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WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

bloomberg.com

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Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#161

Post by Fomite »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #95
zrobotics wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profitability doesn't mean defensible though. What separates them from their competitors? That is the point I'm making, not that they are unprofitable.

> What separates them from their competitors? Scale. One can reliably get an Uber almost anywhere. That makes it attractive to travelling businesspeople and jet setters, two price insensitive customer segments that Uber almost singularly dominates. Network effects. Ubers are almost always among the fastest transportation options in most cities. Breadth. I never use Uber Eats, but apparently it’s doing quite well. (I…

Ironically, where I live getting a Lyft or an actual taxi is easy. Getting an Uber is far more difficult.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#162

Post by isostatic »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #95
zrobotics wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profitability doesn't mean defensible though. What separates them from their competitors? That is the point I'm making, not that they are unprofitable.

> What separates them from their competitors? Scale. One can reliably get an Uber almost anywhere. That makes it attractive to travelling businesspeople and jet setters, two price insensitive customer segments that Uber almost singularly dominates. Network effects. Ubers are almost always among the fastest transportation options in most cities. Breadth. I never use Uber Eats, but apparently it’s doing quite well. (I…

> Scale. One can reliably get an Uber almost anywhere. That makes it attractive to travelling businesspeople and jet setters, two price insensitive customer segments that Uber almost singularly dominates.

Indeed. I was shocked to not be able to get one in China a couple of months ago

When I land in Sydney, or Seoul, or Paris, or New York, I don't want to have to work out what app to get, download it, set it up, set up payments, and then hope it works.

On the other hand Uber really let me down in Nairobi last year. with an airport pickup, so I don't rely on it there now, and will pre-book a legacy transfer to/from the airport now. They need to keep the quality up across all those cities otherwise they risk someone else winning.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#163

Post by rmah »

Spivak wrote: post #138
dragandj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which means it requires much less capital They burned through billions of dollars of capital. That's quite a lot for a business that requires very little capital. What would they burn if they needed lots of capital? Trillions of dollars?

I mean half a million drivers each with a car that say costs $20k over its lifetime is about 10 billion. So like maybe?

500,000 drivers * $20,000/car => $10,000,000,000 or $10 bil, not $10 trillion.

Thus far, Uber has raised $24.2 bil in financing so they could have bought cars for every driver easily. No idea what they did with all that money.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#164

Post by EliRivers »

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…

a still evolving business that currently includes an elementary school and a coding academy.

Education is like catnip to these people. It's like some kind of attractor industry. They're all convinced they have the magic formula.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#165

Post by chipotle_coyote »

rconti wrote: post #127
AlexandrB wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ef…

The dispatch model is also relatively easily copyable, though. I don't want to downplay the amount of tech work that went it, but it's not an insurmountable obstacle -- taxi companies could sign up with a service like Curb or Easy, or even create their own like Yellow Cab Houston's Hail a Cab.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#166

Post by dvtrn »

jjeaff wrote: post #159
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Why in the world we don't have community/mutual based funeral homes is beyond me.

Do you mean burial sites (cemetary) and not funeral homes, or is this perhaps a quirk of localization? To me, born in the American south a "funeral home" is just the place where mourning ceremonies are (sometimes, but not always) held while the bereaved travel to a separate burial site afterwards to actually lay the departed to rest.

So that in mind, is what got me asking-is it the burial site you're actually suggesting be a community/mutual based resource or the actual establishment? I've sometimes heard people use the two interchangeably.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#167

Post by Fomite »

ghaff wrote: post #18
_the_inflator wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with the "rubbish part". WeWork single handedly changed the way we work. It is way easier to build a tech startup with the help of a co-working space company than before. I suspect that WeWork's business model ain't the problem but it's competitors, for example in London, UK. Competition drives prices for new real estate, crashed margins.

For a tiny subset of "we." And, in any case, there are lots of local alternatives.

This. I have never used WeWork.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#168

Post by jjeaff »

dcole2929 wrote: post #88
mcguire wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

And twitch is becoming much more than esports. With YouTube shooting itself in the foot with their copyright nonsense, there are lots of big YouTubers carefully transitioning their content and user base to twitch.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#169

Post by dazc »

zrobotics wrote: post #49
dazc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried using a Regus space the other week. It didn't seem that much better than any other co-working space in regards to noise and bad manners?

Have you been in a WeWork office, though? IME all shared offices are incredibly noisy, I don't understand why anyone would want to rent there.

No, but I've worked in a few co-working spaces and the experience has always been the same. I expected Regus to be a little more grown-up but it appears not?

From what I've read about wework, I certainly won't be a customer any time soon.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#170

Post by dvtrn »

whalesalad wrote: post #150
auiya wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These coworking spaces are terrible. They're like Monkey Joe's for tech bro's.

It's not really tech bro's ... I don't encounter those people very often. I think that fraternity style vibe has kinda gone by the wayside. It's everyone else who aren't really technologists but want to get in on the gold rush. The social media marketing companies, the wordpress/magento factories, the crypto people, the uber-for-xyz... there is a lot of noise both literally and figuratively with these groups.

Don't forget the bootcamps. A company I departed about two years ago was in a Regus spot. We watched 4 bootcamps in 3 years pop up for 6-8 weeks at a time, graduate a "class", pack up and leave.
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