Sad about this because I have a hot desk membership in New York, and it's an amazing experience that I'd probably pay more for honestly.
WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy
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Re: WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is crazy is that he was able to raise 350 millions from a16z for what is basically a simple property management company. After all the sh*t he did. And then you go to a16z with an idea, and they reject it because it is not innovative enough. Then VCs wonder why 80% of their investments fail to produce the expected money on average. https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/16/how-a16zs-investment-into-...
Reminds me of Matt Levine's fantastic Moviepass article https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-07/moviep...
archived as https://archive.is/tX1c5
Re: WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy
#23Company I work at went from a trashy long and cramped room in a WeWork where the toilets were always breaking and the elevator buttons didn't line up with the floor numbering because it was two buildings stuck together to a two floor small warehouse style building, same area for less than WeWork cost.
Even without the push from some to WFH WeWork was a terrible product in the 3 WeWorks I've had to work in.
Re: WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy
#24> The spectacular collapse of a company once valued by SoftBank at $40 billion has been years in the making, but is still surprising given the number of large commercial buildings around the world that don the company’s name. Is it actually surprising? If you too many assets that you bought with variable interest rate debt, then going bankrupt in a higher-interest-rate environment is exactly what I would expect.
Did they actually buy buildings? I thought they just took long term leases from owners and sold short term to their customers? I once read an article saying that for all the tech bs, weworks was basically just a (at the well timed) commercial rent play: fix low rent and then charge rising rents as the market goes up. I might be wrong though? I remember thinking it was like a bank (exposed to time risk) but with prope…
It might have worked on 2008 levels and then ride the elevator up.
But to fuel the growth story they needed to go international where they could not enjoy the same once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Re: WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy
#25This company is an anomaly in the capital markets. Investors should do their due diligence or they’ll get taken in by an idiot or charlatan and lose their shirt.
Just look at their financials: $3.7b in the hole and continual losses pulling them ever further into the red. Even operating cashflow is negative. [0]
[0] valustox.com/WE
Re: WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy
#26WeWork's most recent 10-Q where the warning comes from: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001813756/0...
Re: WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy
#27In my opinion the writing for a way out of this mess has been on the wall for a long time now, post-Covid. This is with the only viable, but still heavily under-utilized product they have left: hot-desking and community workspaces. Having rented multiple dedicated offices from WeWork I can attest that the corridors are become more and more like a post-apocalyptic landscape as the tenants — no longer taking advantage…
They probably enter into long term lease for the building they can’t get out overnight?
Good point - goes to show it’s always easier to criticise behemoths like this from the outside.
However, I wager that they have had long enough to plan around this one - _surely_ there are a non-negligible amount of leases they can trade or sell on / do something with as most WeWork locations are in highly desirable spots.
Re: WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy
#28Several years ago while hustling as a single founder, I hoped to get a desk in a private office (anything but open-space), so I would have a place to come to to focus on work, socialize and feel at work.. So I went to see what WeWork have to offer.
There I saw a nice floor with nice looking private offices, finally taken to what they thought might be relevant for me, they showed me a tiny space where half a diner table is hung on the wall and over a diner sofa with the second wall behind the sofa, (now-days these types of rooms are used for private 1 on 1 meetings and zoom calls..) for the price of what I would pay a private office of say 2/3 people (pre-WeWork shared office spaces).
Just the audacity of the person showing me this for this price struck me how greedy and disconnected WeWork are, got me so insulted I would never check them out again.
This is what you get when you get an MBA type business management constantly looking for ways to up the contract prices like its a B2B SaaS business (not that I'm saying this makes more sense there..)
Re: WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy
#29It doesn't matter what happens to WeWork. Adam Neumann and the other VCs already exit scammed out of it with their millions and additionally dumped on retail. They successfully got away with it, despite knowing that the business has hundreds of millions of dollars of losses pre-IPO, which was over $900M+ [0]; the biggest of all red flags as I said 4 years ago. [1] This company could only exist in a cheap money era wi…
> Neumann and the other VCs already exit scammed out of it with their millions and additionally dumped on retail
Given the outright fraud prevalent in today’s tech landscape, it’s difficult to call WeWork a scam. Stupid, yes. But fraud; for that we lack evidence.
Re: WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy
#30that will be a lot of furniture