The definitive account of how WeWork went from a $47 billion valuation to a basket case in just 6 weeks::The WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann picked the wrong time to be the visionary leader of a company with imperial ambitions and obscure finances.
PSA - this article is over 4 years old. Sep 28 2019
I was wondering why it was 6 weeks when people were talking about this at the same time as Theranos.
Hint: Overvalued bubbles surrounded by cult of personality types, who are more buzzword than substance, making bad business decisions compounded by a once-in-a-lifetime labor paradigm shift.
TLDR: bubble goes pop
This is the best summary I could come up with:
With its stratospheric $47 billion valuation and preposterously ambitious cofounder and CEO, Adam Neumann — his goal wasn’t merely to make money or rent office space, he claimed, but to “change the world” — WeWork had become a glaring symbol of Silicon Valley’s boundless audacity and self-professed exemption from the laws of economics.
In the fall of Theranos, the blood-testing company that imploded under accusations of fraud, the investing public saw how a multibillion-dollar valuation could be spun up from Silicon Valley bromides and the image of an idiosyncratic, enigmatic founder who inspired cult-like devotion.
Neumann, a 40-year-old Israeli Navy veteran, is known for his signature look of long unkempt hair above a T-shirt and jeans and bold pronouncements bordering on the bizarre (“On the one hand, community,” he once told New York magazine, describing his simultaneous desire for social cohesion and cutthroat competition.
Together with his wife, Rebekah, a devout follower of Kabbalah who is a cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow, Neumann cultivated a sort of tech-bro mysticism, combining grueling hours and always-on expectations with a free flow of alcohol and hippie wisdom.
If the WeWork IPO was supposed to be a validation of Neumann’s grand spiritual plan, for his sponsor and largest backer, Masayoshi Son, the CEO of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, it would vindicate his controversial strategy of plowing billions of dollars into promising startups and pushing them to spend gobs of money to dominate their market.
The reasons for the knockdown were well publicized, though members of WeWork’s camp tried mightily to paint it as a prudent step: The Financial Times said the firm’s underwriters were worried about listing the company at too high a valuation and risking a repeat of what happened with Uber, which has fallen about 33% since its debut.
The original article contains 4,210 words, the summary contains 296 words. Saved 93%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Broad City did an amazing job of taking them to task
Kind of surprised that article doesn’t mention COVID-19 at all? Like sure there are a ton of reasons this failed but terrible timing was definitely a factor too.
I’m not, since it was before COVID
It’s from 2019
