WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO • Hacker News Board

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#241

Post by wil421 » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 7:39 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #152

vkou wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you define: "Position yourself defensively and react nimbly" means to an IC?

> Could you define: "Position yourself defensively and react nimbly" means to an IC? Depends on specifics. Broadly speaking, having been an IC, the lessons I learned the hard way were: (1) Pay your taxes early and often. Keep your credit and channels open fixed-cost obligations low. (Nimble and defensive.) (2) Save aggressively. Rule-of-thumb liquidity advice doesn't apply to you; I learned to keep 2 years of cash in…

How does an Individual Contributor (IC) have to worry about paying taxes? I’ve never worked at a company and had to worry about the timing of my taxes.

Save enough for 2 years? Only a very small percent could actually save 2 years worth of salary. For a family I’m not sure if anyone able to do this. The standard advice is 6 months.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#242

Post by adharmad » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 7:42 PM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #230

danesparza wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the OP's question really involves the CFO or any accountants involved in this case. I would expect the CEO to be driven more by vision than by cold, hard facts.

> I would expect the CEO to be driven more by vision than by cold, hard facts. If the facts don't align with your vision, figure out a different vision.

If one is cushioned by unlimited amount of VC money, then it can take a while to realize that the vision was untenable.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#243

Post by speedracer » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #22

So this is what I do not understand: they burn through money like crazy. For them IPO was not a path to liquidity for stock holders, rather it was a way to do the next raise. The large market basically said "Nah, can't get that money on those terms. Sorry". Their only private source of funding is Softbank. How are they going to raise more money for opex? Go back to Softbank and get another pile of cash at even higher…

I wonder if Softbank has released all of it's funds to WeWork. they usually release them in tranches based on milestone achievements. In this case doing an IPO was likely one. Which is probably why they were pushing against doing an IPO, potentially saving some of the remaining capital. Not sure.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#244

Post by vageli » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #110

IshKebab wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a tech investment though.

Then why is it here?

As in, here on HackerNews? Because this site is not limited to tech topics?

Here's another non-tech topic from the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21117707

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#245

Post by Angostura » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #43

S_A_P wrote: post #19

What I don't understand is how do things get this far down the road before a good old fashioned sanity check happens? I have got to think that Soft Bank knew/knows the valuation was off. The fact that they pushed on means they either intended to try and get away with it/take the money and run as I cant believe incompetence is the reason here. How did this get so far along??? As for Adam N, I have to think some part o…

“There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.“ -Margin Call SV ran out of the first two because they are much harder. We are left with the dying gasps of companies trying the third way.

Whereas in Margin Call, the message was 'I don't cheat and although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first'.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#246

Post by eternalny1 » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

S_A_P wrote: post #19

What I don't understand is how do things get this far down the road before a good old fashioned sanity check happens? I have got to think that Soft Bank knew/knows the valuation was off. The fact that they pushed on means they either intended to try and get away with it/take the money and run as I cant believe incompetence is the reason here. How did this get so far along??? As for Adam N, I have to think some part o…

Oh SoftBank knew, and they tried some shenanigans late in the game to try to get this thing to IPO and not lose a boatload of money.

But it didn't work. Sanity has prevailed.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#247

Post by pbreit » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #163

pbreit wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So not really any "cheating", right?

> So not really any "cheating", right? No evidence of fraud, no. But cheating is not necessarily fraud because not all rules are codified as law. There is cleverly devious cheating, like a lot of what Gates and Jobs did in the 80s. That's cheating, but it's clever and it's cute so we think of it positively. Then there's cheating as in pretending to defy the laws of economics, which is what WeWork did. They were tryin…

Wut?

WeWork's revenues already cover its rent costs even at just 70% occupancy.

I still don't see this "cheating" you speak of.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#248

Post by sarah180 » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

jazzyk wrote: post #190

notyourday wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are confusing the opening price with an IPO price. Slack went public at $26, it is at $23.50 today. It is less than 10% less than the IPO price.

Yes, but this is at a time when the overall market is close to an all-time high. What happens when the inevitable correction comes? The Fed will run out of monetary tricks, eventually.

This is arguably a "things might go wrong in the future" argument, which has no real substance as it can be made about literally anything. To really say something, you'd need to provide some more substance about why you think the current investors in Dropbox and Slack are less informed about economic conditions than investors in the rest of the market.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#249

Post by nebulous1 » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #23

Hongwei wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even simpler: it's fraud and they got caught. Hopefully it doesn't paint other great IPOs in a bad light.

In order for something to be fraud there has to be deception. This was never the case with WeWork.

If SoftBank had to do creative accounting to value it at $47 billion in January in order to support the IPO price (and thus increase the value of their existing investment) then that might be fraud. I haven't seen anybody suggest that such evidence exists though.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#250

Post by bpt3 » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 7:57 PM UTC

john_moscow wrote: post #168

skinnymuch wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What relevance does Groupon have? The two companies aren’t related in any major way. Def not with freemium model or revenue model.

Groupon is a perfect example of a company that became irrelevant before reaching profitability. Most tech valuations are based on the assumption that the company's product will stay hot forever, giving enough time to cut expenses and turn black. While in reality, the crowd of early adopters that gave you the hockey stick growth, quickly moves on to something else once they get bored and then it turns out your market…

I don't see a CDN as something that customers get bored of in the same way as coupons for random services.

When a consumer realizes they are getting 50% off of a service or product they didn't want or need in the first place, they stop signing up for deals. Also, once the businesses realize these customers don't provide repeat business and they are devaluing their product for consumers who do want it, they stop offering the discounts. Finally, it's trivial to sign up for each of their competitors and play them off of each other.

When does a Cloudflare customer stop needing secure, performant content delivery, and how easy is it to switch to a competitor?