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WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

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Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#131

Post by perl4ever »

raiyu wrote: post #54

This could be the best situation for Softbank. WeWork is obviously in desparate need of cash, no one is going to touch it with a ten foot pole. Softbank is too invested for it to fail. They can buy up 50% of the equity remaining for any sort of investment since they will have a gun to their head the company will have to accept or go bankrupt. Adam Neumann's shares will become worthless in the process and new shares w…

But does that make any sense if the attraction was that, run by Neumann, it was going to take over the world? Just because people lost faith in him doesn't mean there is a replacement for him that would justify putting more investment in. If it's just a real estate company, maybe it's not even worth close to $11B.

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#132

Post by remotecool »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #101
codesushi42 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like easy money. Anyone with ambition, opportunity, talent and foresight would likely have left We after a month and never looked back.

Or they used their cushy job, high salary, and low expected work output as a nice way to fund and work their side projects. If you leave work energized from not doing much, you have plenty of energy to burn off building something. I know plenty of ambitious and talented developers who work at menial jobs to cash a paycheck and pay for their side projects.

This is exactly my position. I have job where I can get most of my daily work done in 2 hours. I spend the rest of my time on my side projects.

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#133

Post by codesushi42 »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #81
codesushi42 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm sure they worked for a paycheck, providing the critical infrastructure needed to property manage that many office spaces and customers. WeWork has tens of thousands of customers who for the most part are able to seamlessly come and go, check out conference rooms, pay for various one-offs, and their membership fees. Did they need 1500 engineers to build all of that, no. But when you take venture capital in the exp…

Nope, there's not enough work to go around for that many rats.

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#135

Post by cmarschner »

Just as a datapoint - Wework‘s largest competitor IWG has 4x as many locations, makes 3 billion $ revenue and $150 million profit. Not really where a tech company would want to be. Its market cap is at around 4 billion. What is different for Wework that would warrant a higher valuation other than the clout of its founder and, arguably, much nicer offices?

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#136

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

the_watcher wrote: post #127
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The general viability of subleasing as a business is not meaningfully related to the points about whether a subset of WeWork’s current corporate entity can produce a viable business.

Yes, it is. It is, quite literally, the actual business part of WeWork.

No, WeWork is a certain brand and corporate entity. For example, reputation problems may mean that reducing operations to this smaller scale subleasing strategy would not succeed for WeWork. Or similarly, the profit level may be too smal for the investors to care, given projections of how long it would take to get their money back.

You’re missing the point. WeWork is in a position where it likely cannot cut operations and shrink into a smaller scale version of the same business model.

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#137

Post by WomanCanCode »

I don't understand the WeWork business model. Landlords are all around you. Companies sometimes prefer to own a property rather than lease because over the time, you only lose money renting. Explain pls, how is WeWork different than all the other commercial landlords?

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#138

Post by sasper »

bpt3 wrote: post #49
sasper wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WeWork is the most expensive option in our city for managed offices, by a large margin. It's not cheap.

Have you tried to negotiate? If they have any competitors, they'll beat those prices just by asking in my experience.

Yes we negotiated, received discounts, and have a dedicated person working our account since we're growing into new countries and adding lots of offices.

It's still much more expensive than the competition (and absolutely worth the increased expense).

Re: WeWork chases new financing as cash crunch looms

#139

Post by vraivroo »

dustinmoris wrote: post #46
vraivroo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comical thing is how often their systems are down. When I was in a WeWork we used to get free coffee all the time because they couldn't accept payments at the moment.

Coffee is always free at WeWork. The one from the machine as well as from the Barista.

Unless this is a development from within the last year, this is not universal.
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