WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO • Hacker News Board

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#261

Post by joncrane » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 8:24 PM UTC

pram wrote: post #122

PMan74 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an external viewpoint stuff like building your own internal chat application seems like a "too many engineers with too little to do" kid of decision. https://eng.uber.com/uchat/

The chat program they’re referring to in the beginning was HipChat, which really was a steaming pile of crap. Uber was our largest user and they constantly brought the entire service down. IDK if making their own was the right solution, but it was driven by necessity and not boredom I assure you.

So why didn't they switch to Slack, Mattermost, etc rather than build their own?

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#262

Post by paulddraper » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 8:25 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.

> In order for something to be fraud there has to be deception.

Not "fraud" in technical sense; more like "generous marketing".

Running an ad of a bunch of thin, attractive people drinking Coke is not fraud. It's also not very accurate either.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#263

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 8:28 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.

> The Fed will run out of monetary tricks, eventually.

No, it won't.

It might run into a monetary-policy resistant situation (e.g., stagflation), but the Fed has infinite range of monetary policy tricks available (literally, there's no floor to rates now that the Fed has taken notice of the use of negative rates elsewhere.)

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#264

Post by roymurdock » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 8:31 PM UTC

austenallred wrote: post #233

myth_buster wrote: post #15

I'm just impressed by how well the fallout has been predicted by Scott Galloway[0] and Matt Levine. Has been an incredible learning experience for me on the unicorn class in general. Looking forward to unicorn report for 2019 [1]. [0] https://www.profgalloway.com/wewtf-part-deux [1] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/03/20/the-unicorn-ipo-r...

Galloway always predicts that every tech company is a bubble. Every now and then he's right.

Levine is skeptical/amused by the nonsensical valuations but takes a more neutral stance, probably because he was never truly invested in/familiar with/cared that much about new technology and what people promise it can do. Galloway is more idealistic and Levine is more practical taking things at face value and breaking them down. They're both very knowledgeable and worth reading.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#265

Post by eternalny1 » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 8:35 PM UTC

ixtli wrote: post #12

I feel bad for the stary-eyed kids one year out of college that are going to get mass fired. They're all really young and naive :/

That was all I could think about when following this. I've been a developer for a long time and I know how this story is going to end.

In early, the IPO, those shares, the money!

Nope, please have your stuff packed by 2 PM and security will see you out.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#266

Post by lazybreather » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 8:36 PM UTC

mharroun wrote: post #4

Incoming layoffs... between wework and uber the market will be "flooded" with talent. I wonder if having wework on your resume is a good or bad thing.

On a side note, I was quite surprised/shocked to see Waymo's recent valuation. $105Bn!! That is after Morgan Stanley cut it by 40%. So it was 165 Billion dollars prior to that. 165!!

Now, Uber has it own share of quite extensive R&D on self driving tech. How can it be a $50 Bn market cap company today? With all the markets it is present in? For me, it looks like an opposite case of that of WeWork. Conspiracy against the company right in public market. It began with Travis getting all the heat for pretty trivial things, all the way till the IPO and now.

I honestly don't understand how a company which practically revolutionized public transport all over the world and created a business model which gave a bazillion uber-for-X companies be valued so less.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#267

Post by gbronner » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 8:45 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #87

pbreit wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this comment relevant to WeWork? How has it "cheated"? It definitely is early/first and very smart.

> How is this comment relevant to WeWork? How has it "cheated"? They borrowed short, lent long and then pretended it was as sustainable business. To their credit, they abundantly disclosed their shenanigans. (I haven't seen any evidence suggesting investors can reasonably claim fraud.) But they were playing fast and loose with basic economics. At its core, sure, WeWork could have been a business. Its thesis, that off…

I think that they got rid of the rubber ruler, and many of the other asymmetrical bargaining issues that consumers of space faced against large landlords.

They do have some scale, and there's always the idea that you can move to a different office or reconfigure your space quickly. This has real value. Just not $50 billion worth.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#268

Post by huclejerry » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 8:45 PM UTC

Wow this is terrible!

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#269

Post by danesparza » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 8:46 PM UTC

rland wrote: post #255

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'm guessing that the issues have something to do with the management structure. If your CEO is delusional, it's usually possible to reign him or her in... From what I understand, Neumann had some special votes that basically allowed him to fire the board at any point. I imagine that anyone with a pragmatic mindset willing to ask "wait, but the numbers are..." was pushed out of the picture either explicitly or implic…

Holy crap: You're right.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/9/24/20882133/wework-adam-ne...

Thanks for the tip! I didn't realize that.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#270

Post by ska » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 8:46 PM UTC

pram wrote: post #221

user5994461 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The largest user of HipChat, really? Uber must have been something like 5k-15k employees at that time. I thought HipChat was used in F500, much larger than that. Anyway, HipChat was bought and killed by Slack. They avoided a dying product by accident.

Yes. It seemed like every single one of their drivers was getting messages from one of their chat rooms in HipChat. It was like 25k people in a single room iirc. They seemed to be using it for notifications or something? At any rate HipChat was already dead prior to the sale. Atlassian made a new program from scratch called Stride which was its own little awful can of worms.

> It was like 25k people in a single room iirc.

Build it, and they will come ... and do something you hadn't planned for.