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How WeWork is nearing failure after a valuation of $47 billion in 2019
(www.foxbusiness.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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I think the special part was having smaller rental spaces and that feeling of having coworkers in an office that weren't actually your coworkers. I used to deliver to a lot of we work and we work type places and I sort of got the appeal for startups. Some definitely didn't have privacy like another commenter mentioned.
And that's a perfectly reasonable business, but nothing revolutionary.
If their business would have been co-working franchises, in the sense that you can have an office everywhere and with some set standards, it could even have been a good business. But it's low-margin, nothing like Google or Facebook.
Totally. But Adam Neumann wasn’t going to settle for “low-margin”, nosirree! Low margins don’t buy you jets and mansions.
In the beginning, WeWork definitely was about renting to smaller companies (or individuals) at reasonable prices, providing decent (if not upscale) accomodations. That’s probably a decent little business.
But their CEO had (or at least, promoted) delusions about WeWork providing a fundamentally different experience. Some of those delusions were IIRC software projects he claimed would allow renters to automate and improve their network and electricity use. He sold this bullshit on talk shows, and gave this as a reason that WeWork wasn’t just another renter of office space. In reality, they didn’t have the expertise to do anything like he claimed, and it all came to nought.
Maybe if he hadn’t been spending money like a fleet of drunken sailors, much of it on himself or vanity projects, they might’ve not cratered as badly, or at least as quickly.