151–160 of 183 posts
Your talent pool can suddenly come from all over the world, and costs cheaper while making employees happier.
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Not sure why people are negative about the core idea of WeWork. You get free beer, free coffee, bathrooms, an office, meeting rooms, phone booths with doors that close that you can also go work in whenever you want to be isolated, you can be there 24 hours a day, you have a keycard that works at all hours, and best of all, you're surrounded by startups and companies doing the same things as you. Meaning you can chat…
It's not free beer and free coffee, it's X% of $2,200 a month beer and Y% of $2,200 a month coffee.
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In a lot of markets, WeWork is a great deal. We just moved from Chicago West Loop WeWork to our first real office; we got what I think is a pretty amazing deal on our new office and it is still very difficult to beat the package WeWork puts together. But that's not the critique being leveled at WeWork here; the critique is, WeWork can't in the long run be profitable at these rates. In a lot of their spaces --- maybe…
> custom-designed So are the plastic chairs you get at Walmart. This is a fixed cost. Custom design them once, order a million of them and leverage economies of scale. > Free beer Beer by the pallet is $2.30 a can, rent is around $2200. Even if you drink 2 cans a day, its still only about $350 a month in costs. Even if it's a loss, it's a good loss leader and the economies of scale will eventually work out. Their pot…
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exactly. Finding less than a 5 year lease in Manhattan is extremely challenging in my experience.
They will almost always allow you to sublease though, which is its own horrible time sink to find a replacement tenant.
it's for sure a good option if you want a very short term thing, but it's a tough spot when you probably want > 1 year but 5 is a stretch.
The main difference is not amenities or marketing but the fact that a large percentage of WeWork's customers (my company included) are paying rent with VC money. Up to 90% of their customers will go out of business. Not a super stable customer base.
True, the customer base isn’t stable... but there’s a founder born every second, if you know what I mean.
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I agree. I wonder if most people in this thread saying that renting your own space is cheaper has ever really done this. I have, a bunch, and keeping the lights on is not free in terms of time/money. At a small company, this means either you hire someone to handle all this stuff, or make the employees do it. Either way, running an office yourself ends up being expensive.
I pay $400/month for an office for four. Probably another 100-200/month for random services like Internet access via an ISP, general commercial liability insurance I'm required to carry by my landlord, and other random stuff like, idk, paper. You absolutely can get a much cheaper office than WeWork. Maybe not if you focus is MEGA GROWTH and you're going to hire 100 people in the 5 days it takes to get a basic network…
I am not saying it's more expensive than wework, but it is damn sure more expensive than just looking at rent + monthly bills.
I worked in a wework Office for about a year. At first I thought the environment was great, I loved the free beer and the community. However, once we moved out, I realized how much more productive we were in our own office. We had - more space - less noise, in terms of sound and visually (you see everybody passing by through the glass and have to force yourself not to look at them. For a while we had some posters up,…
Of course self-leased speace is generally (way) better - if you can find it (at the capacity you need right now ) and hire people to run it for you. WeWork's entire model relies on the fact that, while not it's not the swankest, most productivity-enhancing working spaces you've ever been in (far from it) -- it is available pretty much on tap , in at least some capacity, in key cities. Remember all those outright shit…
Many people, including the author, skip the more interesting point in favor of the lazy critique: WeWork is not being valued by its investors as an office rental company. It's made the case that it is a business services marketplace, selling vendors' insurance and HR and legal and servers to as large as swath of the small business sector as it can grab with its fancy offices. It wants to own the app store for enterpr…
Not sure why people are negative about the core idea of WeWork. You get free beer, free coffee, bathrooms, an office, meeting rooms, phone booths with doors that close that you can also go work in whenever you want to be isolated, you can be there 24 hours a day, you have a keycard that works at all hours, and best of all, you're surrounded by startups and companies doing the same things as you. Meaning you can chat…
6PM for ending a work day is silly IMO and I emailed our office managers who took the issue to the city manager. Still no change (they asked us to pay $120/hr to keep climate management on outside of 6PM).
I worked in a wework Office for about a year. At first I thought the environment was great, I loved the free beer and the community. However, once we moved out, I realized how much more productive we were in our own office. We had - more space - less noise, in terms of sound and visually (you see everybody passing by through the glass and have to force yourself not to look at them. For a while we had some posters up,…
Same experience here in SF.