Tl;Dr? Don’t know anything about the company or CEO. But I can see the value of shared workspaces for remote employees who want to work in an office away from home distractions.and I can see why the pandemic would fuck that business model sideways.
The CEO started a workshare in Manhattan…got invested got SoftBank or someone to invest…so the way the scam worked is the CEO would get loans from the company buy office buildings and lease them to we work. Hell he trademarked “we work” and sold it to the company…he got crazy rich though.
CEO was a classic god-complex character who thought everything that came from his ass was magic. They expanded way too quickly and never had a path to profitability. Pretty sure they were cooked before the pandemic, which is even worse.
He personally trademarked the word “we” and then sold it to his company for 5 million dollars. He also owned a lot of the buildings the company had signed absurdly long leases on. It was literally a company set up with the sole intention of funneling VC money into his pocket directly. Even for the shady-ass world of start ups and VC firms what he did was pretty blatant. That’s not even getting into how he portrayed the company as a tech start up when it just simply was not. It’s like how Tesla and Ford sell about the same number of cars but Teslas market cap is 17x higher because they call themselves a tech company. At least with Tesla you could probably argue they were a tech company at some point early on, WeWork was never a tech company at all. Neumann got his start renting the spare office space he had after his previous company failed and just decided to run with it.
Good. Shitty founder, shitty idea, shitty execution.
I feel like we’ve found the theme for this particular arc of history.
Tl;Dr? Don’t know anything about the company or CEO. But I can see the value of shared workspaces for remote employees who want to work in an office away from home distractions.and I can see why the pandemic would fuck that business model sideways.
The CEO started a workshare in Manhattan…got invested got SoftBank or someone to invest…so the way the scam worked is the CEO would get loans from the company buy office buildings and lease them to we work. Hell he trademarked “we work” and sold it to the company…he got crazy rich though.
CEO was a classic god-complex character who thought everything that came from his ass was magic. They expanded way too quickly and never had a path to profitability. Pretty sure they were cooked before the pandemic, which is even worse.
He personally trademarked the word “we” and then sold it to his company for 5 million dollars. He also owned a lot of the buildings the company had signed absurdly long leases on. It was literally a company set up with the sole intention of funneling VC money into his pocket directly. Even for the shady-ass world of start ups and VC firms what he did was pretty blatant. That’s not even getting into how he portrayed the company as a tech start up when it just simply was not. It’s like how Tesla and Ford sell about the same number of cars but Teslas market cap is 17x higher because they call themselves a tech company. At least with Tesla you could probably argue they were a tech company at some point early on, WeWork was never a tech company at all. Neumann got his start renting the spare office space he had after his previous company failed and just decided to run with it.
Couldn’t agree more.
Extremely shitty idea.