What do five HUNDRED people in tech do at an office rental company?
You mean 1500 people.
Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles
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Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles
#12There IS a market for a WeWork like service.
A WeWork-like model has appeal to someone like me that would love good coffee and an office/hoteling space! Especially as I travel a lot and sometimes want a reliable private workspace in an arbitrary city. Coffee shops frankly don’t cut it for working/meeting with people all day.
Also there’s often a need for meeting spaces in arbitrary cities. my company would have used an airBNB style conference room scheduling solution half a dozen times last year.
All to say there’s at least a potential customer base here. Whether it’s a profitable business model, well, maybe :)
Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles
#13There IS a market for a WeWork like service. A WeWork-like model has appeal to someone like me that would love good coffee and an office/hoteling space! Especially as I travel a lot and sometimes want a reliable private workspace in an arbitrary city. Coffee shops frankly don’t cut it for working/meeting with people all day. Also there’s often a need for meeting spaces in arbitrary cities. my company would have used…
It’s called a hotel or motel. They contain all those things you desire.
Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles
#14There IS a market for a WeWork like service. A WeWork-like model has appeal to someone like me that would love good coffee and an office/hoteling space! Especially as I travel a lot and sometimes want a reliable private workspace in an arbitrary city. Coffee shops frankly don’t cut it for working/meeting with people all day. Also there’s often a need for meeting spaces in arbitrary cities. my company would have used…
There's definitely a profitable business there, even. WeWork is absolutely a very reasonable, solid business. It's probably just not worth $50 billion.
Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles
#15Say you own a co-working space. You probably should have some way to let:
- People book conference rooms.
- Let people check in and check out.
- Let people book hot desks.
- Manage access for members, hot desks, event participants etc.
- Lots of other stuff.
At some point, the off the shelf software is no good, especially if you're looking to... build a single experience around the world for lots and lots of office buildings under your management! The software will have a lot of other admin and reporting doodads. Especially if you're trying to turn your office company into an everything company. Then the scope goes way up.
You might even start thinking about managing everything because you're a control freak... stuff like central air con control and energy use analytics across all properties... I'm just throwing stuff out there, I've never worked for WeWork.
Does this justify hundreds of engineers? It is so easy to hire more people when you have a massive war chest. Projects begin to justify themselves because you'll need them "soon enough". And if the founder pulls it off, then they're a genius! Or not.
Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles
#16What do five HUNDRED people in tech do at an office rental company?
Without meaning any offense to anyone, I am also genuinely curious how is a company such as Twitter have so many employees? Outsiders like myself know what goes into running GE or Tesla (and is easy to understand), but I would really appreciate someone from silicon valley enlighten about various needs for a company such as Twitter (or WeWork, etc.); what really goes on inside the doors, how are teams organized, what…
Even though this article's title sounds like it, this isn't meant to be flippant: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
Also see the other child comment: Once you have a significant amount of revenue, investing the effort improve things by 0.1% (or even 0.01%) can have a not-insignificant impact on the bottom line.
Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles
#17But I was told WeWork is a tech company. Repeatedly.
Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles
#18There IS a market for a WeWork like service. A WeWork-like model has appeal to someone like me that would love good coffee and an office/hoteling space! Especially as I travel a lot and sometimes want a reliable private workspace in an arbitrary city. Coffee shops frankly don’t cut it for working/meeting with people all day. Also there’s often a need for meeting spaces in arbitrary cities. my company would have used…
It’s called a hotel or motel. They contain all those things you desire.
Not really. Having tried to use hotels for meetings, they are unreasonably expensive and do stupid stuff like “the whiteboard rental fee is $500/day”
Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles
#19What do five HUNDRED people in tech do at an office rental company?
Help convince investors that it's an innovative tech company and thus worth 5x the valuation it'd otherwise get.
edit: This is based on some of the pointless pie in the orbit of pluto projects I've heard they were trying to work on.