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WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

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Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#151

Post by sriram_sun »

reaperducer wrote: post #119
addajones wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds about right. Spent a couple years at a WeWork in Los Angeles. It's a luxury, a glorified co-working community. People enjoy the beer. One shake of the economy and everybody will cut WeWork and go back home or somewhere considerably more affordable.

One shake of the economy and everybody will cut WeWork and go back home or somewhere considerably more affordable Or even free. When I was in the Seattle tech scene about ten years ago, the State of Washington had free co-working space at the convention center as a way to stimulate local entrepreneurship. The desks were a little strange, but they were free!

Do not forget your local community college and city libraries!

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#153

Post by eddiezane »

whalesalad wrote: post #83
sachinprism wrote: post #9

I feel like WeWork would be one of the first companies to go under in case a recession hits the US market. Everyone who works there is probably going to decide en masse that they can do the same things from home or a Starbucks

We (2 of us, expected to grow to 4 quickly) toured WeWork, Spaces (Regus) and a few other one-off spots here in Orange County. Everyone was pretty pricey, like 2500/mo for 100 square feet. WeWork was definitely the worst and was the most overcrowded... but hey they have beer on tap! (sarcasm) Ultimately we grabbed a lease on Pacific Coast Highway with a sweeping view of the ocean for less with about 3x the room in a…

I recently became remote and when hunting for a coworking space initially figured I'd just go to one of the WeWork's here (Denver).

I was blown away at the cost of a "hot desk" membership [1]. The least expensive offering was $360/mo. For a desk that's not "yours" and you can't leave anything at.

I wound up going with Novel [2] for $99/mo. Sure printing costs me $0.10/page but other than that it's pretty much a desk.

For fun I checked out the pricing for WeWork SF [3]...

[1] https://www.wework.com/l/denver--CO

[2] https://novelcoworking.com/locations/colorado/denver/16th-st...

[3] https://www.wework.com/l/san-francisco--sf-bay-area--CA

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#154

Post by mikeryan »

mikestew wrote: post #144
Traster wrote: post #4

>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…

Somewhere along the way I think we got it flipped around. No one was calling Sears a tech company in 1969 just because they bought an IBM 370 to computerize their accounting and inventory. By probably 1975, if you were Fortune 500 and still doing your books by hand you were probably just a dinosaur rather than your computerized competitors being so advanced. Uber, Tesla, okay, maybe there is an argument to be made fo…

Similar I have issues with Compass Real Estate getting 440M in funding to basically buy traditional real estate companies with some sort of mythical special tech to make home buying “better”

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/safe-as-houses-compass-400...

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#155

Post by clamprecht »

kgwgk wrote: post #93

https://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…

Eventually it may be, "we broke."

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#156

Post by travisjungroth »

ritchiea wrote: post #99
kgwgk wrote: post #93

https://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…

Yea it sounds like the kind of corporate slogan you come up with when you have to prove you're not just a real estate company and that your company has exponential growth potential rather than a slogan expressing something anyone wants.

"We rent out office spaces and amenities like big successful startups to anyone."

Says what they do and hints at why people want it. And it will never, ever be their mission for the reasons you said.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#157

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

rglover wrote: post #120
rajacombinator wrote: post #117

Earlier 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.

There's a big problem with funeral homes preying on people's grief for profit. They could absolutely use some disruption, however I doubt that disruption could ever be in the form of a profit-seeking startup.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#158

Post by rickyc091 »

village-idiot wrote: post #132
oh_sigh wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You gotta compare it to the cost of a traditional commercial real estate lease, that’s what makes it a good or bad deal. (I don’t actually know what a comparative traditional lease would cost).

At least in NYC, it's comparable, but there are a lot of other factors like location and time that goes into it as well.

As a founder, do you want to spend your time negotiating contracts, handling the admin stuff like setting up the internet, electricity, build out if necessary?

To compare the original WeWork location I posted, a 1,000- 1,5000 square feet place would be around $15,000/mo in an older building. But that space would be a lot larger than what WeWork is offering, without any ammenities. At the same time, you can move it to a less convenient location and cut some costs.

It really depends on what the company's needs are at the time and how much they want/need to invest in their own office at the moment. WeWork has month to month contracts for smaller desk spaces so you can adjust as needed. They also offer to build you out offices to customize to your needs.

Many larger companies typically have remote offices at WeWork. For example, at a WeWork we were working at, there was a Blizzard and GitHub office.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#159

Post by jjeaff »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #157
rglover wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're disrupting funeral homes. Man, that sounds...horrible.

There's a big problem with funeral homes preying on people's grief for profit. They could absolutely use some disruption, however I doubt that disruption could ever be in the form of a profit-seeking startup.

You know, it occurs to me that we have client owned insurance companies and client owned credit unions. Why in the world we don't have community/mutual based funeral homes is beyond me.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#160

Post by jjeaff »

twic wrote: post #133
rglover wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're disrupting funeral homes. Man, that sounds...horrible.

I know what you mean - but you also hear some horror stories about funeral directors. They're an industry that gets to take advantage of uninformed consumers at a vulnerable time of their life. I'm not sure We, or any other company even remotely connected to Silicon Valley, are the right people to fix that, though.

Companies like Costco and Walmart have disrupted them to a point, by selling coffins at least.
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