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WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

reuters.com

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Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#291

Post by tyingq »

jonny_eh wrote: post #289
roland35 wrote: post #10

Wow what a huge rise and fall in the past few weeks! What I don't understand is how the S-1 filing ever saw the light of day? How could nobody reviewing that see any of the red flags that were obvious? I think this just shows how hard it is to be objective when there are so many cultural/financial/etc influences affecting your judgement. Obviously their team bought the hype (and as a sad Browns fan I can totally symp…

Bystander effect, nobody speaks up because no one else has spoken up. Even if you have a feeling that something is a bad idea, you don't want to stick your neck out and have to defend your claim.

Probably also the (former) CEO that won't back off until he actually touches the stove.

Some people are experiential learners.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#292

Post by charwalker »

martinald wrote: post #21

Cannot understand how they can restructure this. Even one new building in London which isn't anywhere near structurally complete WeWork has taken 18 floors on a 25 year lease (I think due to open 2020 or 2021). Is there a way they can walk away from all these commitments? I understand they have a SPE structure which potentially allows them to do that, but I imagine there must be some costs or downsides to it, otherwi…

Pay whatever cost is in the lease in order to break it or go bankrupt and pay out creditors first. The building management will then either find a new tenant and/or enforce other components of the lease and sue for their money per the contract agreement.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#293

Post by dkrich »

gist wrote: post #179
myth_buster wrote: post #15

I'm just impressed by how well the fallout has been predicted by Scott Galloway[0] and Matt Levine. Has been an incredible learning experience for me on the unicorn class in general. Looking forward to unicorn report for 2019 [1]. [0] https://www.profgalloway.com/wewtf-part-deux [1] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/03/20/the-unicorn-ipo-r...

I wouldn't give that much worship to Galloway it's not like he is always right or my guess even close to that (and nobody is). For example this post circa 2017 about the bubble. I can't tell you how many people have not called the bubble since the last bubble correctly. Galloway is one of them: https://www.profgalloway.com/every-seven-years Market was at 21,600 (very roughly) on the approx. date of that post and now…

Galloway's strength is that he's an amazing communicator and very arrogant. People eat up what he says without a moment's thought. And to be fair he's had some great calls, ie, Amazon's stock run in 2017 and this WeWork fiasco (although the WeWork one wasn't that hard to predict after the reports on the corporate malfeasance came out). Combine an arrogant and vociferous personality with a couple of correct calls and you have something that sells.

But he's also made some really bad calls. For example he predicted that Spotify was going to be the next FANG and that the stock price would double last year. That's not a crime, nobody knows what is going to happen in the future, but it's the arrogance and condescension and air of certainty that bothers me.

He was so adamant about the dominance of voice and how Alexa was going to take over and largely disrupt touch screens. That was the call that I never agreed with and made me more skeptical of what he says. More than once I saw him on tv talking very condescendingly to people who questioned that call and in the end, two years later, I still don't know a single person who has ordered anything using Alexa. To this day it remains a cooking timer and a way to control audio equipment (if I'm really lazy). Galloway called it the most transformative device in ten years. Really?

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#294

Post by Wowfunhappy »

untog wrote: post #105
dcchambers wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many engineers does WeWork actually employ though? From everything I've read on here they're not really a tech company. I can't imagine that, even if it all goes up in flames, there will be many SWEs looking for new jobs from this. Uber is another story. They've got a sizeable engineering force.

Compared to Uber they're still small. But I recall an article not so long ago talking about the tracking WeWork had installed in their offices that gave them startling insights like "people tend to drink more coffee in the mornings". They've been just as guilty as any of hiring a bunch of developers just so they can call themselves a "tech company".

> that gave them startling insights like "people tend to drink more coffee in the mornings".

To play devil's advocate a bit, isn't this how science works? If you're not checking the obvious, you won't discover that people actually drink more coffee on the afternoon, or what have you.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#295

Post by brown9-2 »

roland35 wrote: post #10

Wow what a huge rise and fall in the past few weeks! What I don't understand is how the S-1 filing ever saw the light of day? How could nobody reviewing that see any of the red flags that were obvious? I think this just shows how hard it is to be objective when there are so many cultural/financial/etc influences affecting your judgement. Obviously their team bought the hype (and as a sad Browns fan I can totally symp…

> In a frenzied effort to secure the roughly $100 million in fees for representing WeWork’s IPO, the world’s biggest banks had fallen over themselves to convince Neumann they understood the grandiosity of his vision.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/what-happened-at-we-w...

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#296

Post by pandanomic »

joncrane wrote: post #261
pram wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chat program they’re referring to in the beginning was HipChat, which really was a steaming pile of crap. Uber was our largest user and they constantly brought the entire service down. IDK if making their own was the right solution, but it was driven by necessity and not boredom I assure you.

So why didn't they switch to Slack, Mattermost, etc rather than build their own?

They didn't build their own. The just forked Mattermost and skinned it a bit. Also invested/spent/donated $10k to have a say in Mattermost's roadmap.

Why not slack TL;DR - Uber, surprisingly, is cheap about off-the-shelf solutions. Cheaper than they are about balloons anyway.

Slack was trialed twice. Once in late 2015, and there were some bumps. Rather than stick with it, Uber ditched it citing it "couldn't handle their scale". Maybe that was true at the time, but I had a distinct impression that that's what the group in tech services at the time _wanted_ as well. Their lead on it was very much the type of person that would argue that there's no difference between hipchat and slack. If you asked the right person, you'd get the real answer: slack costs more than hipchat. Besides, the only person they had to convince was directors that didn't use chat anyway. All the executive leadership used Hangouts too. So they just needed to show the price graph comparison to justify, but as far as I know no qualitative productivity cost/savings/improvements measurement was made or factored into this.

Fast forward to the second try, late 2017. Supposedly when Dara came in he asked the same "why not Slack?" question. The UChat team was pretty intent on doubling down justifying their product, but a Slack pilot was done anyway. The pilot was a massive success by all accounts and basically everyone that made the switch was quite happy with it. Then tech services ended the pilot, sent out a survey, and were never heard from again. Would frequently give spiky answers when people asked for the results of the survey as well. Again - ask privately, and the answer you'll get is that Slack was just deemed as too expensive.

In both cases - tech services claimed that Slack was too expensive because of a price that was linearly extrapolated from their website. A lot of people didn't buy this, because that's just not really how enterprise contracts work. But tech services isn't accountable to UChat users, just the eng leadership they report up to.

In any case - everyone* else is still paying the productivity cost of using UChat/mattermost. It's more reliable than hipchat, sure. But is's miles away from being as useful as Slack. Especially the mobile apps - mattermost is a low quality, utilitarian react native app.

*Except ATG. ATG uses Slack because they actually don't fall under the CTO's jurisdiction. And executive leadership all still presumably use hangouts, because the UChat mobile apps are too crap.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#297

Post by pandanomic »

pram wrote: post #221
user5994461 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The largest user of HipChat, really? Uber must have been something like 5k-15k employees at that time. I thought HipChat was used in F500, much larger than that. Anyway, HipChat was bought and killed by Slack. They avoided a dying product by accident.

Yes. It seemed like every single one of their drivers was getting messages from one of their chat rooms in HipChat. It was like 25k people in a single room iirc. They seemed to be using it for notifications or something? At any rate HipChat was already dead prior to the sale. Atlassian made a new program from scratch called Stride which was its own little awful can of worms.

Literally nothing in the first paragraph is true. For driver interaction, if it wasn't a push notification in the app then it would have been some sort of driver operations community tool like zendesk or similar.

> It was like 25k people in a single room iirc.

This never happened. I literally could not have happened. Uber ditched Hipchat when it was around 10k employees. The largest rooms I ever saw were outages or eng rooms with a few thousand, most with the room muted unless they needed something.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#298

Post by jackgavigan »

roymurdock wrote: post #264
austenallred wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Galloway always predicts that every tech company is a bubble. Every now and then he's right.

Levine is skeptical/amused by the nonsensical valuations but takes a more neutral stance, probably because he was never truly invested in/familiar with/cared that much about new technology and what people promise it can do. Galloway is more idealistic and Levine is more practical taking things at face value and breaking them down. They're both very knowledgeable and worth reading.

> ..probably because he was never truly invested in/familiar with/cared that much about new technology and what people promise it can do.

Where's the technology in WeWork?

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#299

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

skrebbel wrote: post #81
aresant wrote: post #49

This is almost too perfect but SoftBank is, at the moment, trying to hire a valuations director: https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=cf0378114e63aeb4&from=tp-s... Sort of a "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" kind of thing . . .

In their defense, Masayoshi Son made much of his fortune by applying the greater fool theory (and lost much of it that way as well). There's a chance they really just took a calculated risk here, and with many of their other investments too. The risk being not so much the success of the company like normal VC investments, but explicitly a "maybe we can profitably push this through an IPO, let's see if the sheeple fal…

Hypothetically, if he was really good at this he'd pick a highly leveraged market segment, attempt to crash it with a ridiculously implausible high-profile failure at the tail end of a bubble, and benefit by shorting everything that wasn't nailed to the floor.

Or maybe he's just a bit gullible. It's hard to be sure.

Re: WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO

#300

Post by djsumdog »

nonconvergent wrote: post #199
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets called "being disruptive" but it's possible to be disruptive without ignoring the law. For example see SpaceX: successful disruption of the launch industry, without breaking any laws. The issue is that not every industry is so inefficient as to be possible to legally disrupt profitably, so people try to do an end-run around the law.

The CEO of SpaceX did commit a couple crimes in the same podcast. Uber's autonomous car fatally collided with a woman, raising questions of negligence and liability in automation. Uber acquired some of Alphabet/Waymo's trade secrets when they aqui-hired one of their former engineers who apparently kept a bunch of Waymo's IP he worked on. That engineer himself is now facing a federal indictment, and Uber and Waymo hav…

Are you talking about the Joe Rogan podcast? It's recorded/filmed from California, where marijuana is legal recreationaly, and had been at the time of the original broadcast.
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