All that Saudi money down the drain.
They raised ~11bn from what I've read.
WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO
341–350 of 404 posts
Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't give that much worship to Galloway it's not like he is always right or my guess even close to that (and nobody is). For example this post circa 2017 about the bubble. I can't tell you how many people have not called the bubble since the last bubble correctly. Galloway is one of them: https://www.profgalloway.com/every-seven-years Market was at 21,600 (very roughly) on the approx. date of that post and now…
Galloway's strength is that he's an amazing communicator and very arrogant. People eat up what he says without a moment's thought. And to be fair he's had some great calls, ie, Amazon's stock run in 2017 and this WeWork fiasco (although the WeWork one wasn't that hard to predict after the reports on the corporate malfeasance came out). Combine an arrogant and vociferous personality with a couple of correct calls and…
I occasionally order from Alexa but we call them “Amelia Bedelia orders” because there’s really no telling what we’ll actually get. It’s kind of fun.
My favorite so far has been the bulk-order of travel size bars of dove soap. Why is that even a thing? Surely anyone who could fit 12 travel bars in their suitcase could just as easily fit a regular bar?
Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, maybe not every tech company but he is wrong more often than he is right. For example, he predicted both Amazon and Google would be 'losers' back in 2015.. oops: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/04/09/the-fut...
From the article “For Galloway, the winner will be Macy’s, which has successfully gone online,” Macy’s Stock https://g.co/kgs/8KZ1Kj Prediction is a hard business.
Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future. - Niels Bohr
Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's a class of narcissist that doesn't really have knowledge and beliefs as much as they have desires and things to say that get them closer to their desires. So in some sense I think asking what Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes really believe is a category error. Knowing the truth makes lying really hard. If you spend a lot of time figuring out what's true, that builds mental habits that make lying feel…
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 don't know the story with WeWork's CFO. But the book "Super Pumped" documents how Kalanick used his dominance to keep from having a CFO at all for long periods.
A good CEO who is very strong on vision will build a team that keeps him in check by having balancing strengths. But narcissists don't like balance. So they build teams that let them do what they want. And when they hire somebody who isn't an enabler, that person soon ends up gone one way or another. And it's not just CEOs. You can find a good example of this in recent US politics.
Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Galloway's strength is that he's an amazing communicator and very arrogant. People eat up what he says without a moment's thought. And to be fair he's had some great calls, ie, Amazon's stock run in 2017 and this WeWork fiasco (although the WeWork one wasn't that hard to predict after the reports on the corporate malfeasance came out). Combine an arrogant and vociferous personality with a couple of correct calls and…
I occasionally order from Alexa but we call them “Amelia Bedelia orders” because there’s really no telling what we’ll actually get. It’s kind of fun. My favorite so far has been the bulk-order of travel size bars of dove soap. Why is that even a thing? Surely anyone who could fit 12 travel bars in their suitcase could just as easily fit a regular bar?
People who travel a lot for work and need one bar at a time and (for some reason) prefer Dove soap.
Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Galloway's strength is that he's an amazing communicator and very arrogant. People eat up what he says without a moment's thought. And to be fair he's had some great calls, ie, Amazon's stock run in 2017 and this WeWork fiasco (although the WeWork one wasn't that hard to predict after the reports on the corporate malfeasance came out). Combine an arrogant and vociferous personality with a couple of correct calls and…
I occasionally order from Alexa but we call them “Amelia Bedelia orders” because there’s really no telling what we’ll actually get. It’s kind of fun. My favorite so far has been the bulk-order of travel size bars of dove soap. Why is that even a thing? Surely anyone who could fit 12 travel bars in their suitcase could just as easily fit a regular bar?
> Surely anyone who could fit 12 travel bars in their suitcase could just as easily fit a regular bar?
... why would you assume someone would take all of them at the same time? Instead of maybe multiple family members using them, keeping a stockpile at home (so they don't have to order an individual one every time they need one), keeping them on hand for guests, ...
Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO
#347I don't understand why we are talking about real estate on Hacker News.
Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
I occasionally order from Alexa but we call them “Amelia Bedelia orders” because there’s really no telling what we’ll actually get. It’s kind of fun. My favorite so far has been the bulk-order of travel size bars of dove soap. Why is that even a thing? Surely anyone who could fit 12 travel bars in their suitcase could just as easily fit a regular bar?
> Surely anyone who could fit 12 travel bars in their suitcase could just as easily fit a regular bar? ... why would you assume someone would take all of them at the same time? Instead of maybe multiple family members using them, keeping a stockpile at home (so they don't have to order an individual one every time they need one), keeping them on hand for guests, ...
> ... why would you assume someone would take all of them at the same time?
I was being facetious... taking it literally à la Amelia Bedelia.
Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a cornerstone of their brand relative to other office space leasing companies, and tech investors are how/where they got a lot of their funding. Check out their S-1, they mention "technology" 110 times: "Technology is at the foundation of our global platform. Our purpose-built technology and operational expertise has allowed us to scale our core WeWork space-as-a-service offering quickly, while improving the qua…
1000 engineers for what? Again, where is the technology?
Maintaining internal frameworks, delivery pipelines, infrastructure, instrumentation and product roadmaps. Transitioning to new organizational structures. Internal hackathons and lunch ‘n learns. What am I forgetting?
Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO
#350I see lots of cheering which, to some degree, I understand given the public persona of Adam Neumann. I'm more interested in the ramifications, and I don't just mean the obvious ones like "potential tech recession" (maybe, who knows) or "more due diligence" (unlikely, or if so likely to swing completely the other direction). Given that "private markets are the new public markets" I wonder if this will just encourage m…
Staying private longer in the face of capital markets skeptical of money losing businesses isn't much of an option. Eventually, in order for the private investors to make money, they either need to get profitable or go public. AirBnB is a poor example of staying private longer in these circumstances because they are profitable. [0] [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/15/airbnb-sustains-profit-as-it...
> Eventually, in order for the private investors to make money, they either need to get profitable or go public.
Most (but not all, obviously) unicorns could easily be profitable if they chose to be. It would come at the expense of growth and R&D, but they would be profitable nonetheless. Growth is just valued much more heavily in the current market.
If you look at S-1s or even recent public unicorn earning statements, most of their losses stem from outsized increases in R&D/etc. expenditures despite healthily increasing revenues. The most recent example I can think of off the top of my head is Dropbox.