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WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

reuters.com

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Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#361

Post by toomuchtodo »

chris11 wrote: post #338
charwalker wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay whatever cost is in the lease in order to break it or go bankrupt and pay out creditors first. The building management will then either find a new tenant and/or enforce other components of the lease and sue for their money per the contract agreement.

I had also thought that they had set up some leases through their own legal structures so they could limit some of WeWork's financial liability from the lease.

The leases through the special purpose entities are still (supposedly) guaranteed by parent WeWork. To shed the leases would require wiping out some component of the equity through bankruptcy.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#362

Post by influx »

PMan74 wrote: post #103
puranjay wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think Uber has over-invested in engineering. The problem they're trying to solve isn't so complicated that it needs their current engineering force. They don't have to add new features at as rapid a pace as a true software-focused company like, say, Stripe.

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/

Someone needed a promotion.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#363

Post by perl4ever »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #340
djsumdog wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or cheat This is called "Being disruptive." Basically, just ignore the law, but make sure you get enough workers and customers that love you so that they turn against politics when you break the law.

You seriously have a twisted and static view of what society should be. You don't ask the question, why should an app like Uber be illegal? Why should taxi medallion holders have a monopoly on on-demand transportation in a city? To make hedgefunds rich? Transportation across cities in North America sucked before Uber. You are completely delusional if you think pre-Uber and pre-Lyft cities were some kind of transporta…

"you don't ask the question, why should an app like Uber be illegal? Why should taxi medallion holders have a monopoly on on-demand transportation in a city? To make hedgefunds rich?"

Medallions are just a mechanism for limiting the number of cabs to what the street network can support; isn't that obviously necessary?

On the other hand, it appears from what I read that Uber may have actually been dealing with the problem by charging surge rates and then keeping most of it, thereby reducing demand without increasing supply which is just what is needed. But that outrages everybody, so the argument for having the government ration things is that it's more socially acceptable - which is a valid reason!

The apps of Uber and Lyft seem to me like valuable innovations in that they allow you to get information on your ride, predict the cost, and pay with a credit card which are great improvements on regular cabs.

But cheering unregulated cabs makes no sense to me - the streets in a given city seem obviously a commons that needs regulation. Uber and Lyft are forms of regulation, so really, people only debate the details. Freedom vs. non-freedom is a caricature.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#365

Post by paxys »

pandanomic wrote: post #296
joncrane wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They didn't build their own. The just forked Mattermost and skinned it a bit. Also invested/spent/donated $10k to have a say in Mattermost's roadmap. Why not slack TL;DR - Uber, surprisingly, is cheap about off-the-shelf solutions. Cheaper than they are about balloons anyway. Slack was trialed twice. Once in late 2015, and there were some bumps. Rather than stick with it, Uber ditched it citing it "couldn't handle th…

TL;DR - the team that evaluated whether Slack would be good for the company also had the most to lose if Slack was selected over their own product.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#367

Post by jamesdsadler »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #355
rrrazdan wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are current WeWork tenants. WeWork can’t even provide us an interface to manage and view who used WeWork credits in our org. We asked for a report and got a pdf after 2 days. Tech my foot. The printer software is an abomination.

> The printer software is an abomination. ...that's a surprise....

If I recall correctly, there was also no uninstaller (at least on Mac, 2 years ago).

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#368

Post by ineedasername »

wgerard wrote: post #350
ineedasername wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 statement…

Yes, the thing is that profitability in that way would cost them their IPO, whose value would plummet. And private investors that bought in at 10x or 20x revenue would not be happy with 0.2x profitability. More or less what happened with WeWork once they issued their offering & the CEO's behavior caused scrutiny on the whole thing.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#369

Post by acjohnson55 »

greenyoda wrote: post #238
acjohnson55 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a tech company in the sense that their internal and client-facing operations are enabled by custom tech, and they have the scale that that stuff needs to be pretty mature. But I wouldn't necessarily assume a WeWork engineer is doing cutting-edge stuff (not that they're not; I just wouldn't assume it).

> They're a tech company in the sense that their internal and client-facing operations are enabled by custom tech... If that's the definition of a tech company, then Citibank, United Airlines and Fedex are also tech companies.

Arguably, yes.

I don't think that's exclusive of the other types of company you can be.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#370

Post by lazybreather »

danbarker wrote: post #327
lazybreather wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Uber's tech and business model is relatively easy to replicate. So much so, that in many of their markets they already have at least one close competitor, or near-perfect competitor if you count Lyft (who have a similarly good app to Uber in my estimation; many of the other substitutes seem to have a pretty acceptable app that is missing some of the polish of Uber). This makes their business vulnerable to price compe…

Wow. I just looked at Cruise's numbers. 19Bn. That explains a lot. I guess I've been way out of touch with happenings of self driving world. Thank you for the details.
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