Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your assessment of environs is right, they bought Meetup.com for that.
Does meetup have a revenue model?
Subscription-based
https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/15/leaked-shareholder-docs-me...
WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company
221–229 of 229 posts
Re: WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The losers in the WeWork deal are the landlords, as they're bearing a lot of the risk, and get minimal upside. Couldn't this be interpreted differently? That is, landlords are having less and less choice. Something from WW is better than an empty building. Is WW a canary of sorts? It tells us about changes in the economy (less growing small to mid-size companies in major metro area?), as well as the health and stre…
Yes and No. Part of the No answer is that as an real estate investment company your building's worth is effectively present value of future rent, so sometimes it's better to preserve the valuation of your building rather than set a new market rent which will negatively affect your building valuation which in turn affects the cost of financing your building etc etc etc So you get an extra $1m in rent but it now costs…
"so sometimes it's better to preserve the valuation of your building rather than set a new market rent which will negatively affect your building valuation "
I understand that, and thus the question about WW being a canary in the economic coal mine. If there are more and more building owners who literally can't afford to "preserve the valuation" - and WW's success seems to hint at that - then doesn't that say something about the economy that aggregate numbers aren't seeing?
I understand the theory of "preserve the valuation", what I suggesting is that in reality less and less building owners are able to preserve that theory. And some of that is direct result of demand (read: the lack there of) not being in parity with demand.
Re: WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except AWS does a whole lot more than just let you rent generic EC2 instances by the hour. They have sooo, sooo, sooo many custom services that their lock-in is huge. It would be extremely painful for any sizable customer on AWS to switch (my previous comment on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20339381 ). No such lock-in exists with WeWork. In fact the entire reason for WeWork's existence is it does…
>> No such lock-in exists with WeWork. In fact the entire reason for WeWork's existence is it doesn't have lock-in. This isn't true for their expanding customer base: Businesses who are paying for blocks of co-working memberships to expand through services rather than finding new leases themselves. There is significant lock-in when this occurs, as people may move close to those WeWork locations, arrange their life ar…
That's also my understanding of their pitch; have we seen any evidence it's actually happening?
Re: WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suggest you look into the history of companies like TLRY and the current state of BYND.
Can you summarize what you’re trying to point out with those two? Is it just that the market is bubbly and willing to support insane valuations?
Beyond Meat recently was trading in the open market at $230. They decided they wanted to sell 4% of the company in a secondary offering, and they were only able to get $160/share.
Tilray had similar problems trying to monetize their high valuation.
The point is that bubbly tech prices in public markets are no less fragile than bubbly ones in private markets.
Re: WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you summarize what you’re trying to point out with those two? Is it just that the market is bubbly and willing to support insane valuations?
Beyond Meat recently was trading in the open market at $230. They decided they wanted to sell 4% of the company in a secondary offering, and they were only able to get $160/share. Tilray had similar problems trying to monetize their high valuation. The point is that bubbly tech prices in public markets are no less fragile than bubbly ones in private markets.
Ah great example, thanks for summarizing. I haven't been following BYND. 4% is a pretty small percentage compared to the amount of float (~91% right now). I wonder if the price would have moved that much if that many shares had been sold unofficially.
But yeah, if you sell integer percentages of a company in a short timeframe, you're right that you can't expect to get the current market price. I'm surprised that it moved it so much in this case, though.
Re: WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> No such lock-in exists with WeWork. In fact the entire reason for WeWork's existence is it doesn't have lock-in. This isn't true for their expanding customer base: Businesses who are paying for blocks of co-working memberships to expand through services rather than finding new leases themselves. There is significant lock-in when this occurs, as people may move close to those WeWork locations, arrange their life ar…
That's also my understanding of their pitch; have we seen any evidence it's actually happening?
Anecdotally in Seattle it is absolutely happening. My small business is one of many that is expanding into these short-term spaces due to flexibility. Who knows if it's actually working well, but I've seen many "sub-offices" at the co-working space where I lease two desks for my employees.
Re: WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
While you're not wrong, aliasing tech (or even "high-tech") to mean exclusively software seems quite insulting to the rest of technologies.
Here’s a proposal: “Technology” means the same thing it always has, but the abbreviation “Tech” is slang for computing, the subject of the current industrial revolution.
Here's an even better proposal - lets try immeasurably hard to stop re-inventing words and maybe use words that people would generally understand without an accompanying definition. Where, for instance, software actually means software and tech actually means technology. :p
Re: WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here’s a proposal: “Technology” means the same thing it always has, but the abbreviation “Tech” is slang for computing, the subject of the current industrial revolution.
Here's an even better proposal - lets try immeasurably hard to stop re-inventing words and maybe use words that people would generally understand without an accompanying definition. Where, for instance, software actually means software and tech actually means technology. :p
That's very nice, but "Tech" sometimes means an industry now, not the technology itself. Same for software. There is software the code, and Software the industry. Nobody invented a new word, but we have to understand what we're talking about in context.
Re: WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and No. Part of the No answer is that as an real estate investment company your building's worth is effectively present value of future rent, so sometimes it's better to preserve the valuation of your building rather than set a new market rent which will negatively affect your building valuation which in turn affects the cost of financing your building etc etc etc So you get an extra $1m in rent but it now costs…
"so sometimes it's better to preserve the valuation of your building rather than set a new market rent which will negatively affect your building valuation " I understand that, and thus the question about WW being a canary in the economic coal mine. If there are more and more building owners who literally can't afford to "preserve the valuation" - and WW's success seems to hint at that - then doesn't that say somethi…
Yes precisely, if things become systematic then there is no avoiding the new reality.
I am no expert on real estate I used to be a property accountant at an international commercial property company and so used to compute out growth rates on rent and valuations for owners.
I do find WW's business model difficult to follow, there maybe something I fail to appreciate, I guess time will tell.