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WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

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Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#421

Post by navigatesol »

munificent wrote: post #240
cj wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.) I like this way of thinking. WeWork isn't doing anything "new" - coworking spaces have existed for years. What's the upside of having a giant corporation owning all coworking spaces, versus having many small and independent small businesses running and opera…

> What's the upside of having a giant corporation owning all coworking spaces, versus having many small and independent small businesses running and operating independent coworking spaces? Advantage to customers? Likely minimal. Advantage to the company itself: economies of scale and, likely more importantly, lack of competition allowing them to increase prices. The very clear trend across all sectors is that compani…

Why is it that you believe these companies can suddenly raise prices and make money? We've been hearing about "economies of scale" in companies like Uber and Tesla for years, yet no sign of it yet. Price cuts and investor subsidization abound.

And no competition in the real estate market? Please.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#422

Post by roymurdock »

coredog64 wrote: post #399
mandevil wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"WeWork used [a sensor network that tracked everyone throughout the building combined with machine learning] to learn that people drink coffee in the morning so they should hire a barista." Source: https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/10855834347880202... Sounds like a reasonable use of tens of millions of dollars of VC money.

Not a fan of WeWork, but there actually is something to this. We have two coffee makers in the break room at work, and there's always a line. If they brought in a barista who could work the machines, it's theoretically possible that you'd get better efficiency as there wouldn't be the dance of "who is next in line" or "sorry, gotta block the machine while I get sugar" or "I just want some hot water". I'd love to be a…

Tell your WeWork employed office manager (there is one in every office right?) to look at the line every morning when they're getting their coffee for two weeks. If the line is too long buy another 2 or 3 espresso machines, or supplement them with a few keurigs.

I just saved you $20M per year in sensors, IoT platform subscription, and data scientist salaries for an investment of $5k. Pretty insane how much money is wasted on dumb BS just because there's so much money to waste and it's a trendy way to waste money

Or more likely they wanted an innocuous reason to track all their office users at all times for other reasons

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#423

Post by dreamcompiler »

csomar wrote: post #392
ngngngng wrote: post #17

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…

> a recruiter working very hard to convince me I'd be rich when they IPO Is that even legal?

Why not? Doesn't everybody know not to believe recruiters or car sales people?

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#424

Post by paxys »

rossdavidh wrote: post #408
609venezia wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. That's a surprise. I wonder what kind of stick they had to beat him into that?

Well, if he leaves now, it's not as if he's going off to a terrible fate. He's been pretty well-paid. If he gets an IPO out of it someday, he'll get even more money, but if he doesn't, he gets to step off the burning ship. Or, to put it another way, he doesn't have to go through firing all of those people that he hired when he was pumping the company up to ginormous size. I think perhaps the fun part of running WeWor…

Exactly. If they have a successful IPO and become a profitable company - he gets very rich. If they don't - he still stays rich and gets to gloat about it.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#425

Post by btown »

tgtweak wrote: post #386
likpok wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real estate is a data play: figuring out which locations are going to be valuable. McDonalds famously does tons of research on locations, so much so that "be mcdonalds-adjacent" is an acceptable strategy. I'm not entirely sure what a data science engineer does, but somewhere between "making it easier for the DS team to find what they need to find" and "figuring out where we should buy/lease next".

From what I heard they were doing some notable data engineering - leveraging 4square data to decide where to put locations based on optimisation algorithms, profiling potential lessees based on known good ones, optimizing workspace layout based on camera and keyfob data, lease price elasticity tests... Lots of interesting domains. Sadly I'm sure this was/is one of the first departments to get downsided post backdown.

Data science is one of the few areas where WeWork may achieve an economy of scale - your local coworking operator won't be able to have that in house, and their ops system SaaS provider probably doesn't have the margins to invest heavily in it. If they're this messy at it though, that's not a good sign...

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#426

Post by patio11 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #348
patio11 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Walgreens will happily close a location and move it across the street to take advantage of a more advantageously shaped curb cut if they can't get the Illinois Department of Transit planner to approve the optimal curb cut from their current location. This is because they have extreme confidence in their ability to assess the business impact of curb cuts.

A market commenter who believes that Google is not one of the most sophisticated engineering organizations in the world is wrong. If you believe Walgreens is not one of the most sophisticated commercial real estate operations that exist, I would encourage you to talk to people who understand real estate as well as you understand Google and recalibrate based on what they tell you.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#427

Post by rtkwe »

hilbertseries wrote: post #349
rtkwe wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah somewhat. Though instead of it's leader it lost it's appeal and the cult leader had to go into hiding. WeWork is still a decent business idea just no where near the crazy valuations it was given.

Given how much money wework has lost this year, I think it remains to be seen if they’re a decent business.

I mean more the underlying model seems like it should work. There's tons of successful coworking spaces it seems and that's a lot of what WeWork did just with the option for company size teams.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#428

Post by mxcrossb »

JohnFen wrote: post #321
ngngngng wrote: post #17

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…

> a recruiter working very hard to convince me I'd be rich when they IPO When a recruiter makes that argument to me, I consider it a huge red flag all by itself, and am much less interested in working there.

Particularly when a company is only months away from an IPO. How much equity could you actually expect?

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#429

Post by cbanek »

jedberg wrote: post #164

So he gets to keep all the leases that his company made against his properties that are collateralized by the value of his company? Essentially they solved the self-dealing issue by removing the self instead of removing the deals?

Interesting point. Although if they broke the leases, I'm sure that would also line his pockets (from early termination fees) without necessarily getting anything out of it?

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#430

Post by skinnymuch »

mrguyorama wrote: post #299
avs733 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never occurred to me just how pretentious/bad the name 'We' is until reading that article... >We will now need additional capital from the private markets, who are no longer under the influence >We has gone from unicorn to distressed asset in 30 days. >In just seven days, We lost more value than the three biggest losers in the S&P 500 have lost in the last year combined: Macy's, Nektar Therapeutics, and Kraft Hein…

>Kraft Heinz Super off topic but why the heck is Heinz losing so much value?

Crazy. Buffett lost a lot of money over that.
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