded company for over a year (I had a non-compete so it was a good time to branch out and try crazy stuff) and the way the company was run was explicitly poised to bet on high growth with acknowledgement that it was a very risky bet that had a high chance of blowing up.
We were one of the first notable companies to do the "we over-hired and now that the world is changing, we need to lay off" thing in this cycle, and got a tremendous amount of negative press for what is now just basically expected behavior across industries.
But anyway, neither company management nor SB were dumb. Everyone understood that we were playing a high-risk high-reward strategy and recognized that "high risk" means the company blows up if things don't go right. It's just a choice that people make about: where to invest their money, what kind of company to start, and where to work. Like, for some people working at the DMV makes sense (very steady, no growth or significant upside) and for some people working at a crazy startup does (not steady at all, some chance of hitting it big.)
The company I was in was very sensitive to rates. We bet that if capital remained cheap, we'd power our way to real scale and profitability. It was a reasonable bet. History showed that we bet wrong and paid the price (I doubt the investors will recoup their money, and my equity is likely to be worth nothing although the company itself still exists.)
But that's OK. My company made a bet at revolutionizing its industry (and to some extent, it did) as did We. If these companies completely die, well - that's the nature of the game we chose to play. If luck worked out the other way, it would be glorious.
My main point is you can't apply the same lens to an explicitly high growth/high risk company that looks to change the world (or die trying) as you would to a self-funded bootstrapped business that is looking to slowly grow (and avoid death at all costs) by taking only small incremental bets. As long as everyone knows who is playing which game (and I guarantee you that management, employees and the investors like SoftBank knows which game they are playing) it's all good.
The rest of their bike parking "amenities" seem to just be the bare minimum required by San Francisco law, which often means having to take a freight elevator which can take a very long time in a busy building, or put it in a shared cage in a parking garage that is open to the public.
Notably they didn't send me any notification regarding the office closure, I just opened the app and it was gone.
In 2019, they had a 99% occupancy rate.
The most successful coworking spaces near me have a restaurant, a bar, and nice multimedia event spaces with Satellite TV -- all expenses that I don't think Regus, WeWork, or Expansive would ever spend money on.
Those spaces, that have amenities that are not things that you could get at home, have waiting lists for offices.
Maybe the space makes more sense for people who aren't coding and just need to check a few emails and write some documents, but even then it's pretty damn bad for your back to be hunched over your laptop.
Developers were going to need paying more than even a 10-year served exec in the UK with 200 staff under them. They couldn’t run it within their existing organisation - the salary disparity would have been unpalatable. So they were advised to set up a subsidiary, rent a whole floor of Wework in London and run it out of there.
Burned through £20m in a year - a decent chunk on contractors from the sort of IT brand you know. Nothing shipped. Wrote it off after a year. Fired everyone and surrendered lease.
That was Wework’s target market - not freelancers or startups. Big companies with deep pockets who could have leased the whole building but never created the buzz. Work from home killed that market and it won’t return.
Great point, and a key issue in the PR narrative about WeWork and others like Uber and Airbnb. The PR is always about "helping the small guy", when the business reality is that enterprise whales are much better for the bottom line.