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WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources

reuters.com

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Re: WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources

#301

Post by wayoutthere »

KoftaBob wrote: post #298

It's a shame WeWork is run by such scummy characters, the concept itself has the potential to make people's commutes much more flexible and shorter. When on-boarding a new employee, companies would be able to automatically provision them a desk/office at the closest WeWork to them. This allows companies to have access to a much bigger pool of talent, and allows employees to have access to a bigger pool of companies.…

Why even provide office space to folks? Just let them work from home and you save a lot!

I always felt this was the fatal flaw in WeWork’s model. Once telecommuter culture has been established, companies realize they can just make their employees pay for their office space and deduct it.

For most things where you benefit from “going in to the office”, the benefit is reliant on having a set of people in the same place. If everyone is all over the country, what is the point of office space in the first place?

Re: WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources

#302

Post by nkoren »

puranjay wrote: post #291
nkoren wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "Silicon Valley", it's Silicon Valley . As in the show. My wife just started a contract at a new WeWork office in London. The lobby features a giant but non-functional as skateboard ramp, and two DJ booths, both manned (at 9am on a Monday). The bathrooms feature the very latest in digital toilets, but they aren't flushing, and nobody can figure out how to reboot them. At an aesthetic level, this couldn't be…

My WeWork in Gurgaon, India has a biweekly bhangra dance class at 4pm on a weekday After the third such class, I decided to get the hell out of my lease. It's like their entire corporate culture is built around finding creative ways to not work. It's awful environment to build a startup in.

Snort!

I am imagining a bunch of microdosing firangi sitting in their gravity pods, asking each other what Indians do to be, like, all cool and stuff. "Build a successful business" is, like, way too square an answer, daddy-o. Anybody can be a dull old business man. Our customers want to be cooool. So what's cool and Indian?

Yoga?

Sure, man, but everyone does yoga. They probably do Yoga in Kansas these days, so how's that gonna build our brand? Yoga goes without saying. We need something way cooler than that. What is it?

(Long awkward silence.)

Ah, I've got it! Bollywood dancing! Yeah, they eat that shit up over there. Let's do that.

Re: WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources

#303

Post by fredley »

puranjay wrote: post #291
nkoren wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "Silicon Valley", it's Silicon Valley . As in the show. My wife just started a contract at a new WeWork office in London. The lobby features a giant but non-functional as skateboard ramp, and two DJ booths, both manned (at 9am on a Monday). The bathrooms feature the very latest in digital toilets, but they aren't flushing, and nobody can figure out how to reboot them. At an aesthetic level, this couldn't be…

My WeWork in Gurgaon, India has a biweekly bhangra dance class at 4pm on a weekday After the third such class, I decided to get the hell out of my lease. It's like their entire corporate culture is built around finding creative ways to not work. It's awful environment to build a startup in.

The spaces where you're actually supposed to work are so hostile to productive work anyway - loud, public, and if you're not by a window or at least only one tier in from one, dark.

Re: WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources

#304

Post by Slartie »

H8crilA wrote: post #289
tempsy wrote: post #23

As someone living in SF, I don’t think anyone in SF or SV would ever consider WeWork to be a “Silicon Valley” company in the same way that Uber or Twitter or Slack is. The company has 0 tech brand among employees (how many ex-FB or ex-Google engineers work there?) and outside of Benchmark’s early round none of the VCs are SV-based. Point is the media is making this out to be an indictment on some SV tech bubble but p…

Why would it matter if it's "tech" or not? Being "tech" somehow makes companies magically better than being "not tech"? If so, that's a bubble right there - your valuation depends on whether or not you're considered "tech", rather than what the financial performance data says. Here's a news headline: "Tech company" brand value damaged by WeWork; WeWork not in the club key investors say

People work with prejudice, if they are aware of it or not. A bunch of companies from the tech sector have managed to earn absurdly high valuations in a short timespan by successfully monopolizing a winner-takes-all market for a service with high initial cost but very low additional cost per customer. This situation is pretty uniquely found only for a certain subset of digital services, but people have already generalized this kind of approach into the word "tech company" - even though far from all tech companies operate in such kind of markets.

What we see now is the second stage of this: companies which have a marginal involvement of technology in their core business (which is true for basically all companies today) try to paint themselves as "tech companies", with the goal being that investors put them in the same box as Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Salesforce et cetera.

And since investors are just as stupid as anyone else and just as susceptible to fall for herd-like behavior as anybody, this strategy works to a certain degree.

Re: WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources

#305

Post by odyssey7 »

puranjay wrote: post #291
nkoren wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "Silicon Valley", it's Silicon Valley . As in the show. My wife just started a contract at a new WeWork office in London. The lobby features a giant but non-functional as skateboard ramp, and two DJ booths, both manned (at 9am on a Monday). The bathrooms feature the very latest in digital toilets, but they aren't flushing, and nobody can figure out how to reboot them. At an aesthetic level, this couldn't be…

My WeWork in Gurgaon, India has a biweekly bhangra dance class at 4pm on a weekday After the third such class, I decided to get the hell out of my lease. It's like their entire corporate culture is built around finding creative ways to not work. It's awful environment to build a startup in.

I take it this was just one example of something that didn't agree with you about the location. I've had a good experience at mine with better productivity vs working from home.

Keep in mind, this is an office that aims to keep individual workers paying it, not the other way around, so the environment is going to be different than a lot of employer-owned offices.

Re: WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources

#306

Post by stillworks »

victor106 wrote: post #77

> The WeWork brand is strongly tied to Neumann, a freewheeling 40-year-old Israeli-born entrepreneur who has said that We Company’s mission is “to elevate the world’s consciousness”. "Elevate the world's consciousness" --> Dont mean to be negative but what the hell does that even mean? Imagine your landlord told you that. Been following this story closely and Adam Neumann is such a crook, from the outset he just want…

> "Elevate the world's consciousness"

Well, when one provides an anti-work work place, the people actually trying to do their work need to elevate their consciousness to get anything done.

Re: WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources

#307

Post by zrobotics »

Kiro wrote: post #244
Kiro wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I bet 90+ percent goes right in the can and out to the curb Source? Or are you just speculating based on nothing?

Just to elaborate: The comment is basically saying they are lying without any proof of such. Is it OK to blatantly and unfoundedly accuse companies of fraud like that?

This isn't an accusation of fraud. Note that the post you quoted includes the words "I bet", so you should know its speculation. Accusing them of fraud would be claiming the packaging materials aren't recyclable. Note that the OP's claim is that most of the packaging probably doesn't get recycled. I don't find this at all far-fetched, as many people who are environmentally conscious enough to care about recycling everything will also be bothered by the amount of packaging material.

Recyclable materials that end up in a landfill are no better than non-recyclables in that same landfill, as even organic materials don't really decompose in a landfill.

Re: WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources

#308

Post by 52-6F-62 »

twic wrote: post #226
nkoren wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "Silicon Valley", it's Silicon Valley . As in the show. My wife just started a contract at a new WeWork office in London. The lobby features a giant but non-functional as skateboard ramp, and two DJ booths, both manned (at 9am on a Monday). The bathrooms feature the very latest in digital toilets, but they aren't flushing, and nobody can figure out how to reboot them. At an aesthetic level, this couldn't be…

This sounds a lot more Nathan Barley than Silicon Valley .

You just gave me a whole new thing to look at here. Thank you for this.

I can't believe I've never seen it.

Re: WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources

#309

Post by warp_factor »

tempsy wrote: post #23

As someone living in SF, I don’t think anyone in SF or SV would ever consider WeWork to be a “Silicon Valley” company in the same way that Uber or Twitter or Slack is. The company has 0 tech brand among employees (how many ex-FB or ex-Google engineers work there?) and outside of Benchmark’s early round none of the VCs are SV-based. Point is the media is making this out to be an indictment on some SV tech bubble but p…

I already think that Uber and Slack are not really Silicon Valley: those are businessy companies but not really tech companies.

WeWork is even taking it one level further. They still have close to thousands software engineers to build... Things though.

Re: WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources

#310

Post by zrobotics »

foldingmoney wrote: post #125
manigandham wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Trends takes advantage of the Google knowledge graph for deeper understanding of entities and companies. This is showing "Pinterest the social network" not just "Pinterest the search term". You can toggle with the menu at the top.

>This is showing "Pinterest the social network" not just "Pinterest the search term" I believe this is just a broader result set that includes searches for anything that Google deems to be related to 'Pinterest the social network'. Google doesn't have access to internal Pinterest metrics.

Google also knows how many Android users search/download the app. I don't use pinterest, but if they use Google analytics or ads then Google also has a fair amount of data on usage.

Google is very much a panopticon, I doubt any other single entity has as much knowledge of the internet as a whole. Now whether this reflects in Google analytics I don't know, as I've never really used their analytics for anything serious.

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