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"..
Even when I interned it proto-dinosaur Allstate they called themselves "a tech company that happens to sell insurance".
It does sound absurd and annoying, but for businesses like that it's good reminder that they'll probably get their market share eaten away if they don't stay on top of things by someone that can move faster or cheaper with their underlying technology stack.
Interesting that Goldman Sachs pumped up their valuation to $60-90 billion at one point, but now won’t give them a lifeline: “ Goldman Sachs, one of WeWork’s investors, advisers and customers, had been among a consortium of banks willing to lend $6bn had the IPO succeeded but has so far sat out the new financing discussions out of concern about the level of uncertainty surrounding the company, one person said.”
My first thought was related to this: hhow is it possible that one moment the company is ready for an IPO, with all the due diligence that comes with it and backing of financial giants, and then next month be desperate for cash? Isn’t there some sort of fraud going on in this situation?
The company believed it was ready for an IPO, but all the potential IPO investors disagreed after reading the S-1 and doing some diligence. In a sense the system worked well in that regard.
The big issue was with the private investors letting the CEO do whatever he wanted and pushing the valuation up very high.
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 des…
People like easy money. Anyone with ambition, opportunity, talent and foresight would likely have left We after a month and never looked back.
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 des…
> My guess would be 'very little', though I have no facts to back that up
Almost exactly 2 years back, when interviewing around for a position, I talked with WeWork (along with several other firms). I attempted to ask their recruiters on the phone about how they use computers. I didn't walk away with a very strong understanding of how they used computers, but what I did manage to take away was that they wanted to be a software provider for firms that used their office space.
With broad ambitions like that, I am not confident that they had enough focus to deliver meaningful software products without them being a massive drain on their resources. I will also note that this was months before they bought Teem in 2018.
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.
Even so, surely the revenue numbers were shared internally at some point. After which, anyone who could would have run for the hills.
And then borrowed $300-some million secured against his WeWork shares
I just did some work to get together info for an investor due diligence questionnaire and I LOLed when I came to a long series of questions at the end that I swear were an itemized list of all the shenanigans that went on at WeWork. Loans of that sort were one of the items.
I just visited my boss in a WeWork space in San Jose, and it is the closest thing I've found so far to my idea of hell. The offices there have a unique combination of feeling exposed (from all the glass everywhere) and claustrophobic (from the tiny offices everywhere).
That is hilarious. Best description yet that I’ve heard of the WeWork vibe
well i mean they let an umbrella shut down an office for 2 days instead of just breaking the window which would have cost less than days of being shutdown, so are we surprised?
Interesting that Goldman Sachs pumped up their valuation to $60-90 billion at one point, but now won’t give them a lifeline: “ Goldman Sachs, one of WeWork’s investors, advisers and customers, had been among a consortium of banks willing to lend $6bn had the IPO succeeded but has so far sat out the new financing discussions out of concern about the level of uncertainty surrounding the company, one person said.”
My first thought was related to this: hhow is it possible that one moment the company is ready for an IPO, with all the due diligence that comes with it and backing of financial giants, and then next month be desperate for cash? Isn’t there some sort of fraud going on in this situation?
It's clear that investment banks are incentivized to maximally value a company. Valuing a company is pretty simple, in that you can tweak certain values in, say cash flow analyses and depreciation projections to literally make billions of dollars appear on paper. They have complete deniability in that, at whatever moment, their proprietary analyses and due diligence appears in a prospectus that public markets are supposed to just trust in good faith.
That way, when the banks capture the spread on an IPO (difference in price guaranteed to a firm vs IPO price), the banks can offload shares en masse to investors and gain the spread, only paying capital gains taxes. It's pretty much theft, unless you are a very very early investor, to sell stock in something like WeWork as an investment bank. Financial giants aren't like other companies. If they don't make deals every single day, they will die. They have no product, nothing to offer that improves and compounds upon previous products (save, perhaps, for algorithmic trading software). Are we really surprised that this bloated corpse of an industry known for churn, extreme burnout, and grift would overvalue an IPO when it serves them?
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"..
Is this B...? Really wondering what culture is like there now, though the CEO seemed to have ambition the recruitment process was really weird. The in-house HRM/recruiter basically warned me he was narcissistic and was still code reviewing everything, often publicly shaming you when you made mistakes. Whether I was okay with that and often doing unpaid overtime as it was quite common. This was a few years ago so not sure what it's like there right now or if the situation improved.