Sucks for the employees and everyone else who built up the founder's ego and his wallets. But honestly, this is an indefensible business model with clearly unsustainable economics. This deal and Theranos has convinced me that venture capitalists aren't as a group particularly insightful or worthy of admiration. Personally I hope the collapse of WeWork takes Meetup.com with it.
Would you mind explaining what you mean? I can't see any connection between wework and meetup.
Then they should research the companies in the post and if they're interested in a change apply as well. No listing in that post is catering to an ex-FB employee by any means.
It’s not about doing “research“. They would love to work at Facebook if they could. FB software engineer is a dream job for many outside of SV bubble, and even for many inside.
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…
> ...he believed in his own spin and was phenomenally successful at building a large, real business. Successful at building a large, real business selling $10 bills for $8. It's a dreadful business, they lose money hand over fist with no path to stopping the bleeding. For a while now, any company who could claim to be a "tech" company like WeWork (an objectively real estate company) did was able to raise on terms tha…
Doesn't have to be necessarily a bad thing if you ask me.
Why corporate boards are so inept, and allowed to remain so, I'll never understand. If you buy into the goal being "shareholder value" then plainly Softbank failed. One could make the argument that WeWork's board did the things that they thought created the most value - but if you implode in on yourself, you clearly failed. Even if the self-dealing was not outright legal fraud, it was plainly not to anyone's benefit…
Before a company goes public, the only way you get to be on the board is by being a cheerleader. After a company goes public you have a lot more responsibilities.
Why corporate boards are so inept, and allowed to remain so, I'll never understand. If you buy into the goal being "shareholder value" then plainly Softbank failed. One could make the argument that WeWork's board did the things that they thought created the most value - but if you implode in on yourself, you clearly failed. Even if the self-dealing was not outright legal fraud, it was plainly not to anyone's benefit…
Before a company goes public, the only way you get to be on the board is by being a cheerleader. After a company goes public you have a lot more responsibilities.
Right - I get that - but my thinking is, why would you make short-sighted greedy choices that are fundamentally bad business decisions? One could say hindsight is 20-20, but I don't buy that. WeWork at its core was a legit business (I say this as a former customer), unlike a say Theranos. It could have legitimately been a wildly successful company without the shenanigans. It seems trite to simply say that the board hoped they would get theirs before everything imploded.
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.
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…
Just one small comment -- instead of investors, it was mostly Masayoshi Son at SoftBank that was pumping capital into WeWork and each round invested pumped up the valuation as well, so never had to face any reality from other investors, but it all came to a head in the prospectus for the IPO.
Ah yes, "if it's legal, it's not his fault." It's not "his fault" for the gross incompetence that lead to this outcome? Whose was it? I would suggest that it is in fact "his fault," but why would he ever have cared? He lacked any incentive to fret any potential negative outcomes for the business, since after a point he had assured that they all ended in him being astronomically wealthy regardless. This sort of thing…
The investors. If you give a loose cannon many billions of dollars, who is at fault? But yes, normal employees are paying the price here.
The investors also paid a hefty price. The only person getting out of this scot-free is Adam.
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.
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…
Wait, did he not use company funds to buy real estate in his own name and then lease them back to the company? That is still not illegal but super shady. You cannot paper over things with "investors overvalued it" logic. He went to extra lengths to make his cheating legal.
They ended up having their heads cut off, so, yes.
According to [1] there have been more revolutions in the last 10 years than in the entire 17th century. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebe...
Interesting observation, but a) events of the last 10 years are documented at an exponentially higher rate and resolution than events of the 17th century, and b) this list has lots of events which hardly raise to the level of the large scale revolutions of the 17th century, aaand c) none of these events are taking place in global centers of wealth and power. Today's elites are without a doubt more protected than the denizens of Versailles precisely because their power and wealth operate on a global scale.
If I'm Neumann, I'm taking 200-250 million dollars of my 1.7 billion in winnings and giving it away to the laid off employees (about 90k each). Imagine the positive press you could drum up about yourself! All while keeping 1.5 billion dollars!
This would upset me if I was one of the remaining employees.
Good point! Google says there are 15k employees at WeWork, how about EVERYONE gets 50k.
750M given away, still have a billion dollars and a bunch of goodwill.