Neumann seems like the current embodiment of 90s dotcom boom that's just about to bust. He's a leader that makes weird proclamations - which admittedly often work out for some reason - and who...
Neumann seems like the current embodiment of 90s dotcom boom that's just about to bust. He's a leader that makes weird proclamations - which admittedly often work out for some reason - and who just haemorrhages money, much of it on personal things. On top of that, they're creating an amazingly antagonistic work spaces, with firing quotas, random employee removals, dietary restrictions, work first mentalities...
It's such a bizarre article that highlights the antithesis of everything I personally want from working in this sector. I think it's well worth a read.
Matt Levine has been writing a lot about WeWork for the last few weeks in his newsletter. I think this one from last week is probably one of the most relevant, talking about how WeWork got away...
Matt Levine has been writing a lot about WeWork for the last few weeks in his newsletter. I think this one from last week is probably one of the most relevant, talking about how WeWork got away with all sorts of strange behavior while it was private, but it's not going to work when they're trying to go public: We can be weird, or it can be public
You can be a bit of a polarizing figure; most of the investors you meet can hate you, and you can still raise a lot of money from the ones who love you. But that is definitely more true in private markets than in public ones. If you pitch 100 venture capitalists and raise money from one, well, that’s a successful funding round. If you pitch 100 investors in your IPO roadshow and only 10 come into the book, that’s a pretty bad performance.
I talk a lot around here about how the distinctions between public and private markets have collapsed, but WeWork’s failed IPO is a pretty strong counterargument. From a corporate-finance-and-governance perspective, a good startup-founder strategy is to be beloved by one or two or five really powerful people. They will give you a lot of money in concentrated chunks, and, because they love you, they will give you total control of your company without checking up on you too much.
This is not at all a normal public-company-CEO strategy. In a public company, you will have hundreds of shareholders, all of whom put up a relatively small amount of money; rather than being beloved by a few of them you have to focus on being tolerable to a majority of them.
Neumann seems like the current embodiment of 90s dotcom boom that's just about to bust. He's a leader that makes weird proclamations - which admittedly often work out for some reason - and who just haemorrhages money, much of it on personal things. On top of that, they're creating an amazingly antagonistic work spaces, with firing quotas, random employee removals, dietary restrictions, work first mentalities...
It's such a bizarre article that highlights the antithesis of everything I personally want from working in this sector. I think it's well worth a read.
Matt Levine has been writing a lot about WeWork for the last few weeks in his newsletter. I think this one from last week is probably one of the most relevant, talking about how WeWork got away with all sorts of strange behavior while it was private, but it's not going to work when they're trying to go public: We can be weird, or it can be public
Today's has a little too, I especially think this part is good:
Curiously, after excoriating the stock, Aswath Damodaran stated if the price was below $10 billion, "I would buy it for its optionality."