111–120 of 291 posts
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I don’t really see why it’s his fault investors over valued his company — he believed in his own spin and was phenomenally successful at building a large, real business. This was not like Theranos where he was straight up lying about a product working — anyone could analyze the business based on the fundamentals, and investors seemed ever willing to invest at high valuations. The self dealing was reprehensible and ev…
> I don’t really see why it’s his fault investors over valued his company > he believed in his own spin It's his fault because he accepted the price for his business! He was in numerous conversations where people wanted to invest in WoWork and he told them that the valuations they were investing at were not just reasonable, but under the real market price - which is why venture buys into companies. > none of those ev…
What? It's his fault that he was able to hoodwink all these amazingly smart venture capital owners into investing?
No. What happened was some venture capital owners made a bet that they could find a bigger sucker to dump their shares on. But that bet went sideways. Nothing more. There is no indication of any fraud yet. Just some people that thought an eccentric personality could help them ride the wave of funding.
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> I don’t really see why it’s his fault investors over valued his company > he believed in his own spin It's his fault because he accepted the price for his business! He was in numerous conversations where people wanted to invest in WoWork and he told them that the valuations they were investing at were not just reasonable, but under the real market price - which is why venture buys into companies. > none of those ev…
I refuse to believe anyone wouldn't take 1.7 billion to walk away from a company.
From the article, 2,400 employees is 19% of the peak of 12,500 employees on June 30. There was no mention of where the cuts were made however. I am curious how many "white collar" type jobs WeWork would have, since I heard from previous discussions here that they were hiring for roles in unrelated-to-real-estate things like machine learning. I would imagine that there are lots of hourly-type roles managing the sites,…
I currently keep a wework hotdesk and they do have a sizable headcount at each location - 3 rotating front desk people, a location manager, and maybe 3/4 rotating maintenance staff. I think they might contract out the maintenance staff, but that's still 4x number_of_locations just for that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t really see why it’s his fault investors over valued his company — he believed in his own spin and was phenomenally successful at building a large, real business. This was not like Theranos where he was straight up lying about a product working — anyone could analyze the business based on the fundamentals, and investors seemed ever willing to invest at high valuations. The self dealing was reprehensible and ev…
> The self dealing was reprehensible and evidence of low morals in my view, but none of those events actually materially impact the value of the business. Materially WeWork is a real estate company selling itself as a tech company to get a higher valuation. Sure, it's expected that founders don't have a realistic idea of what their company is worth, investors should have done more research. But Neumann's ethical fail…
Sellers don't get to dictate what something is worth.
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I don’t really see why it’s his fault investors over valued his company — he believed in his own spin and was phenomenally successful at building a large, real business. This was not like Theranos where he was straight up lying about a product working — anyone could analyze the business based on the fundamentals, and investors seemed ever willing to invest at high valuations. The self dealing was reprehensible and ev…
> was phenomenally successful at building a large, real business What? How? He built an 8b business with 16b in investment. Anyone can do that. Take 16b, put it in index funds, call yourself an investment bank. You'd get better returns than -50%, for sure.
I still can't believe this guy gets to walk away with 1.7 billion dollars just for building up fluff while all the people who helped him grow have dire consequences both financial and personal. Unbelievable that this guy gets a clean chit, and all this isn't considered criminal. This to me is almost at the scale of Theranos. Only, this guy was smarter in the legal side of things, perhaps.
Investors did not do due diligence (unless there was fraud, but I have not heard of that). It is therefore not surprising AN got away with it. There are several companies with the same business model as WeWork that do not have nearly the same valuation (before all the recent hullaballoo, that is). There have been a number good articles about this topic in the WSJ lately. There is no reason to compare Adam Neumann to…
One (likely in my opinion) possibility is they did, and they were betting they could find a bigger fool.
I can't fathom the morale at this place. I really hope things get better for these poor people caught in the middle of this shit show.
I wish I had gotten that level of sympathy as a software engineer at an investment bank in 2008. In fact, rather than sympathy, more often I was told I was the problem.
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Well if you define a market simply as a mechanism of wealth transmission from dumb people to smarter people then I think that Adam Neumann deserves every single cent of 1.7 billion dollars.
> if you define a market simply as a mechanism of wealth transmission from dumb people to smarter Who defines a market with that kind of cynical, silly definition? I don't think most of us want that kind of "market". And if that's the only way to make Neumann look good, then maybe the reverse is true.
Most of the people are jumping one over the other to lose money as quickly as possible on some fantastical promise of profits. Human nature is like that. Intelligent people made money out of this sentiment since money had been invented.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t really see why it’s his fault investors over valued his company — he believed in his own spin and was phenomenally successful at building a large, real business. This was not like Theranos where he was straight up lying about a product working — anyone could analyze the business based on the fundamentals, and investors seemed ever willing to invest at high valuations. The self dealing was reprehensible and ev…
> was phenomenally successful at building a large, real business What? How? He built an 8b business with 16b in investment. Anyone can do that. Take 16b, put it in index funds, call yourself an investment bank. You'd get better returns than -50%, for sure.