51–60 of 95 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
in Italy, I believe it used to be a crime to mismanage a company such that people lost their jobs. Anyway, such large job losses would trigger a criminal probe.
In Italy, I believe it used to be a crime to mismanage a company such that people lost their jobs. On an unrelated note, Italy has never had a tech startup worth a billion dollars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have significantly higher brand value than Regus, which does merit a premium though probably not 5x.
Brand value, maybe (even after this?) but they definitely haven't proven that they can turn that brand equity into higher margins. I believe if two offices were priced the same, someone might pick WeWork, but would people pay WeWork more than Regus for a comparable office? I'd imagine not much.
WeWork was way overvalued because they sold themselves to the public as a "tech company" that dabbled in real estate, not a real estate company that dabbled in tech. I mean, they had a lot of the same characteristics (such as crazy revenue growth while operating at a loss), but let's be clear: WeWork isn't a tech company, they're a real estate company in "tech clothes."
To circle this back to the parent comment - I still don't think they'll be profitable after drastically cutting spending. They might be able to keep the company afloat for a little bit. But their spending cuts target parts of the business that aren't under their "core competency" which is leasing office space on a short-term basis. So for example, they ax'd plans for WeLive or WeSchool (or whatever their kindergarten plans were called) as part of their turnaround plan.
WeWork has something like $17B in long-term lease liabilities across major cities in the US (and UK, I believe). They signed these long-term (10+ years I believe) leases with hopes of turning around and leasing them back to freelancers/businesses on a short-term (3-6mo) basis. If the economy slows down and demand for this variable-term space dries up, WeWork will still be on the hook for those $17B leases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a Capitalist but I approve this message. There has to be a sense of morality somewhere even when running a company. I truly believe that a company can make great profits while taking care of its people. I also believe that it is ok for the initial risk takers like founders/CEO to make a hell lot more money BUT not by destroying other people's lives. I don't think any private company should have any interference…
I thought capitalism was all about rational self-interest. If there’s no government interference, what incentive is there to behave ethically? As far as I can tell the answer is “none” and that’s what we see playing out over and over again.
One theory of ethics holds that it is in your long-term interest to behave ethically, even if you can't know for certain what the constraints are. They encode a heuristic wisdom for survival, and that's why we have ethics at all. But many will fail to follow that, and if they are punished in the end, it's only after many others suffer -- and are not made whole by your punishment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Italy, I believe it used to be a crime to mismanage a company such that people lost their jobs. On an unrelated note, Italy has never had a tech startup worth a billion dollars.
This isn't a tech startup.
"We pioneered a “space-as-a-service” membership model that offers the benefits of a collaborative culture, the flexibility to scale workspace up and down as needed and the power of a worldwide community, all for a lower cost. Through iterative product development at scale and significant investment in technology infrastructure, we have demonstrated that we can build better solutions for less money. We are changing the way people work globally and, in the process, we have disrupted the largest asset class in the world—real estate."
Edit: I just noticed that it continues with a MUCH better statement on the next page:
"Technology is at the foundation of our global platform. Our purpose-built technology and operational expertise has allowed us to scale our core WeWork space-as-a-service offering quickly, while improving the quality of our solutions and decreasing the cost to find, build, fill and run our spaces. We have approximately 1,000 engineers, product designers and machine learning scientists that are dedicated to building, integrating and automating the complex systems we use to operate our business. As a result, we are able to deliver a premium experience to our members at a lower price relative to traditional alternatives."
So uhh, honest question. What were they trying to build with those 1,000 engineers/designers/ML scientists? The company literally leases (not buys) office space to then lease out to their customers. I never understood why this business model needs "significant investment into Tech infrastructure"
SoftBank and their investors deserve this. SoftBank wanted to take wework and jam it on the stock market, then pull their money out. They knew this company was trash, they are no better than Adam Neumann. Congrats to Adam for exposing and exploiting softbanks attempts to exploit the USA stock market. In the end this will stop future cases of investors trying to jam garbage companies into the public markets, essential…
>In the end this will stop future cases of investors trying to jam garbage companies into the public markets, essentially stealing money from retail investors who don’t know better History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. I wish I could have hope that this wouldn't happen again in the future (banks selling an overvalued business to the public markets via IPO) But really, this has happened before and it will happ…
I suspect the only way that would maybe go away would be both greater transparency requirements and the ability for the market to parse all of the data in an informed way. So in other words technically possible but probably not going to happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
in Italy, I believe it used to be a crime to mismanage a company such that people lost their jobs. Anyway, such large job losses would trigger a criminal probe.
In Italy, I believe it used to be a crime to mismanage a company such that people lost their jobs. On an unrelated note, Italy has never had a tech startup worth a billion dollars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In the end this will stop future cases of investors trying to jam garbage companies into the public markets, essentially stealing money from retail investors who don’t know better History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. I wish I could have hope that this wouldn't happen again in the future (banks selling an overvalued business to the public markets via IPO) But really, this has happened before and it will happ…
Really I would expect it to reoccur just from neural network forgetting over time alone - let alone human irrationalities. I suspect the only way that would maybe go away would be both greater transparency requirements and the ability for the market to parse all of the data in an informed way. So in other words technically possible but probably not going to happen.
SoftBank and their investors deserve this. SoftBank wanted to take wework and jam it on the stock market, then pull their money out. They knew this company was trash, they are no better than Adam Neumann. Congrats to Adam for exposing and exploiting softbanks attempts to exploit the USA stock market. In the end this will stop future cases of investors trying to jam garbage companies into the public markets, essential…
There are no good guys here. Neumann, by taking money from SoftBank, was completely complicit. He knew his financials, he knew the company was a flaming dumpster, he knew he had no plan to fix it, other than buying a wave pool company and assigning his family to high-level positions. You really think if the company had gone public, Neumann would have what, stepped up and said "see, this is why we need to add more inv…
There are plenty of private companies with outside capital that are not structured for a stock market debut. WeWork was one of them and the investors tried to list it on the stock markets anyway.
Neumann played the best cards available to him and cemented his consolidated ownership, with a different share class becoming a mere conduit for payment, and voter control allowing for unilateral signing off on contracts to himself and his other entities.
SoftBank and their investors deserve this. SoftBank wanted to take wework and jam it on the stock market, then pull their money out. They knew this company was trash, they are no better than Adam Neumann. Congrats to Adam for exposing and exploiting softbanks attempts to exploit the USA stock market. In the end this will stop future cases of investors trying to jam garbage companies into the public markets, essential…
And yet - as bad as their "losses" were - precisely none of those people are actually suffer (in actual personal, physical terms) anywhere near as badly as the laid off / outsourced service workers referred to in the article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Late state capitalism" is a Marxist term.
It was coined by Werner Sombart, who was not a Marxist but rather a classical economics professor in Germany.
"Sombart, at that time, was an important Marxian, someone who used and interpreted Karl Marx — to the point that Friedrich Engels said he was the only German professor who understood Das Kapital. Sombart called himself a "convinced Marxist,"[1] but later wrote that "It had to be admitted in the end that Marx had made mistakes on many points of importance."