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> With coffee bars, free beer and well-used communal spaces Beer, while working? What a good idea... or maybe not. Reminds me of 10-15 years ago when we'd have a pint or 2 at a local pub during lunch on Fridays. Nobody every got anything done on a Friday afternoon after that.
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Does WeWork pay to have these sorts of articles written? Because there are a lot of these sorts of places and they never get mentioned in these articles about WeWork. It makes it sound like WeWork is single-handedly reviving a concept that died with the first dotCom crash, yet it's really just the latest. The only other places they mention are Regus--making it out to be a shambling zombie form of its pre-dotCom bust…
Did we read the same article? I really doubt WeWork is happy about the WSJ pointing out how much they look like a company about to take a spectacular fall. That wasn't quite a hit piece, but it was not a favorable article.
(big imho-post) Oh, I wish someone could explain to me how I can practically short many of these bubbles that come around HN daily. China, the many tech-unicorns, the housing market in Canada. Enough chances to short something succesfully. That whole 'private-IPO' thing makes the 'valued at' so much less worth, since you can't short them, information is private, no efficient market hypothesis in play (if any). I only…
Ultimately, all "money" these days is supplied by central bankers.
There aren't a lot of good ways to short this stuff, at least if you aren't someone like BlackRock. That's especially unfortunate because it means no one is going to make money on the downside, offsetting others' losses. In every transaction there is still a winner or a loser, it's just that in this case the winner is going to be the people selling chunks of worthless companies for big money today. Just like in 2008 the winners were people who sold overpriced and overhyped real estate in 2006 and 2007. So if I were you, I'd go found a worthless company, pay the "tech press" to hype the holy living fuck out of it, raise a dozen rounds at obviously nonsense "valuations", and use the money to pay yourself and your friends nice fat salaries and lots of silly perks for the next 3 or 4 years while everything implodes around you. That's not how you short the madness, but it's how you profit from it which is really what your question is about.
(big imho-post) Oh, I wish someone could explain to me how I can practically short many of these bubbles that come around HN daily. China, the many tech-unicorns, the housing market in Canada. Enough chances to short something succesfully. That whole 'private-IPO' thing makes the 'valued at' so much less worth, since you can't short them, information is private, no efficient market hypothesis in play (if any). I only…
To bet against the Canadian housing market, for instance, you could look at shorting vulnerable financial institutions (Canadian banks and lenders with exposure to the Canadian housing market). You could also look at the Canadian dollar, which could conceivably fall if there's a housing crash.
Private startups are obviously a more difficult target, but you should consider that the types of events likely to push the private startup market into meaningful decline would in most cases also be bad news for publicly-traded tech companies as well, and you can short just about all of these. There are numerous advantages to targeting publicly-traded companies (liquidity, availability of information, in a major market correction there will be forced selling, etc.).
> With coffee bars, free beer and well-used communal spaces Beer, while working? What a good idea... or maybe not. Reminds me of 10-15 years ago when we'd have a pint or 2 at a local pub during lunch on Fridays. Nobody every got anything done on a Friday afternoon after that.
[deleted]
Does WeWork pay to have these sorts of articles written? Because there are a lot of these sorts of places and they never get mentioned in these articles about WeWork. It makes it sound like WeWork is single-handedly reviving a concept that died with the first dotCom crash, yet it's really just the latest. The only other places they mention are Regus--making it out to be a shambling zombie form of its pre-dotCom bust…
Did we read the same article? I really doubt WeWork is happy about the WSJ pointing out how much they look like a company about to take a spectacular fall. That wasn't quite a hit piece, but it was not a favorable article.
One of my clients has a space in one of WeWork's San Francisco locations. Every time I've visited, I have been struck by how many of the spaces seem underutilized (i.e. companies have more space than they're using). For example, I see companies that have private offices with x desks but I only see x /2 being used at any given time. Other private offices appear to be entirely unutilized (i.e. they're occupied but I ne…
> When the technology sector is booming, as it is now, growth is strong. The risk, real-estate executives say, is that if demand falls—because of, say, a tech bust—WeWork’s revenue would drop, while the rent it owes to landlords stays constant. Though an obvious risk, I wouldn't say it's the only one. To me I would be more concerned about the thousands of other spaces out there that are easily more affordable.
The real problem for the valuation if not the business itself is that apart from free beer, they're not really doing anything differently from most of the other spaces, and their brand and scale really isn't much of a draw for their audience. And they're notionally valued at over 5x the value a firm operating essentially the same business on a much larger scale...
marc andreeesen says no