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Some of these criticisms are just irrelevant personal abuse - like saying he doesn't think Neumann's t-shirt is fitted well.
While the writer is a irritating in how he presents info, he does have good points. WeWork never looked like a real business to me, I thought the IPO as presented was such a great work of fiction. In the end the "business" is renting office space. It's not worth any more than that. At least Uber and Lyft provide something new (calling taxis from phones, I guess you could think of that as not terribly new) but it did…
It's less than that—they provide the ability to call taxis from an app. You've been able to call taxis from phones for significantly longer, you just had to dial a number.
I know this isn't a common way to call taxis everywhere, but it was in some locations. I went to college in a small-ish city called Saratoga Springs. If you wanted a taxi, the expected method was to dial one of the local taxi companies. They'd arrive in a few minutes. It was a little more expensive than Uber and Lyft, but not drastically so, and while I'm sure a bit of that price difference comes from increased efficiency, I think a lot of it is just VC money.
While the writer is a irritating in how he presents info, he does have good points. WeWork never looked like a real business to me, I thought the IPO as presented was such a great work of fiction. In the end the "business" is renting office space. It's not worth any more than that. At least Uber and Lyft provide something new (calling taxis from phones, I guess you could think of that as not terribly new) but it did…
> At least Uber and Lyft provide something new (calling taxis from phones) It's less than that—they provide the ability to call taxis from an app . You've been able to call taxis from phones for significantly longer, you just had to dial a number. I know this isn't a common way to call taxis everywhere, but it was in some locations. I went to college in a small-ish city called Saratoga Springs. If you wanted a taxi,…
Is Adam Neumann - Next Elizabeth Holmes?? I would not be surprised to see SEC involved at some point somehow.
> WeWork then used this cash to underprice competitors in the co-working space market, hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in real estate subletting or ancillary businesses. > This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The difference is Amazon saw what the marginal costs coul…
I think the connection here is that the assets themselves were money losing but they passed them off as safe assets despite knowing they weren't safe. If I make money by producing counterfeit bills and circulating them then it makes money. It's still counterfeiting. The underlying assumption that makes capitalism desirable is that you are (supposed to be) rewarded based on the value you put into the system. If there are ways to reliably create and dump value inflated assets and those ways are easier than actually producing value, then we shouldn't be surprised when that becomes a competitive business.
Arguably this is what WeWork was trying to do by going public. I don't think anyone here who has followed WeWork over the past few years was itching to jump into day-1 buying even before the current iteration of the Neumann freak show began. Would any engineer here really have taken a stock heavy WeWork comp package in the past two years? On the other hand if you're a rando investor who just sees "oh Uber for office space!" you might line up to get fleeced.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Defending those of poor character and moral fiber (not my judgement, facts reported) from a jab about their clothes is low priority. The other issues presented are far more pressing.
Taking a jab at clothing generally is so low effort to be actually embarrassing and will invalidate anything else that you are trying to say. IMO.
Apparently, Neumann's fashion sense is more defensible than his personal integrity.
Burning many billions of dollars before the market takes a step back and says "WTF?" is hardly a model of market efficiency, but if the market is now waking up to the problems of this sort of investment then, yes, however imperfectly the market is correcting this bad behavior. I suppose the question then is whether WeWork represents a turning point in this trend, or merely an outlier.
Some of these criticisms are just irrelevant personal abuse - like saying he doesn't think Neumann's t-shirt is fitted well.