WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

I had a remarkably intense series of frontend... ish interviews for a really difficult to define project. As in, I was working very hard in the little 5 minute slices of time I got for "do you have any questions" figuring out just wtf the job was and what the team was doing, and nobody could really explain it.

It was some sort of "connectivity and identification team" working to identify people/customers/tenants/whatever. Something like, you'd walk in, and WeWork would know it was you, and like, turn your office lights on or some shit. It was going to start off with keycards and I remember someone talking about bluetooth or wifi recognizing your phone, eventually doing face recognition.

I couldn't figure out the point. A HUGE team. The questions I was being asked were wild system design questions and android app stuff (what? I'm frontend lol). All so that people's desks would be at a certain height or whatever when they came in the room.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

My assumption has been he will step aside, wait for an inevitable restructuring post IPO markdown (and blame the markdown on his being pushed out) then swoop in and take the credit for getting it back on track

It's a different sort of scam for sure - I should have made clear that I was basing this on my read of the star CEO rather than the business.

I have a similar enough personality type to such folks that they're easy for me to spot. Rather than taking claims in good faith and doing extensive due diligence to assess their business-worthiness, if I read someone as a fake (an almost purely intuitive thing) and then look at their project with that working assumptions, the holes in their pitch are magnified into yawning chasms.

It's not perfect, of course. I've been taken in by other sociopaths several times, but in personal or employment contexts where it was a 1:1 relationship. I'm not money-oriented so sociopathic entrepreneurs stand out like a sore thumb because I don't have any feeling of excitement about an investment opportunity to get in the way. It's like being able to spot a good or bad athlete in a sport you don't play, if that makes sense.

>"Oh, they'll just walk away from the leases. Each lease is owned by a different subsidiary. That subsidiary will just file bankruptcy. Problem solved. They'll just cut the losers, and turn up the dial on the profitable buildings."

"Each lease is owned by a different subsidiary" doesn't help you that much against the lessors, they'll either charge you more or demand signed guarantees from the parent corporation. Counter-parties are not idiots, generally speaking. There's no free lunch here.

How the structure helps is by protecting against other creditors that may arise out of operating the physical business in a way that may inadvertently generate legal liability. Since this is a real estate business, I'll go with a classic example - there's a spill on the floor, someone slips and falls and sues the people running the building. This litigant can generally only collect from any insurance policy and the subsidiary running the building - in order to go after WeWork's assets, they'd have to convince a court to pierce the corporate veil, and that's significantly more difficult.