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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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Never heard of them but I'm a little skeptical a company like that could even have had a valuation that high.
If you were a tech worker 20 miles from a wework building, you got a LOT of swag and invites to events. It was weekly for me.
In the era of low interest rates, a lot of stupidly-high valuations happened in tech. Many of those idiotic valuations were predicated on the idea that companies could afford to lose money for a long time in pursuit of “market share”, and then pivot to profitability when they wanted that. Never mind that if your business model is fundamentally about being the cheaper alternative while losing money — waving at Uber — the only path to being profitable goes through gaining monopoly powers and hiking prices to much higher levels that consumers will hate — waving at Uber again.
The truly dumb thing about WeWork’s valuation was that it was being valued as if it were a tech stock. It was a renter of office space, period. All of its “secret tech sauce” was a combination of lies and aspirational bullshit from its bullshit-artist CEO.
Oh yeah, that's completely stupid. Getting really sick of these 'undercut-everyone-monopolize' companies. Good to see them burn in that case. Wonder if we'll look back on this era as a bubble.
If you’re interested in some of the gory WeWork details, I can recommend either reading The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion, or (if you have an Apple+ subscription) watching We Crashed.
I frankly don’t understand how so many people didn’t quickly peg Adam Neumann as a charlatan. I guess everyone was more worried about Fear Of Missing Out than Fear Of Losing All My Money, and it drove some really dumb investments in WeWork.