Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 139 posts

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#61

Post by booi »

atdrummond wrote: post #56
raiyu wrote: post #54

This could be the best situation for Softbank. WeWork is obviously in desparate need of cash, no one is going to touch it with a ten foot pole. Softbank is too invested for it to fail. They can buy up 50% of the equity remaining for any sort of investment since they will have a gun to their head the company will have to accept or go bankrupt. Adam Neumann's shares will become worthless in the process and new shares w…

He already ferreted away $700m. He'll be fine.

Well.. if you call that living...

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#62

Post by api »

ben_jones wrote: post #30
cgh wrote: post #24

I don’t understand how this company employed 1500+ programmers, PMs and data science people. What did they do? I guess not much, as 500 of them got laid off recently.

Analytics, logging, "Artificial Intelligence", the latest Fad in devops/application development, System administration duties, help desk duties, hiring/interviewing duties (you don't get to 1500+ without A LOT of this!), the refactoring after the clusterf * of using the latest Fad in devops/application development. "BIG" data pipelines, managing an Elasticsearch cluster, PM for the design of app 1, PM for the design…

A small team could have written all the software for WeWork to do what it actually does. Each location could run it on an Intel NUC or similar. Central cloud could be moderately sized, maybe a dozen instances.

That would be efficient, but ironically it would not have attracted so much investment because fewer buzzwords. It would have been a better way to run a business that sells office space but a less effective way to run a business that sells its stock.

In a top heavy severely demand constrained economy it is far more profitable to sell stock than goods or services.

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#63

Post by Cd00d »

markstos wrote: post #42
mchristen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a common practice. My parents live in a highrise that has construction defects and it took years to extract money to repair the building because the LLC that sold the building to the condo association had no cash or assets anymore.

My accountant advised our business to setup a separate business to own the building we wanted to buy. It silos the liabilities of each. Also, you have some flexibility in how much you charge yourself for rent. Depending on which company might owe more taxes, you may want to adjust that rate up and down. In our case, the property business outlived the primary business turned out to be another benefit of decoupling the…

Liabilities makes sense. I used to be at a remote sensing company that was leasing a plane and when we were close to buying instead the CFO said, we need to start a new company for the liabilities.

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#64

Post by EpicEng »

cgh wrote: post #24

I don’t understand how this company employed 1500+ programmers, PMs and data science people. What did they do? I guess not much, as 500 of them got laid off recently.

>What did they do?

My guess would be 'very little', though I have no facts to back that up. It's just a staggering number given what the company does.

I've worked at a place like this. The job was as easy as it was cushy. Two week sprint plans could be completed in literally 3-4 days... but they just kept on hiring. I often heard the word "growth", but I have no idea as to why their interpretation of the word was desirable.

In contrast, I have also worked at two sucessful biotech companies. At the first we developed automated microscopy systems used by pathologists, as well as image viewing/analysis applications and your typical data management type interfaces. I worked on the scanner/image processing team. We were a team of six, three of which were software devs. The other software team (the data management / viewing stuff) had about eleven people. We were the most successful company in our domain, and our competition was the likes of Zeiss and Hamamatsu (one of which later purchased us.)

At my next company we successfully released a prognostic test for late stage colon cancer using CTC's found in the blood stream. In the course of doing so we had to write all sorts of integrations on top of an image viewing application, reporting systems, and the core bits (scanning + image analysis + local data management + R&D tooling.) We had a team of ~4 devs over a three year period.

When I read about stuff like this I'm just mystified.

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#65

Post by delfinom »

ben_jones wrote: post #30
cgh wrote: post #24

I don’t understand how this company employed 1500+ programmers, PMs and data science people. What did they do? I guess not much, as 500 of them got laid off recently.

Analytics, logging, "Artificial Intelligence", the latest Fad in devops/application development, System administration duties, help desk duties, hiring/interviewing duties (you don't get to 1500+ without A LOT of this!), the refactoring after the clusterf * of using the latest Fad in devops/application development. "BIG" data pipelines, managing an Elasticsearch cluster, PM for the design of app 1, PM for the design…

And with all of that, they couldn't even setup their wework networks more securely, even as little as blocking device discovery and port scanning.

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#66

Post by dastx »

qsymmachus wrote: post #47
cgh wrote: post #24

I don’t understand how this company employed 1500+ programmers, PMs and data science people. What did they do? I guess not much, as 500 of them got laid off recently.

Careful! It's easy and fun to make fun of WeWork for calling itself a "tech" company, but we might be throwing rocks in glass houses. How many of us are currently working at """tech""" companies right now?

I used to work for a startup bank. They used to always say "we're not a bank, we're a tech company with a banking license"..

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#67

Post by fjp »

atdrummond wrote: post #56
raiyu wrote: post #54

This could be the best situation for Softbank. WeWork is obviously in desparate need of cash, no one is going to touch it with a ten foot pole. Softbank is too invested for it to fail. They can buy up 50% of the equity remaining for any sort of investment since they will have a gun to their head the company will have to accept or go bankrupt. Adam Neumann's shares will become worthless in the process and new shares w…

He already ferreted away $700m. He'll be fine.

And then borrowed $300-some million secured against his WeWork shares

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#68

Post by bpt3 »

AgloeDreams wrote: post #25
youngtaff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't understand your linkage to tech stocks… WeWork are a property company

I think their comment is a little apocalyptic but I can say that wework going under could possibly trigger a large number of mid-small-size startups losing their spaces and possibly ending up out of business.

Those companies will have their employees work from home, go to a WeWork competitor, or set up a permanent office.

One of the many wonderful benefits of using WeWork is that it's very easy to stop using their service.

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#69

Post by endymi0n »

atdrummond wrote: post #56
raiyu wrote: post #54

This could be the best situation for Softbank. WeWork is obviously in desparate need of cash, no one is going to touch it with a ten foot pole. Softbank is too invested for it to fail. They can buy up 50% of the equity remaining for any sort of investment since they will have a gun to their head the company will have to accept or go bankrupt. Adam Neumann's shares will become worthless in the process and new shares w…

He already ferreted away $700m. He'll be fine.

You better hope he did that in a squeaky clean way - if there‘s just the slightest hint of embezzlement, you can be sure there‘s going to be an army of SoftBank lawyers trying to make a case.

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#70

Post by bdcravens »

codesushi42 wrote: post #48
cgh wrote: post #24

I don’t understand how this company employed 1500+ programmers, PMs and data science people. What did they do? I guess not much, as 500 of them got laid off recently.

I am even more baffled that 1500 engineers accepted an offer at a company that's clearly a fraud. And it would have taken one Google search about their prospective employer to have seen this. If you work at or did work at We, what was your reasoning? Did you have any?

I don’t think it was as obvious as it is now. Plus a lot of engineers work at companies which are blatant VC plays with little chance of viability, outside of acquisition. Those companies just don’t burn as hot or as fast as WeWork.
Post reply on HN