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

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#471

Post by philliphaydon » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 4:15 AM UTC

cgearhart wrote: post #56

I had concerns earlier this year when I interviewed at WeWork—which was the worst interview experience I’ve ever had. I applied for a data science role. The first two hours of the on-site were painful—they seemed to be asking questions tailored to be outside my experience. The third interviewer came into the room and said, “I, uh, just looked at your resume and I have to ask, why do you want to be a backend engineer?…

Haha, I had an interview many years ago in Australia, was a full 2 hour technical interview in MS technologies. Nailed all the C#/.NET/SQL Server questions. Nailed everything they threw at me. I felt really proud of myself because I thought I was doing very well.

After they were done with me I started asking questions. I asked what they would have me doing?

"Oh the back-end system & api is done by a different team, you would just be doing the HTML/CSS for the front-end team"

I was furious when I left...

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#472

Post by shaklee3 » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 4:49 AM UTC

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…

Is it weave the kubernetes cni? That does seem like a fun place to work.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#473

Post by vinay_ys » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 5:04 AM UTC

cj wrote: post #230

seisvelas wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage is similar to that of a large gym chain - you can pay more to get a membership that's valid at all the WeWorks in the entire world. This is great for people who regularly travel between many large cities.

I suspect the majority of WeWork's revenue comes from people working in the same location day in, day out. Same with gym chains. People sign up for Planet Fitness because the nearest location is the most convenient, not because they plan to visit multiple locations over the course of a year (not to say there aren't people taking advantage of the multi-city aspect, just that they aren't the typical customer).

WeWork may soon be headed the way of Gym's business model which is to oversubscribe like crazy assuming not everyone will show up at the same time and many will not show up at all. When that happens, I wonder what happens to NPS. How many people will be a WeWork member (like their gym membership) but don't really need/want to use it?

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#474

Post by orblivion » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 5:09 AM UTC

cgearhart wrote: post #112

metalliqaz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From what I understand they wanted to instrument their offices (with cameras, microphones, thermometers, etc.) to collect data on the occupants ostensibly because they’re trying to be a tech company. Felt Orwellian, but it sounded interesting enough to at least hear them out.

On the one hand it seems like a new level of creepy. On another level, it's kind of funny to have tech companies be the ones getting spied on.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#475

Post by sbr464 » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 5:10 AM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #272

munificent wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The advantage to me with Spaces (which I believe is owned by Regus) is that I can do guest co-working in any city they happen to be present - and since I travel extensively, the bigger the network the better, as far as I'm concerned. Sadly WeWork do not appear to offer this option (or didn't last time I looked).

I may be misunderstanding, but one of our offices is at a WeWork. I’m listed on the team and we have a ton of monthly credits that I’ll use while traveling in random cities, it’s convenient to have a place to work from.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#476

Post by cookie_monsta » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 5:15 AM UTC

leesec wrote: post #442

randycupertino wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Going by the general sentiment in that thread, I'm sure there are better examples. There are a few people saying how or why they thought Dropbox wouldn't work, but overall the reception is very positive. By contrast, any mention of WeWork here causes an instant pile-on of quite impressive vehemence.

There are always going to be isolated nay-sayers for whatever reasons. When you get a near-consensus on HN that something's a PoS that's something that's worth bearing in mind.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#477

Post by dreamcompiler » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 5:26 AM UTC

ipqk wrote: post #468

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".

There's been a meme for decades that McDonalds is really a real estate company that sells burgers on the side.

Ray Kroc actually said this. It's not just a meme; it's canon.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#478

Post by fragmede » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 5:36 AM UTC

braythwayt wrote: post #438

ineedasername wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which case, the major failing of We was that it did not go public fast enough. I wonder if we'll see this translate into time pressure for future startups to go public a little earlier before the bloom is off the rose.

I don't think speed would help. If Softbank were the only people putting in the last few rounds, that suggests that nobody else wanted to invest in this business with this governance. People already knew what kind of business WeWork was. Sure, they were getting press, but when actual institutional investors looked at it, they must not have liked what they saw. That has been going on for the last few rounds, so I susp…

Uber's lackluster IPO factored in to the decision. An IPO by We before Uber means there's less data on how much investors value a brand.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#479

Post by kerkeslager » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 5:45 AM UTC

woah wrote: post #191

kerkeslager wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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." Ugh. What an awful culture we live in where this is considered perfectly normal behavior.

Limited liability is a great concept which allows businesses to be run by people who don’t have the personal capital to absorb all possible losses of the business. Our society would be more unequal without limited liability. There are also many legal safeguards in place to prevent it being used for fraud, negligence, etc. Are you really worried for big commercial landlords who know exactly what they are dealing with…

> There are also many legal safeguards in place to prevent it being used for fraud, negligence, etc.

You're doing a thing which is quite frequent on HN, which is where you say that unethical behaviors are prevented because some narrow definition of those unethical behaviors is illegal. But the bit I quoted above is an unethical behavior which is clearly not prevented by the law.

> Are you really worried for big commercial landlords who know exactly what they are dealing with and how corporations work? Commercial landlords are not typically thought of as especially trusting and vulnerable entities who need special protection.

"The victims are tough enough to handle it" is a pretty poor justification for sleazy behavior.

Re: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

#480

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 5:50 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #419

jacquesm wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or an investor. It is interesting how often investors goals accidentally line up with early employees.

How so?

Because both end up eventual minority shareholders in the same company. The difference of course being one of magnitude and that the investors are likely more diversified.