I hope they make it through. I have a WeWork right in walking distance and would love to work there regularly if I ever get a remote job.
I tried one out for a month and didn't like it. It's very expensive for what it is.
WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality
121–130 of 380 posts
Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality
#122https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-08/wework... "In addition to the corporate finance weirdness: “Going forward, the company will no longer be called WeWork but rather The We Company.” (“The switch is not a legal name change,” okay.) And: “Rather than just renting desks, the company aims to encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds,” which is—and I have spent years w…
[deleted]
Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality
#123I've enjoyed being a customer of WeWork (and benefitting from this economically untenable situation) much more than having my start-up acquired by them. It actually is a pretty well executed product (not economically viable but well designed/run spaces) but not the type of company I wanted anything to do with as an employee. I definitely wasn't buying their pitch about being a tech company.
I left immediately after we were acquired to start another new company and have been very happy with that decision. The whole thing was very... bizarre... to say the least. Just glad I can enjoy this spectacle from afar with relatively little skin in the game.
Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other, other hand, Amazon sends currently very overvalued as a retail company. (I haven't looked at the comparative sizes of its various components.) How long before Amazon sounds of its retail business?
Amazon hasn't been just a retail company in a very long time. It is probably THE Tech company at this point. They are a consumer electronics company having cornered the market on the cheap android tablet, and the smart speaker. They are a dominant enterprise cloud player. They own the biggest player in e-sports currently with twitch. They are in the music and video streaming business. They do government contracting a…
I think the point is that Amazon as retail on the web isn't the success story of Amazon. It's all of the other things you mentioned.
Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you see this 60k/year figure? Estimates that I'm don't even come /close/ to 60k/year for a WeWork space.
In New York, it's around $60k a year if you get an office for 7-10 people. https://www.wework.com/buildings/154-grand-st--new-york-city...
That doesn't sound too bad if your employee payroll is going to be >= $1M/yr.
To put it another way, I'd rather have a dedicated space for 10 employees than have 10.5 or 11 employees all working from their bedrooms and starbucks.
Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
WeDie with free beer/kombucha/whatever sounds pretty amazing tbh. Funeral home industry could benefit from some disruption.
> We're disrupting funeral homes. Man, that sounds...horrible.
Does it really? I can imagine there's room for innovation in helping people to honor and grieve the passing of their loved ones.
Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes it's different, sometimes it's not. Tech allowed a company like Amazon to scale. Tech allows a company like Uber to allocate rides vastly more efficiently, tech allows a company like AirBnB to enable property owners to extract more value from their property. But tech doesn't allow Tesla to sell 10x more cars than Toyota (for example).
> Tech allows a company like Uber to allocate rides vastly more efficiently It's more accurate to say that venture capital allows Uber to subsidize rides more aggressively. I see no evidence that Uber is substantially more efficient (when you include the driver's costs) than traditional taxi companies. Edit: Uber has also managed to skirt a bunch of labor laws by claiming their employees are contractors. I guess that…
I think it's unquestionable that tech like Uber's can/does allocate cars and rides more efficiently. The taxi model relies on drivers circling looking for a fare and phone dispatch with, at best, a dispatcher seeing GPS cab location on a screen and trying to eyeball-match it to the caller's location. (or, at worst, caller-reported location, and radioing a bunch of cabs asking them "hey, where you at?")
At its most efficient, an Uber model can automatically and predictively allocate rides based on realtime rider and driver current and predicted locations with realtime traffic/travel data. There's simply no comparison.
The extent to which rides are cheaper due to skirting of regulations, extracting money from VCs, pushing costs onto drivers, is effectively a separate issue.
That is to say, Uber can break many laws, screw over drivers, flood the market with way too many cars, all while losing money, but none of that means that the dispatch model isn't inherently more efficient.
Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality
#128>The Gulf investors backing the Vision Fund seem to have decided that WeWork is not a tech bet but simply an aggressive punt on real estate. This is the bogey man of a huge number of current 'tech startups' - What if it turns out Tesla really are a car company! Or if We Work are actually an office rental company! OR gasp Uber is a cab company! (1) We now have a glut of companies operating in traditional markets that…
Don't forget that Snap is a camera company.
Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality
#129I really wonder why and how companies are willing to rent at these places. It's full of arrogant pricks and the failure rate of startups is insane.
I founded a company few years ago. Was offered space at we work for about 3k for just 100square feet. Few days of searching through local real estate companies brought me a 300square feet office for 1.5k at a similar location. Only no freebeers and fancy entrance.
Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind, too, that $1 in January 1999 would buy what $1.53 does today [1]. Saying you’d be 20% Amazon in 1999 is the same as saying you’d have bought the stock then. Yes, of course—with that prescience you’d overperform. [1] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=199901...
5X is worse case, it's 15X in dollar terms, but an equivalent investment in Dow would be almost 3X so thus the discount. It's also worse case because it assumes you buy at the $107 peak. It didn't spend much time above $100...
Buying Amazon in the 90s is analogous to buying Berkshire in the 70s. It would have taken a prescient and outsized allocation decision which, ex ante, would have been difficult to justify.