I have a very unsophisticated eye, but it's difficult to avoid the feeling that a portion of modern VC is a pump and dump scheme. Particularly when taking into account recent equity moves by WeWork and Beyond Meat.
The We Company S-1
261–270 of 346 posts
Re: The We Company S-1
#262Translation: WE slurp money - for granted.
Re: The We Company S-1
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Adam is a unique leader who has proven he can simultaneously wear the hats of visionary, operator and innovator... Is this a normal sort of thing to see in such a filing? He's being referred to by his first name and heaped with praise.
Adam is extraordinarily humble. Everyone, including Adam, would never exaggerate. Adam is a part of everything. He is in the sky and sea. He is in the dreams of children at night. He is all that there is, forever.
Adam is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. Those who invest will inherit all this, and Adam will be their God and they will be his children. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the shorts -- they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulphur. This is the second death.
Re: The We Company S-1
#264This is just my opinion, but I think it will be one of the most shorted stock this year and next year.
Re: The We Company S-1
#265I’m really disgusted by how much recent tech IPOs inject pitch deck-style garbage into the S-1 filing, especially this one. I’ve always had a great amount of respect for the mediating nature of the S-1’s dry, candid, and ruthlessly honest assessment of business risks, and even though those things are still there, they’re blown out by marketing photos, full-page charts, and branding. This is basically like putting per…
I feel the opposite. The boilerplate S-1 stuff can be very mis-leading and unhelpful when trying to figure out how the business is and can work.
Re: The We Company S-1
#266Can someone give me a tldr of what this is/means and why it's almost at the top of HN?
In addition to what others said, this belongs at the top of HN because one of HN's primary missions is to be the social media platform of the California VC community. The IPO is the final crowning achievement of everything that YCombinator stands for as a start-up accelerator, so the S-1 is the first very important pulling back of the curtain of exactly what the incubator-driven, VC-fueled startup ecosystem has wrought.
And in this case, the emperor appears to have no clothes. Good luck everyone. See ya in the breadlines!
Re: The We Company S-1
#267WeWork has $33.9 Billion in Non-canceable lease commitments, and it's lease payments are increasing 100% YoY. I think that is the true ticking time bomb for this company. In a world where billion dollar losses (Uber) seems somewhat normal, those lease obligations are still outrageous, and those payments will come due eventually, whether they have the money or not. In 2019 they attributed over $800 Million to operatin…
Seems like they are pretty much levered to the hilt. What happens when the current bubble bursts (or even just deflates) and their occupancy rate declines? Their business model seems to be selling short term leases and buying long term leases. This is all fine and dandy as long as they can find enough buyers for the short term commitments, but the distribution of almost all such strategies tends to be heavily tailed.…
in a recession, is short term, flexible office space more or less desirable?
Re: The We Company S-1
#268Apparently Adam has pledged $1B in charitable donations over the next 10 years, otherwise he loses voting power. Is this normal? >To evidence their commitment to charitable causes and to ensure this commitment is meaningful, if Adam and Rebekah have not contributed at least $1 billion to charitable causes as of the ten-year anniversary of the closing date of this offering, holders of all of the Company's high-vote st…
It seems disingenuous to make themselves only 10x more powerful than other investors if they don't do what they say, rather than the accepted 20x. Is such an ratio normal?
It's certainly normal for founders to give themselves more power than other investors.
Re: The We Company S-1
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can also serve as a major red flag, when a company adds in a bunch of unnecessary things while excluding things that aren’t required, but are critical, to valuations such as churn rates. This was a big one in Uber’s filings where it looked like they were probably mixing in Uber Eats to hide flat or declining usage of the actual ride sharing service. Public companies changing how something has been historically rep…
Or pull a Groupon and just completely redefine several accounting concepts, e.g. list marketing costs as capital expenditures.
I don't get that one. How are they justifying placing marketing as Capex instead of Opex? What is the advantage? Are they saying marketing is a depreciating asset?
Re: The We Company S-1
#270I’m really disgusted by how much recent tech IPOs inject pitch deck-style garbage into the S-1 filing, especially this one. I’ve always had a great amount of respect for the mediating nature of the S-1’s dry, candid, and ruthlessly honest assessment of business risks, and even though those things are still there, they’re blown out by marketing photos, full-page charts, and branding. This is basically like putting per…
I'd agree except WeWork's emphasis on design is a huge reason they have become this big in the first place.
Indeed, presumably they have paid a sizable team of designers quite well to create these diagrams, graphs, etc.
I was impressed by all the varied ways they have visualized their "data". The tipping scale, for instance, gives a clear before/after projection while being much more visually interesting than a plain graph.
Not to say that I believe all of it, but I do think visually appealing and/or dazzling graphics do have an effect on some types of people. Conscious or not.