I feel like something must be seriously wrong with capitalism if it can keep creating these startups and funnelling endless hundreds of milions into them so they can accumulate debt, lose money, and achieve absolutely nothing of value.
WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn
41–50 of 176 posts
Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I guess that's a function of how relatively few HNers may be Pinterest users? I actually use Pinterest. It's just how often does the opportunity to mention Pinterest comes up? My pins are fashion (boots, athletic wares, etc..) and haircuts.
Pinterest probably has an amazing tech stack. I am surprised that it doesn't get more love around here.
Pinterest founders are business+design. Therefore the company is not engineering first, it's product and design first.
This is why it's not particularly loved on HN, and this is also why the tech stack is nothing special (it's not bad, it's just not special).
What is special is the unbelievable product market fit. Engaged Pinterest users 1) spend a shitton of time on the app (hours a day) and 2) interact very positively with ads (this is VERY purposeful and part of the product first company style).
I think their recipe makes for a great company, but it's not the most fun for engineers to work on (those things don't always if ever correlate).
Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn
#43Magical indeed. From the chart in the article it looks like for the most recent half-year they were paid $1.35B in rent and spent $1.23B to operate their properties, which works out to just $120MM in operating income for the year, let's say $250MM for the year. Per the S1 they already have around $4B of debt which looks like it costs them about $80MM per year in interest. That leaves about $170MM in plausible "earnin…
Digging into those other costs is informative as well, the numbers for 2018:
Pre-opening location expenses $350MM
Growth and new market development expenses $475MM
Sales and marketing expenses $370MM
Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn
#44Zoom is also up 50% since it went public in April, and Crowdstrike is up 70%. I don't really get the sense in comparing a bunch of companies with disparate financials and very different industries. The We Company is a real estate company trying to convince people it's a tech company. This list mixes B2C and B2B companies, SaaS platforms with monthly recurring revenue with companies with advertising-based business mod…
But if they all feed from the same pool of money who are looking to invest in "tech", then they are related.
Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn
#45The City of London is having a skyscraper boom at the moment - two major 100+ floor buildings are going up and you can hardly turn a corner without some crane or building work going on. I personally (and without any empirical evidence) think that there is no way London needs this much more office space, partly because "Brexit China Tariffs", but mostly because remote working and "just not in the office five days a we…
> [...] perhaps floors 1-20 as office and 20-40 as apartments or something, will almaot certainly be a feature of the next twenty years.
Please be wrong, please, please, please...
If I just can telecommute I don't want my workspace being my live space and my neighbours being my coworkers.
That can may be a thing if you are living by your own, living in a foreign city and without family. I can't see it other way.
Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn
#46The City of London is having a skyscraper boom at the moment - two major 100+ floor buildings are going up and you can hardly turn a corner without some crane or building work going on. I personally (and without any empirical evidence) think that there is no way London needs this much more office space, partly because "Brexit China Tariffs", but mostly because remote working and "just not in the office five days a we…
Sorry to disappoint you but I'm not sure I agree here. It doesn't feel much different to 2006/07 - ie peak of the cycle in real estate for the City (not to say that I think the bust will be like 2008/09 but that I think there really is a clearly cyclical element to it).
The City is not a place families typically want to live because it has very little green space - and it's largely not a place marketed to families. High-end residential space in the City is essentially marketed at two groups: single people in their 20s/early 30s working nearby, and people for whom it's a second home near work. In my opinion, those markets are enough to sustain it for many years to come - they're likely to grow and what's more they have disposable income which will support the retail/etc element in a way homes for families these days don't.
The commercial real estate boom in the City is the latest in a long, long list of such. Unlike Canary Wharf, which has been very careful to manage space so that almost every square foot is always occupied except in the deepest points of recessions, real estate in the City has had a large speculative element to it for at least the time I've been observing the market (since the 90s), and I don't see anything different here.
There's a long-term growth story and a cyclical element. Long-term growth is about a move eastwards as the West End gets filled up/businesses get priced out. The cyclical part this time to me seems to combine an element of that with it being a "signalling" location for certain types of business about who/what they are.
Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn
#47The City of London is having a skyscraper boom at the moment - two major 100+ floor buildings are going up and you can hardly turn a corner without some crane or building work going on. I personally (and without any empirical evidence) think that there is no way London needs this much more office space, partly because "Brexit China Tariffs", but mostly because remote working and "just not in the office five days a we…
> [...] perhaps floors 1-20 as office and 20-40 as apartments or something, will almaot certainly be a feature of the next twenty years. Please be wrong, please, please, please... If I just can telecommute I don't want my workspace being my live space and my neighbours being my coworkers. That can may be a thing if you are living by your own, living in a foreign city and without family. I can't see it other way.
One thing the City as an area is short of is hotel space. Hotels or part-time occupancy residential (serviced apartments and second homes) feels much more realistic for that space than "true" residential space.
Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn
#48The City of London is having a skyscraper boom at the moment - two major 100+ floor buildings are going up and you can hardly turn a corner without some crane or building work going on. I personally (and without any empirical evidence) think that there is no way London needs this much more office space, partly because "Brexit China Tariffs", but mostly because remote working and "just not in the office five days a we…
> [...] perhaps floors 1-20 as office and 20-40 as apartments or something, will almaot certainly be a feature of the next twenty years. Please be wrong, please, please, please... If I just can telecommute I don't want my workspace being my live space and my neighbours being my coworkers. That can may be a thing if you are living by your own, living in a foreign city and without family. I can't see it other way.
Skyscrapers are only getting bigger. And while "walkability" and "going outside" are really important so too is density and density can breed innovation.
It's why weird companies with funny CEOs might try things that a serviced office corporation might not and might build an environment that's better for us all.
It would be rare I admit.
Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn
#49Tangent: the article includes a chart titled "Unicorns Gored" with the caption, "Many of the highly valued young technology companies have not done well as public companies". It features 9 relatively recent tech IPOs, including Lyft, Dropbox, Spotify, and Snapchat. All of the companies have a negative delta in terms of initial stock price, from -47% to -2%, except for Pinterest, which is +77%. I actually had forgotte…
Huh didn't even know Pinterest is still a thing. Is it like Instagram?
Pinterest is huge in the Architecture and Design community as a place to organize project inspiration and ideas.
Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another way in which Pinterest is an outlier in this list is that its user base skews heavily female (>80% according to one source: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/pinterest-statistics/ ). I wonder whether some "Moneyball Factor" could be at work, in that this led to it being underpriced for its potential. Snapchat users also skew somewhat female, but they are also quite young compared to other sites, and "youth" may…
Don’t want to overgeneralize, but women seem to be more likely consumers (of things) & regular users of social media. [I’m sure niche exceptions abound] I don’t know if anyone has run the numbers, but I’d expect ladies to more valuable on all kinds of KPIs of a good customer. My feel is that men gravitate towards large purchases around a hobby or two (bikes, outdoors, cars, computers, video games). While women are mo…
The stats do back you up on this point. Women make about 80% of purchasing decisions in the US [0].
[0] https://health.oliverwyman.com/2019/01/women-in-healthcare-m...