161–170 of 171 posts
I've got to say I think this is a really bearish sign for Softbank. Softbank is meant to be so big that it can pick winners and buy shares of entire markets so they can own the future returns of all these tech companies. One of the big advantages of Softbank was meant to be that if you have softbank money you are going to win through capital spend and expansion. But the fact that Softbank can't walk away from We seem…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine you are a bank or investment firm or hedge fund or VC. You want to do business with person A, I shall call them “Alice.” Alice says to you, right up front, “I need to make one billion dollars, or I look for a different partner.” Are you going to accuse Alice of being greedy, when your entire business consists of making money? You don’t cure the sick, or bring the Internet to rural communities, or manufacture…
Maybe you should tell Alice to work for her billion instead of running scams and treating the company like a piggy bank. Maybe we should just not have anyone worth a billion dollars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
666 is Gematria numerology applied to Nero’s name in Greek, 616 is what you get with the Latin spelling, it’s more of a confirmation than a contradiction
Given Nero was Roman, his name will presumably be from the Latin. If the Greek version of the spelling differs, then 666 surely must be in error. Unless they meant that the number of the beast is Nero's name when you attempt to write it in Greek, though that seems something of a stretch, even for numerology afficionados.
> It only is when the words are transliterated from Greek into Hebrew and then calculated that the numeration adds up to 666 (nrwn qsr, 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200). Even so, this is an alternate spelling, a letter being transliterated in "Neron" (nrwn instead of nrw) but not in "Caesar" (qsr instead of qysr)
> If the Latin (rather than the Greek) spelling "Nero Caesar" is transliterated into Hebrew (nrw qsr), the final "n" in Neron being omitted (and its corresponding value of 50), the name computes as 616, which is the number indicated in the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/gla...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If Adam provides an opportunity for his investors to make their “ten billion,” why would anyone object to his self-dealing? Why do we, for that matter? There’s one aspect of some sort of ethical wrongness because I suspect there’s an eventual chump who will lose out not having full perspective when this thing falls apart. But, for me, I have a tendency to feel uncomfortable when things are “obviously” wrong. I find…
Ah, well, I think it's certainly valid to take a CEO's behaviour as a signal you use to make predictions about their future behaviour. And I think it's valid to use that to make predictions about the company's viability and/or make predictions about the likely outcome of any private or public stock market investment. Choosing whether to do business with someone who fully discloses their past choices and is truthful a…
We must be pretty important for Softbank as a signal - even if they didn't believe in the company, allowing such a major investment take such a big hit would be rather bad. Worth them pouring a few $bn more in instead of an IPO, if only to shore up faith in the rest of their portfolio? All that being said, someone needs to be mentoring the CEO, like right now. That S1 was... not... great.
> Worth them pouring a few $bn more in instead of an IPO, if only to shore up faith in the rest of their portfolio? I'd love to know how throwing good money after bad would shore up the faith in the rest of the portfolio? "No one else wants this, but we can't afford to mark-to-market, so we're going to throw more money in with the hopes of maintaining an illusory valuation." At the end of the day, it's a bad business…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rare? Regus was widespread in this space before WeWork was a twinkle in Adam Neumann's eye.
Is Regus really pin compatible with WeWork? WeWork offers cheap 1-desk offices with Internet/utilities bundled. Last I checked, Regus offered a "1-desk office" that was much more expensive, could fit several people, and didn't include amenities like Internet bundled. There were online retailers before Amazon, too.
I see WeWork has having a few damning problems that aren't issues of questionable business or accounting practices:
1) Since they're an challenger in a hot real-estate market, they're starting at a price disadvantage to anyone who already has properties. If other brands can copy enough of their magic at 20% less money, watch WeWork disappear from approved-vendor lists.
2) They're pushing for scale in a non-scale business. There's not huge synergies in supply, marketing, or purchasing. The fact they have hundreds of locations doesn't matter for many "I need an office in one specific place" use case. I don't doubt a WeWork of a handful of locations, as a niche product, would be a modest success. But they need that investor-pleasing hockey-stick growth which means "open 500 locations speculatively" and "generate huge debts and close 50% of locations once we figure out what won't perform".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Regus really pin compatible with WeWork? WeWork offers cheap 1-desk offices with Internet/utilities bundled. Last I checked, Regus offered a "1-desk office" that was much more expensive, could fit several people, and didn't include amenities like Internet bundled. There were online retailers before Amazon, too.
I suspect we may be still defining the actual market. There are definitely some components of the WeWork experience that are a hard sell even in their target market. The noise, lack of privacy, and casual nature for example. It would not be hard for Regus and friends to roll out trial balloons for variations on the theme. I see WeWork has having a few damning problems that aren't issues of questionable business or ac…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like anything even remotely threatening the climate change gospel is treated just as the Catholic Church treated heretics centuries ago. AGW has ascended (descended?) into religious territory where even the slightest criticism of the “truth” is treated as blasphemous. It’s like many of the climate alarmists have turned into old school evangelicals that avoid wine and dancing out of fear it’ll rile up the dev…
[flagged]
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.