WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO • Hacker News Board

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#441

Post by notfromhere » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 2:14 AM UTC

likpok wrote: post #198

metalliqaz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WeWork is basically a real estate company. Why would they need a data science engineer?

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".

Burger King's strategy for the longest time used to be 'just build across the street from McDonald's'

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#442

Post by leesec » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 2:15 AM UTC

randycupertino wrote: post #432

pjc50 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The famous Dropbox comment? HN is overly skeptical of startups that take something possible and simplify the UX. Although I can't think of a recent example.

What was the famous Dropbox comment? I'm out of the loop. Thx.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

basically someone belittling Dropbox before it went on to be worth billions.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#443

Post by tgtweak » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 2:17 AM UTC

goldenkey wrote: post #398

tgtweak wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hijacking this spot to highlight newrelic as a company I used to evangelize and now will go out of my way to recommend against (I consult startups as a virtual CTO). They used to have a brilliant offering (Application level monitoring with all associated hosts included) then they deprecated the host monitoring and jacked the price up on every one of my clients while simultaneously threatening them to collect based on…

Ah, brings back memories. We used NewRelic at Jux circa 2012ish onward. We were happy with it at the time. What year did this all happen?

2015/2016

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

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Post by ahi » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 2:19 AM UTC

moltensodium wrote: post #414

mcny wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insane. This story is number one on hn for me and right below it in number two is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21062231 > WeWork, Bankers Have Discussed Laying Off One-Third of Workforce (theinformation.com) If you, the reader, have an offer from WeWork, I suggest you ask for a bigger paycheck (like real money, not funny money) for all this uncertainty.

At this point there is a non-zero and growing chance the company collapses completely. They have no plans or research or any other projects that are expected to make money, ever, and nobody seems interested in another round of fundraising. They will likely try to force the IPO through anyway at some sub $5B valuation, but even then it seems like they may not generate much interest after that cuckooville S1.

Some of their financing demands they IPO this year I think. Could have misread something though.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#445

Post by yashap » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 2:23 AM UTC

joshpadnick wrote: post #210

I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this, but I actually just signed up to be a (thankfully month-to-month) WeWork customer for a HotDesk today in Phoenix, and it's actually been a pretty great experience: Great space, nice people, reasonable IT, I was up and running and working within 30 minutes of doing my tour. And yes I've had a cup of the famous We Kombucha. This particular location just opened 3 weeks ago and is ap…

Yeah, in my company’s “main city” we have traditional offices with long term leases that we furnish and operate ourselves. Our headcount in these offices is pretty stable, so it makes sense. But we’ve got a bunch of decent sized, sales/marketing focused international offices, and they’re mostly WeWorks. They’re great!

These international sales offices can quickly spring up and grow, but also quickly scale down or close. For satellite offices that can easily get way bigger OR way smaller over the next year, the flexibility WeWork provides, and the fact that they handle furnishing and operating the offices is huge. Plus they’re beautiful offices with free beer and whatnot, so (most) people enjoy working in them.

WeWork clearly has terrible corporate governance, and we’ll see if they can keep the product great while moving towards profitability. But for now they do have a really nice product for a lot of companies (and some individuals). They’re like AWS for offices - flexibility and “managed by someone else” is almost as nice for offices as it is for servers.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#446

Post by opportune » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 2:25 AM UTC

DebtDeflation wrote: post #199

paggle wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they will shut down WeLive. The entire premise of WeWork, and WeLive, is that they can sell you more than real estate -- they can sell you a "tribe." There are so many reports in recent years about growing social isolation and loneliness, that if something can be successfully packaged into a simulacrum of a community, it will be a hot item indeed. That's the only way WeWork can justify its stratospheric…

I'm sorry, but while there is some logic to the co-working idea, I don't see any serious demand for co-living. Quite frankly, I find the idea of having on-premise yoga instruction, cafes, bars, shared hot tubs, shared kitchens, etc. so you never have to leave your apartment building (except, presumably, to go to WeWork) to be absurd.

I personally see value in it and could even see myself as a customer, at least to try it for 6-12 months and see what it's like. Sounds like a good way to meet other young people with a bent towards tech

That said, I don't know the details of the program so can't speak to its practicality in this instance. But considering it's wework, there's opportunity for a good vertical there. At its face it seems like sound corporate strategy

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#447

Post by fragsworth » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 2:26 AM UTC

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…

> People act like healthy, competitive, transparent markets just appear out of thin air, but they are an artificial creation of government.

Thanks for this insightful comment. I never fully considered it, but yes - all healthy, competitive markets exist as a result of a government that fosters them.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#448

Post by dbuder » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 2:32 AM UTC

whoisjuan wrote: post #34

This is some dense shit. I can't imagine how working for WeWork feels like, right now. I have worked for companies where all the employees were eagerly waiting for the day the company will go public. It was seen as a pivotal moment both financially and professionally. In any rational world that's a landmark moment. A significant milestone for founders, investors and early employees. For WeWork it has been the complet…

Much like with Uber, I have no sympathy for the employees and in fact I would take a lot of convincing to hire anyone who had more than a short stint at either.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#449

Post by ionwake » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 2:38 AM UTC

ahi wrote: post #440

Viliam1234 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Articles warning against buying bitcoins were highly upvoted for years, and bitcoin costs several thousand dollars now.

I was mining bitcoin in 2011. It was stupid then and stupid now. Sometimes a lotto ticket hits.

Did you ever end up managing to hold to any?

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

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Post by ahi » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 2:39 AM UTC

btown wrote: post #425

tgtweak wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Except the local operator will have a more intimate understanding of area dynamics than data science can provide.