121–130 of 291 posts
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.
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> 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'd love to see you try. It's easy to turn $20 into $40, but as you approach larger numbers it keeps getting harder.
Hypothesis: Events like this are the modern moral equivalent of the giant, gaudy, gilt-encrusted palaces of the 17th century. Economic disparity has reached a point where those at the top end literally have more money than they know what to do with and are increasingly spending it on stupider and stupider things out of some perceived need to do something .
Events like this are the modern moral equivalent of the giant, gaudy, gilt-encrusted palaces of the 17th century. I think this vastly overstates it. Versailles cost some significant fraction of France's GDP - possibly as much as 25% in some years. WeWork's $10B is a mere drop in the US' $20T GDP.
Honestly I'm surprised there are 2400 employees who have stuck around this long, waiting for the other shoe to drop. How could they not see the obvious implosion coming? The proverbial tidal wave of ugly news has been steady for months now.
Being laid off gets you unemployment. Quitting doesn't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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'd love to see you try. It's easy to turn $20 into $40, but as you approach larger numbers it keeps getting harder.
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…
That's like saying the Soviet Union was successful at building a strong consumer economy. Anything can look good when you're able to under-price your services using someone else's money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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'd love to see you try. It's easy to turn $20 into $40, but as you approach larger numbers it keeps getting harder.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“WeWork isn’t really a real estate company. It’s a state of consciousness, a generation of interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs.” -Adam Neumann.[1] Even after hearing that media raved about him/WeWork, analysts were bullish and investors pumped Billions. Startup media are generally happy with their funding related news as it is glamorous. And due to the funding noise, Startup ecosystem has forgotten t…
I don't even know who their target audience was. Many people who work from home do so because they enjoy the privacy of working from home. People who want more social interaction go to coffee shops, and plenty of people do both. I don't see who would want to pay a few hundred bucks a month to work on a conference table surrounded by strangers.
Outside of smaller independent coworking spaces and WeWork's existing customer base there is IWG which does the same (albeit more sustainably): https://www.iwgplc.com
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“WeWork isn’t really a real estate company. It’s a state of consciousness, a generation of interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs.” -Adam Neumann.[1] Even after hearing that media raved about him/WeWork, analysts were bullish and investors pumped Billions. Startup media are generally happy with their funding related news as it is glamorous. And due to the funding noise, Startup ecosystem has forgotten t…
I don't even know who their target audience was. Many people who work from home do so because they enjoy the privacy of working from home. People who want more social interaction go to coffee shops, and plenty of people do both. I don't see who would want to pay a few hundred bucks a month to work on a conference table surrounded by strangers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>Investors did not do due diligence One (likely in my opinion) possibility is they did, and they were betting they could find a bigger fool.