361–370 of 551 posts
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In fact small firms may be more efficient. If they make a bad bet on some real estate they fold while WeWork has to spread that cost to all of its users and keep on moving.
More efficient but less likely to exist next year is not a sustainable niche.
He flew too close to the valuation sun.
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The reason WeWork is great is because investors are subsidising our memberships, just like Uber is cheap because investors are shovelling in cash. WeWork has the potential for profitability if you take away the ridiculousness but the ridiculousness _is_ WeWork: co-working spaces have existed for years, companies like IWG (Regus) offer the same as WeWork and they're profitable... because they don't have a full time ba…
The superfluous perks are a red herring, they’re not why WeWork doesn’t work. Regus filed for bankruptcy after the dotcom collapse for similar reasons WeWork is struggling: taking a bunch of long term leases and re-leasing them out as short term leases to economically vulnerable businesses is a recipe for disaster.
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> but I predict WeWork is still going to be around in another decade. There's clearly a ton of demand for what they provide There's also a TON of rent-a-desk places. The big questions are: - What's the benefit to a large corporation doing this instead of lots of small companies? (The economies of scale need to outweigh the large corporate overhead.) - What's WeWork's secret sauce or first mover advantage?
Another value of their large network, WeWork has relationships with large companies (like Amazon) to manage satellite offices across the country. Some of those are just a corner of a WeWork carved out, and some of those are entire floors of office buildings that WeWork handles administrative, custodial, and break room for. I don’t know how much that impacts their profitability or value as a company, but it feels like…
In comparison Regus Virtual Offices has more than 2500 locations.
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Do you work in commercial real estate? My father does, and would pick them and Walgreens as the most effective scaled siting operations in the US. Optimizing for absence of failed stores would be an interesting utility function for them to have, but since they own substantially all of the stores (and therefore don't have franchisee relationships to consider, where volatility for a partner might impact you disproporti…
I've seen a Walgreens that was closed in less than a year because of poor location despite being across the street from a Rite-Aid. They aren't perfect either.
You can have 0 failed stores if you open 0 stores. A successful operation will inevitably have failed stores. Having a long list of failed stores doesn't mean anything in of itself. You have to look at the rate of failed stores vs successful stores among other metrics.
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Same here, and only by reading the headlines. A WeWork recruiter reached out to me. I laughed out loud and added it to the list of companies I would never work for. Not only do they do nothing interesting, but they are apparently unethical as well. No doubt another failed tech bro pump 'n dump scheme headed to the dustbin of history.
what are the other companies you'll never work for?
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Definitely just another failed tech bro pump 'n dump scheme headed to the dustbin of history. I seriously doubt that. I think they're overvalued too, but I predict WeWork is still going to be around in another decade. There's clearly a ton of demand for what they provide.
> but I predict WeWork is still going to be around in another decade. There's clearly a ton of demand for what they provide There's also a TON of rent-a-desk places. The big questions are: - What's the benefit to a large corporation doing this instead of lots of small companies? (The economies of scale need to outweigh the large corporate overhead.) - What's WeWork's secret sauce or first mover advantage?
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Same here, and only by reading the headlines. A WeWork recruiter reached out to me. I laughed out loud and added it to the list of companies I would never work for. Not only do they do nothing interesting, but they are apparently unethical as well. No doubt another failed tech bro pump 'n dump scheme headed to the dustbin of history.
what are the other companies you'll never work for?
Was kind of a death rattle for me and sure enough after they IPOd they really did nothing.
Still makes me angry when I think of it cause it was such a kick-ass product.
I'm so glad I read hacker news. I almost took a job at WeWork just 2 months ago with a recruiter working very hard to convince me I'd be rich when they IPO. Now I'm at a much smaller startup called Weave which is a really phenomenal place to work. I didn't discover until recently that it's also a YCombinator company. edit: to clarify, hacker news has been extremely skeptical of WeWork for some time, due to this, I wa…
Hackernews is skeptical of many things though, sometimes hard to filter through the noise.
Theranos and WeWork are two great examples of companies hated by HN because there's evidence supporting negative opinions.