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WeWork founder remains a billionaire even with firm’s bankruptcy | The Straits Times
(www.straitstimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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I worked in Tech Startups in London a few years ago, and what was overwhelmingly the main goal of Founders was to make a company that IPOed or was bought out by a larger company.
Not one's company to lead and guide to achieve some kind of vision (like Steve Jobs with Apple) and which one could pass one to one's children, but rather something one could quickly sell for tons of money.
And, guess what, something which is basically a scam whose numbers can be beautified and which only works during a period with very specific and historically unusual conditions, absolutelly achieves such a core objective as long as one's "exit strategy" (one of the main things Founders and Early Investors cared about) is executed before conditions change.
It's not by chance that the domain is riddled with all sorts of scammy business ideas, up to and including outright scams.
So this article is not at all surprising for me.
don't forget the role masayoshi had in pissing money away in 30 minutes. charisma and Kool-aid runs (ran?) SV.
I worked for a VC for several years, and this rings true so much. Even outside of exiting, there were so many fabrications in getting funding, even from investors that didn't know the difference between a "hit" and a "visitor".
I've got many of my own opinions of the tech scene here, but one thing that was often said by outside investors was that in the UK, someone will make £1m and sell up, whereas in North America someone will make £1m and pour it into their next venture. It probably explains why the UK has always struggled in tech, despite having 4-5 elite level universities, and dozens of top universities used by people all around the world. There just seem to be so few real success stories here, and a lot of that is probably down to the political climate.
It's a cultural problem in the UK at several levels.
For example, a founder who has tried and failed in the UK is finished and will not be given more chances whilst from what've heard in the US it's actually treated as a positive because it means he or she will start his or her next venture with more experience.
Other problems are in the broad access to opportunities: the UK is very classist - to the point that upper classes have theit own accent - and there is quite a well entrenched structure, involving even the mechanisms for access to the best universities (the pair being often named Oxbridge, for Oxford & Cambridge) that means that almost everybody from the upper classes has access to some opportunities and that specific network of interpersonal connections but only a small fraction of people from other social layers have it. That means that the pool of people who have the opportunity to gain the qualifications relevant to be a founder in Tech is limited mainly to those from a subset of society (about 10%) quite independently of merit AND on top of that not having the right accent and language (i.e. the "right" upbringing) results in those who aren't from those layers of society to be descriminated again.
As for Tech specifically, in the UK an Engineering degree is considered lesser than, say, Law or Political Sciences (quite likely because of the whole mechanism that guarantees upper class people can get into the top universities independently of educational merit and capability, and one can't really talk one's way through a degree in Hard Sciences or Engineering as one can in Law) - to the point that for people there an "engineer" is a guy who drives trains or installs heating boilers - or people from Finance (a surprising meritocratic industry there for positions up to Managing Director).
Unsurprisingly, during my time in there what I saw was that the techies were overwhelmingly foreigners, whilst the founders tended to upper-middle and upper class locals.
I was a founder once and I had a very lofty vision for the future. I was very surprised when people started asking me for my exit strategy. What the hell, yo? I am trying to make the world a nicer place, not just fill my pockets.
What happened in the end?
I kept pushing for my vision, which would have taken a bit of patience, but the shareholders kept pushing for faster returns within unreasonable time frames. The other founder was CEO at the time and he didn't dare resist the shareholders impatience.
The other founder kept changing the company strategy after pretty much every prospect he talked with, because he wanted to make a faster return, which, against my constant back-pressure to get stuff properly done, made us move in all directions without ever really committing to a single strategy or even properly finishing work. We had a period of fast growth for a while, mostly due to a smart sales strategy and a slick story (based on my vision), but then all the unfinished loose ends kept creeping back and we lost a lot of customers to quality issues and an inability to deliver on our promises. Every customer wanted something else and since we were building a platform we could in theory do everything, but in practice we had only a certain amount of developers, so we just couldn't make them all happy. There was also a real pressure from sales to make prospects and POCs work, but there was very little pressure to make actual production systems produce value, so it seemed we were never really working on the things that our customers actually wanted, but always on features that prospects like and may sell well.
After years of fighting to get the company aligned on a single product strategy, the other founder and I finally got it to that point, but we had lost a lot of business and had to fire nearly 30 people (half the company size). A relatively new power hungry product manager basically did a bunch of shareholder ass kissing behind closed doors. He then got elected as the new CEO, when the old CEO (who really wasn't very good) got demoted. His true narcisistic/sociopathic nature was then revealed. At that point I couldn't handle it anymore. The company still exists and I wish them well, but I am so happy to not be involved with it anymore.
It all got started with a lofty vision, but greed for money, status and power basically fucked it over from all sides.