WeWork

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork

by Reeves Wiedeman  · 19 Oct 2020  · 303pp  · 100,516 words

Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Prologue Chapter One: Capitalist Kibbutz Chapter Two: Green Desk Chapter Three: 154 Grand Street Chapter Four: “I Am WeWork” Chapter Five: Sex, Coworking, and Rock ’n’ Roll Chapter Six: The Physical Social Network Chapter Seven: Reality Distortion Field Chapter Eight: Greater Fools Chapter

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Over We Chapter Thirteen: Blitzscaling Chapter Fourteen: The Holy Grail Chapter Fifteen: WeGrow Chapter Sixteen: Game of Thrones Chapter Seventeen: Operationalize Love Chapter Eighteen: A WeWork Wedding Chapter Nineteen: Fortitude Chapter Twenty: The I in We Chapter Twenty-One: Wingspan Chapter Twenty-Two: Always Half Full Chapter Twenty-Three: The Sun

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society. “We are here in order to change the world,” Neumann once said. “Nothing less than that interests me.” * * * IN THE NINE YEARS since WeWork’s founding, practically every New York landlord, investor, and industry titan could tell a personal story about Neumann punctuating a business meeting with tequila shots

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rent low while asking for generous construction allowances to renovate the space—a crucial component of the company’s future expansion. The landlord, meanwhile, wanted WeWork to hire his brother to handle the remodeling. Miguel would never be the hardened negotiator between the two cofounders, and even years later, he

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in a company,” he told one group of employees. “Sales, and everything else.” Gualco brought along Patrick Morselli, another senior Uber employee, to help manage WeWork’s expansion. Morselli quickly recognized certain differences between the two companies and their leaders. “Travis is an analytical person. He thinks like an engineer. He

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—that would contain a standardized plan for the company’s expanding legion of employees. Their constant refrain became “Well, at Uber…” The comparison annoyed WeWork employees. Uber had plenty of factors complicating its business, but taxi service was more or less universal across the globe, lending itself to a relatively

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uniform playbook. Workplace demands, by contrast, varied widely: when WeWork arrived in the UK, in 2014, the company had to install espresso machines because Londoners wouldn’t accept drip coffee. Angelenos cared about on-site

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over the space from the organizations, both of which worked to prevent tenants from being evicted from their homes in San Francisco. To keep up, WeWork was hiring architects, salespeople, community managers, mechanical engineers, coders, real estate brokers, and more. At one company meeting, a newly hired software engineer yelled

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much standing in the fight, having just given Travis Kalanick similar control at Uber. Dunlevie relented, but not before offering a warning to Berrent and WeWork’s board. “I’ll just leave you with this thought,” Dunlevie said. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Chapter Eight Greater Fools IN AN ARTICLE TITLED

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nuts,” Michael Eisenberg, from Benchmark, told the Wall Street Journal. “I don’t think they have a lot of regrets about that.” Eisenberg believed WeWork’s global community offered an opportunity to build Warren Buffett’s famous “moat,” in part by offering frequent business travelers a uniform experience wherever they

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this country, because this is a great country where freedom comes first.” He turned back into the building, and the chanting continued: “WeWork, shame on you!” * * * WEWORK’S DISPUTE WITH its cleaning staff made it into the press and highlighted the fact that beneath its progressive rhetoric about offering a better

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talked about the joys of building a nuclear family—in 2015, Rebekah was pregnant with twins, the Neumanns’ third and fourth children—but most WeWork employees found the circumstances of their employment made that an impossibility. Multiple female employees said that when they were interviewing for jobs, Adam asked if

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country, it was still scrambling to open 110 Wall Street and one other location in greater Washington, DC. Both projects were woefully behind schedule. WeWork’s growing expertise in the construction of commercial office space didn’t neatly translate to the more complicated requirements of a residential building. Office towers

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Neumanns a hundred thousand dollars. They scored an invitation to Vanity Fair’s exclusive Oscar party, but I, Origins tanked at the box office. WeWork Studios never made another film. The company’s scattered assortment of potential business lines was distracting for the employees tasked with maintaining the blistering growth

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slogan—“Buildings = Data”—fit the tech-forward story Adam was trying to tell, and by 2015, half its sixty employees were devoted exclusively to WeWork projects. Joining WeWork gave Case’s founders and employees, most of whom weren’t software engineers or product developers, the rare chance to join a fast-growing

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acquired employees. Berrent had joined the company from WilmerHale, a white-shoe law firm, and was there to allay the concerns from Case employees that WeWork intended to claim ownership of their personal projects, which Case had encouraged them to pursue freely before. Berrent referenced HBO’s Silicon Valley, which

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But the company was still struggling to fulfill its promises, especially when it came to building the physical social network Adam had sold to investors. WeWork had parted ways with Joey Cables, its teenage IT director, but its tech infrastructure remained patchwork. A member had recently complained to the company that

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cash),” Gurley wrote, “have created a complex and unique circumstance that many Unicorn CEOs and investors are ill-prepared to navigate.” Gurley didn’t name WeWork, but the problem he diagnosed had obvious applications: few entrepreneurs were spending more money or boosting their valuation more quickly with rapid-fire fundraising rounds

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body language, the questions they were asking—you could just tell they were skeptical.” Several months into the negotiation, SoftBank’s team asked to see WeWork’s projections from previous investment rounds to assess whether the company had fulfilled its promises. “There were some projections we missed by 80 percent,”

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to California for the weekend. A contingent from the Kabbalah Centre hosted Shabbat services on Friday night, and Eitan Yardeni addressed the company again. WeWork seemed to be back at its most audacious. The company rented out Universal Studios Hollywood for a night and brought the Chainsmokers back to perform

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popular post-campaign jobs for political operatives seeking a lucrative and philosophically palatable gig—experienced flashbacks while watching Adam stride onstage at Summit after another WeWork executive tried to work the crowd into a frenzy. What kind of CEO needed a hype man? Adam seemed to want the fawning crowds

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the corners for a while very obvious,” Mulcahy wrote. “Is what we are doing still meaningful?” * * * MASA’S MONEY ALSO turned the game that WeWork’s competitors thought they were playing into something unrecognizable—a pattern that was repeating itself around the world in industries of all kinds. Massive amounts

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make suggestions and hope that Adam listened. But practically every atmospheric force of the 2010s was encouraging Adam to do precisely what Masa was enabling. WeWork’s growth-at-all-costs plan epitomized an increasingly popular Silicon Valley strategy known as blitzscaling, a term coined by Reid Hoffman, the cofounder

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months to stop growing so that Starbucks could have ironed out various problems that would plague the business for years. This was precisely what many WeWork executives had been pressing Neumann to do: systematize its sales and leasing operation, get a handle on the construction process, stop moving into peripheral

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dozen people in 2013 to more than two hundred, but the first task facing Rajaraman remained fixing Space Station and Space Man. The insistence that WeWork build and maintain its systems in-house rather than outsourcing to an established software provider had lingering consequences. For a period of several months,

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with members and organized them into “nuggets” of information that would allow community managers to improve their spaces in specific ways. (Polaris, what do WeWork members in the Midwest think about the light bulbs we use in our kitchens?) The results were often underwhelming: San Franciscans complained about the quality

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so make them smaller. They experimented with cameras and microphones that could track facial expressions and tones of voice. (At one point, SoftBank suggested that WeWork partner with SenseTime, a Vision Fund company in China with facial recognition technology that had come under fire for its use in surveilling the country

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for Teem and Ritchie joined the company, that he learned from other executives that when Adam said something would happen, it usually did. Many WeWork executives were confused by Adam’s acquisition spree. They would approach other companies to forge potential partnerships only to have Adam enter the conversation and

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?” “Nepotism?” Gross said. “That’s it,” Adam said. “To nepotism!” Chapter Seventeen Operationalize Love A YEAR AFTER the Women’s March in Los Angeles, WeWork’s 2018 Summit returned to Manhattan, where the company planned to introduce its latest shift in focus. Artie Minson, a New York native, fulfilled a

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watching it, chugging a Red Bull,” Macklemore said. “And I immediately thought, ‘Damn, I should have got into technology.’” With the confetti swept away, WeWork presented its employees with the company’s newest initiative: Powered by We, an offering meant to appeal to so-called enterprise clients—companies like IBM

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aesthetic, replacing the boutique-hotel look with white walls and bright kilim rugs that felt more like a retrofitted motel in Palm Springs. He encouraged WeWork’s designers to think in seasons, as a fashion designer would. There was occasional aesthetic confusion—when questions about branding came up, teams would

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Aviv to an office that would be occupied entirely by Microsoft employees. The hourlong address included a surprise announcement, tossed in almost as an afterthought: WeWork, Adam said, was banning meat. This wasn’t the strangest declaration Adam had ever made, but it took almost everyone, including his executive team,

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devotees who kept the machine running. “From a business perspective,” one HR executive told me, “the cult is working.” Chapter Eighteen A WeWork Wedding AUGUSTO CONTRERAS JOINED WeWork at the beginning of 2018. He was thirty-five and living in Texas, where he ran a community arts program with his girlfriend

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nothing groundbreaking. Building company culture was a labor-intensive task that resisted standardization. It was hard to operationalize love, and it surprised no one at WeWork to discover, later on, that the phrase was a slogan deployed by Marianne Williamson. * * * FOR MANY LONGTIME EMPLOYEES, the close of Summer Camp 2018

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arrived at when Adam, who was celebrating his thirty-ninth birthday, multiplied his age by eighteen, a lucky number in Judaism. The bond offering required WeWork to release quarterly financial statements. The magical thinking that pervaded its forecasts throughout the decade needed to be tempered with more sober assessments that would

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acronym stands for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization,” and is a standard way of measuring financial performance. The phrase “Community Adjusted” was a WeWork creation, meant to apply the company’s rhetorical flourish to a metric that would present its financial picture in a rosier light. By removing certain

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costs like design, marketing, and administrative expenses, which the company argued would dissipate over time, Community Adjusted EBITDA transformed WeWork’s $933 million loss in 2017 into a $233 million profit. Those costs were unlikely to disappear, and the cringeworthy term struck many as another

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stuff.” The Financial Times dubbed Community Adjusted EBITDA “perhaps the most infamous financial metric of a generation.” By any measure, Adam seemed unworried by WeWork’s mounting losses. The company’s revenue was still doubling every year, and he constantly repeated Masa’s exhortation to move faster, telling executives that

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ruthlessly pursued its goals. Adam bristled at input from advisers within the company and began referring to himself as the “Mark and Sheryl” of WeWork, dismissing suggestions that he bring in a trusted lieutenant to run the business now that he had pushed away other internal candidates. Neumann reportedly missed

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was for everyone to be “getting high on consciousness, instead of, you know, anything else.” For Rebekah, the assimilation of her personal belief system into WeWork presented a triumphant culmination of years spent figuring out how to mesh spirituality with business. Rebekah told her staff heading into Summit that she wanted

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paid to place advertisements atop relevant searches (“office space,” “coworking”) as well as queries for the names of its competitors. But the Google employees presented WeWork with a troubling report. “Google said this is the most alarming negative sentiment trend they have seen compared to prior companies in similar situations,” Parlapiano

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all the way to the US House of Representatives. During a meeting of a House Financial Services Committee’s subcommittee, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invoked WeWork’s valuation as an example of how the ballooning private markets were screwing over public investors: “They had raised on a previous valuation of $

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if the company had gone public at SoftBank’s valuation, everyday investors who put money in would be “getting fleeced.” Adam grew increasingly frustrated with WeWork’s communications team, which was suddenly unable to control the news cycle. Someone was leaking information. Was SoftBank trying to scuttle the IPO? Was

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and the people inside it drifted away. Minson and Gunningham stepped aside as co-CEOs, replaced by Sandeep Mathrani, an experienced real estate executive. Several WeWork employees had left to join smaller coworking companies elsewhere, or to start one of their own. Rebekah eventually bought the rights to WeGrow’s curriculum

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from these interviews, as well as various documents, legal complaints, internal emails and recordings, contemporaneous news reports, and other materials in recreating events. Many WeWork employees were eager to share their stories. When I set up a meeting with one former employee, after the company’s IPO collapsed, he suggested

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podcast WeCrashed; and many others. Gideon Lewis-Krauss, Ariel Levy, Marisa Meltzer, Gabriel Sherman, and Andrew Rice were particularly generous fellow travelers on the WeWork beat. Thank you to Savannah Lewis, Ramsey Khabbaz, and Timmy Facciola for their help researching this book, and Mairav Zonszein for swift work in Israel

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion

by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell  · 19 Jul 2021  · 460pp  · 130,820 words

draws on interviews with more than three hundred individuals who have shared their time, knowledge, experiences, and materials. It includes interviews with former and current WeWork executives, staff, and board members; SoftBank staff; bankers, advisers, investors, landlords, rivals, friends and family members of the Neumanns; SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son; and

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sense of connection and camaraderie. Neighbors up and down the halls would introduce themselves and chat. Neumann, believing engagement among members would be key to WeWork’s growth, would himself lead occasional happy hours with members standing in a circle, introducing themselves. These first members had the sense that they

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exposed brick replaced drywall. Words like “artisanal” and “craft” became ubiquitous in product descriptions. Food trucks—offering Korean burritos or cupcakes—popped up everywhere. WeWork’s offices—which would later add 1990s arcade games and craft beer on tap—appealed firmly to those craving this urban landscape tinged with hipster

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in The Social Network—that some ambitious young adults could become rich and successful through internet businesses—had entered the mainstream. The startups in WeWork’s offices were often funded by venture capitalists—the moneyed and intrepid investors who back fledgling companies that they believe have potential for breakthrough and

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doing something different to merit its colossal valuation—something that tech investors understood but that wasn’t obvious to an outsider? Representatives from Regus toured WeWork spaces and even rented one so they could analyze the business from the inside, hunting for some special sauce that explained the difference. Eventually,

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the bigger they got, the better they could serve targeted high-priced ads or charge more to recruiters, there was no real corollary for WeWork. As WeWork got bigger, so too did its costs—it still had to build desks—while average rents tended to be flat or even go down.

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-testing company CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. Forbes magazine would write two big features on Adam Neumann, with one highlighting how “heat-mapping technology” had helped WeWork “make the most of every millimeter” and how its scale had created price advantages. With little skepticism from the media and elsewhere, tech investors began

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hype and lofty projections that helped win hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, WeLive never expanded beyond the two locations. * * * — One problem with WeWork’s mission-driven, community-focused rhetoric was that its founder’s lifestyle was increasingly at odds with it. In 2015, Neumann moved into the company

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with a competitor, he thought. But Neumann wasn’t bluffing. Soon after, Hodari’s staff started receiving offers passed along by their tenants, showing that WeWork was indeed offering huge discounts to anyone who defected. Similar assaults were launched on numerous other competitors, even small single-location co-working companies. * * * —

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All of the spending added up. WeWork in 2017 recorded $1.8 billion in expenses. Those expenses were growing even faster than revenue, which in 2017 totaled $866 million. Seven-year-old

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on the stock market, based on its growth. A public offering was the obvious endgame: employees and investors could sell their shares, harvesting their WeWork riches, and WeWork would be able to raise more money from stock investors. SoftBank’s money wouldn’t last that long, after all, especially as their losses

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addition to those standard figures, Minson turned to a formula that they’d been showing to investors and in internal projections and infused it with WeWork branding: “community-adjusted EBITDA.” As traditionally understood by investors, EBITDA was shorthand for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.” While the term isn

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. Until this point, he had enjoyed years of largely fawning press. Just months earlier, The New York Times ran a splashy weekend feature on WeWork titled “The WeWork Manifesto: First, Office Space. Next, the World,” that delighted PR staff. This time, though, Neumann’s personal touch couldn’t fix the coverage.

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retailer. Offices to us are like what books were to Bezos, he would say. But what was the other half of that analogy for WeWork? What was WeWork’s equivalent of developing the dominant global e-commerce platform? The vision was still eminently hazy, despite eight years of growth and billions of

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was rudderless, with staff scattered between a problem-plagued billing system, an eclectic array of acquisitions like Meetup and Conductor, and other random projects. What WeWork called cutting-edge new developments had comically simplistic results. For instance, the company boasted about how its artificial intelligence systems and sensors could yield amazing

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the endeavor cost more than $200,000 and amounted to a one-minute video that appeared briefly on the company’s home page. * * * — Beyond WeWork’s operational inefficiencies, Neumann’s inclinations for new business ventures—often enmeshed with his personal interests—continued unrestrained. Neumann gave Michael Gross the green light

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latest draft: the dedication had been reinserted. Rebekah explained to them that someone told her it was brilliant. * * * — Beyond the visual and rhetorical presentation, WeWork was struggling to figure out how to even present its numbers. Adam Neumann would jump back and forth between being willing to divulge more details

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, changing its name to “contribution margin,” a more standard term. But the SEC was concerned about the underlying accounting issue rather than the name. WeWork countered by renaming the metric again, calling it the rhetorical mouthful “contribution margin excluding non-cash GAAP straight-line lease cost.” Further, it agreed to

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, they rushed into the agency’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters. Inside, Neumann walked through a presentation with SEC accountants, making his case that WeWork’s own measure of building profitability would help investors understand the business. The accountants were receptive and polite, but unmoved. The effort failed. Later that

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release. The prospectus, the SEC believes, has to speak for itself. And given how the public reacted, that wasn’t a good thing for WeWork. * * * — To WeWork’s bankers and executives, it was clear the hostile reception to the S-1 was going to hurt the company’s valuation. The negative press

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phone calls—and the other SoftBank executives glared at him. Eventually, the conversation became more subdued and awkward. They’d all seen the headlines flash. WeWork would be postponing its IPO. No one stayed for dessert. * * * — Adam Neumann stood stiffly in his office Tuesday morning, feet planted behind a clear

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space filled quickly with small businesses and the self-employed, including a lawyer and a photographer. Jamel Toppin/The Forbes Collection via Getty Images As WeWork expanded, the locations began to take on a uniform aesthetic. Light streamed in through the glass walls, giving the interiors a light and airy

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in the guise of a music festival, staff played games, listened to inspirational speakers, and partied in the evenings. Photography by Jacob Elliott As WeWork’s valuation grew, Neumann sold a large amount of shares and took loans, worrying investors. He used that money to finance an increasingly lavish lifestyle

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a $21 million home, with a room shaped like a guitar, just north of San Francisco. Paul Denton Neumann hated flying commercial. In mid-2018, WeWork paid $63 million for a Gulfstream G650ER private jet. Bloomberg via Getty Images To keep funding its heavy losses, and with diminished options left for

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private funding, WeWork decided in 2019 to raise money through an initial public offering. JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, was eager for the bank win the lead

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meanwhile, asked McKelvey: “Miguel McKelvey Is Reimagining the Workplace.” CHAPTER 3: FAMOUS ENERGY Finkelstein told Neumann: “Build a Purpose Driven Business, Education, and Life with WeWork Co-founder Rebekah Neumann,” The School of Greatness (podcast), Nov. 6, 2018. “You, my friend, are full of shit”: Adam Neumann Commencement Address, Baruch College

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2020. Rebekah’s father, Bobby, added to their fortune: Ibid. “There was no being a dilettante”: “Build a Purpose Driven Business, Education, and Life with WeWork Co-founder Rebekah Neumann.” She started seventh grade at Horace Mann: Ibid. she briefly flirted with a banking job: Ibid. the Kabbalah Centre: Ibid. CHAPTER

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4: PHYSICAL FACEBOOK His success in Dumbo: “WeWork: Miguel McKelvey,” How I Built This with Guy Raz, NPR, Sept. 3, 2018. blurted out, “We Work”: “Miguel McKelvey Is Reimagining the Workplace,” The

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, document 82, filed Dec. 9, 2014. CHAPTER 5: MANUFACTURING COMMUNITY Lisa Skye awoke: Interview with Lisa Skye, Feb. 2020. They cleaned the brick walls: “WeWork: Miguel McKelvey,” How I Built This with Guy Raz, NPR, Sept. 3, 2018. her sales strategies also extended: Interview with Skye, Feb. 2020. Abe Safdie

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6: THE CULT OF THE FOUNDER Michael Eisenberg was leaving an event: Evan Axelrod, “Executive Profile: Michael Eisenberg, Partner at Aleph VC and Investor in WeWork,” Commentator, Nov. 12, 2017. The modern venture capital industry: David Hsu and Martin Kenney, “Organizing Venture Capital: The Rise and Demise of American Research &

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“41 West 11th St: Proposed Horizontal and Vertical Expansion,” Presented to NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, Dec. 30, 2014. the free-flowing booze: “Summer Camp 2013/WeWork,” YouTube, posted Sept. 27, 2013, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=RZJ4_Qp8CNw. When Ra Ra Riot played: Interview with Erin Griffith, Sept. 2020. Neumann got

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9, 2015. the beauty products shipper Birchbox: “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies 2013,” Fast Company, Feb. 11, 2013. “heat-mapping technology”: Steven Bertoni, “WeWork’s $20 Billion Office Party: The Crazy Bet That Could Change How the World Does Business,” Forbes, Oct. 2, 2017. “cultural search engine”: Geraldine Fabrikant

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, 2015. origins involving Alexander Hamilton: “History of Our Firm,” JPMorgan Chase website. access to more than $500 million in debt: Preliminary offering memorandum, senior notes, WeWork Companies, April 24, 2018. Lee, then sixty-two, died: Dana Cimilluca and Emily Glazer, “Jimmy Lee, Famed J.P. Morgan Deal Maker, Dies,” Wall

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Summit, Los Angeles, Jan. 8, 2019. pulled out a fire extinguisher: Maureen Farrell and Eliot Brown, “The Money Men Who Enabled Adam Neumann and the WeWork Debacle,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 14, 2019. CHAPTER 14: FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES Startup India, the brainchild: Sean McLain, “Startup India: Entrepreneurs Draw Up

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Out at Least $700 Million via Sales, Loans,” Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2019. when she arrived for the signing: Jen Berrent, “Welcome Home to WeWork,” WeWork website, June 18, 2018. causing Uber to sell its operations: Alyssa Abkowitz and Rick Carew, “Uber Sells China Operations to Didi Chuxing,” Wall Street Journal

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Mayumi Negishi, “SoftBank Considers $6 Billion Investment in China Ride-Hailing Firm Didi,” Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2017. “In a fight, who wins?”: Bertoni, “WeWork’s $20 Billion Office Party.” CHAPTER 19: REVENUE, MULTIPLE, VALUATION the entire San Francisco public school system: San Francisco Board of Education, “SF Board of

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First-Ever Bond Offering Is a Master Class in Financial Masturbation,” Dealbreaker, April 25, 2018. $702 million of bonds to investors: Brown, “Look at WeWork’s Books.” WeWork eventually spent $32 million: We Co., Form S-1 Registration Statement, SEC, Aug. 14, 2019. CHAPTER 21: ADAM’S ARK had indeed been on

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like Plenty: Phred Dvorak and Mayumi Negishi, “How SoftBank, World’s Biggest Tech Investor, Throws Around Its Cash,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 26, 2018. “WeWork will be analyzing”: “Corrected Transcript: SoftBank Group Corp. Q1 2018 Earnings Call,” FactSet, Aug. 6, 2018. Now a father-figure type was goading: Eric Platt

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via Internet Archive, web.archive.org/​web/​20190604085317/​http://lifebiosciences.com/​team/. “That might be forever”: “Build a Purpose Driven Business, Education, and Life with WeWork Co-founder Rebekah Neumann,” The School of Greatness (podcast), Nov. 6, 2018. Jeff Skilling was cast as the archetypal: Rakesh Khurana, “The Curse of

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Meeting, 09.27.18,” Transcript of board meeting provided by Presidio Trust. CHAPTER 27: BROKEN FORTITUDE “my good friend”: “Adam Neumann: Co Founder of WeWork Delivers Incredible Speech at UJA Federation,” YouTube, posted Dec. 26, 2018, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=-4vTTmUByfk. wouldn’t show up at meetings: Maureen Farrell

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Wall Street Journal, Dec. 6, 2018. reported in The Wall Street Journal: Eliot Brown, Dana Mattioli, and Maureen Farrell, “SoftBank Explores Taking Majority Stake in WeWork,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 9, 2019. SoftBank raised $24 billion: Mayumi Negishi and Suryatapa Bhattacharya, “SoftBank Unit’s Debut Is One of Japan’s Worst

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, No. 265013/2018, Tax Certiorari Petition, Oct. 24, 2018. her older brother, then twenty-three: “Build a Purpose Driven Business, Education, and Life with WeWork Co-founder Rebekah Neumann,” The School of Greatness (podcast), Nov. 6, 2018. number of phobias: Ibid. The time without her “Festina Lente”: Interviews with Joshua

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Post, Dec. 27, 2019. EPILOGUE “My own investment judgment”: Phred Dvorak and Megumi Fujikawa, “SoftBank Founder Calls His Judgment ‘Really Bad’ After $4.7 Billion WeWork Hit,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 6, 2019. estimated at less than 20 percent, against Rover: Tomio Geron, “Since Receiving SoftBank’s $300 Million Check,

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, “Goldman’s Next Generation Takes Shape With New Promotions,” Bloomberg, September 21, 2020. he told a crowd: Greg Roumeliotis, “Goldman CEO Says Process on Canceled WeWork IPO ‘Worked,’ ” Reuters, Jan. 21, 2020. named one of eighteen “global chairmen”: “JPMorgan Names New Global Leaders at Investment Bank—Sources,” Reuters, Feb. 18,

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future

by Sebastian Mallaby  · 1 Feb 2022  · 935pp  · 197,338 words

companies. VCs have a proud tradition of building fledgling startups. They are less successful at governing multibillion-dollar unicorns such as the office-rental company, WeWork, or the ride-hailing giant, Uber. In short, venture capitalists are far from perfect. Yet even as the public mood has turned against the

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protect startups from the hubris that came with so much capital. In two notorious cases—the ride-hailing company Uber and the office-rental giant WeWork—Benchmark lived through the painful spectacle of its wards going off the rails.[73] Such was the limitation of the cottage-industry model. Chapter Eight

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votes to force a change—just as a16z had done with Zenefits. At the same time, however, Dunlevie didn’t want to block the financing: WeWork needed the capital. Balancing these considerations, Dunlevie registered his opposition politely, arguing that super-voting rights were a mistake not only for investors but for

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and private-equity investors seeking yield from hot private firms, entrepreneurs had the power to demand what they liked; for a startup as dynamic as WeWork, super-voting rights had become normal.[13] Moreover, banks like JPMorgan seemed to regard governance as a side issue; they were happy to grant the

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in the building, Neumann would have set himself up to profit personally from his company’s lease payments.[15] Playing its proper role as overseer, WeWork’s board blocked Neumann’s proposed purchase. But after the governance change empowered Neumann to overrule his board, he revived the Chicago scheme elsewhere, and

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profits, linking it instead to his company’s lease costs. A gap between Neumann’s interests and his shareholders’ interests was opening. Perhaps not surprisingly, WeWork’s finances deteriorated in parallel to its governance. At the time of Benchmark’s initial investment, the startup had a plausible business model. It took

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it charged to tenants. The result was the opposite of the strong incremental margins that Tiger Global prized: with each additional $1 million in revenues, WeWork’s losses grew by more than $1 million. In 2015, for example, the company more than doubled its sales. Meanwhile, its losses tripled.[18]

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WeSleep (an airline). But even as Son closed off the possibility of disciplining Neumann, he opened a window on the other potential shareholder escape: selling WeWork equity. In 2017 and in a later round, Son was happy to buy out part of the earlier investors’ holdings, rendering illiquid stakes liquid. T

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battle-tested adult, and Gurley had carefully checked him out by calling a friend who had backed one of Kalanick’s earlier companies.[38] Unlike WeWork, which Benchmark had bet on despite the partners’ skepticism of real estate, Uber was the type of marketplace business that Gurley understood deeply. What’

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C, less than one year earlier. Yet even as its value boomed, Uber was charting its version of the worrying shift that occurred simultaneously at WeWork. Slowly and steadily, Kalanick was consolidating his power at the expense of his investors. In addition to denying Pishevar a voting directorship, he had used

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demand was, presumably, Kalanick and his team. They were evidently out to destroy what little leverage Gurley still had over the company. Like Dunlevie at WeWork, Gurley now confronted an impossible dilemma. He could not object to Kalanick’s additional board seats without jeopardizing the $3.5 billion capital injection. And

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83] But, just as with the backlash following the Theranos scandal, the critique was too sweeping: it glossed over the different types of technology investors. WeWork’s capital had come overwhelmingly from nonstandard players: banks, mutual funds, and then Masayoshi Son, acting as a conduit for Arab Gulf money.[84] The

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But Uber’s most significant enablers came from outside the Valley. The truth is that standard venture capitalists were not the main villains: not at WeWork, not at Uber, and not at overmighty unicorns more generally. Between 2014 and 2016, more than three-quarters of late-stage venture funding in the

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fact that they refused to listen to their venture backers. In 2019, confirming the argument in Gurley’s essay, the IPO preparations for Uber and WeWork brought about a healthy reckoning. At Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi embraced the controls that Gurley had urged: the position of chief financial officer was filled, and

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valuation of $76 billion, but it was still a formidable sum—one that allowed Benchmark to celebrate a 270x return on its investment.[86] At WeWork, in contrast, the megalomaniacal Adam Neumann disdained Khosrowshahi-style reforms, so the IPO process punished him appropriately. Required to publish its financials in the run

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-up to its road show, WeWork produced a document that telegraphed its uncanny resemblance to a cult. “Adam is a unique leader who has proven he can simultaneously wear the hats

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, the plethora of conflicts, the complete absence of any substantive corporate governance, and the uncommon ‘New Age’ parlance.” With public-market investors refusing to buy WeWork stock, the board canceled the IPO and belatedly fired Neumann. Gurley had been right. The IPO process did what broken private governance had failed to

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needed. But the question was whether larger lessons would be learned and whether the tech world would turn a corner. In the wake of the WeWork humiliation, Masayoshi Son, the single greatest corrupter of unicorn governance, confessed the error of his ways. “My investment judgment was poor,” he offered.[87]

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from deal to deal. A unicorn’s momentum usually translates into an extremely high price for its shares. In the cases of Uber and especially WeWork, some late-stage investors lost millions. Fourth, the anti-skill thesis underplays venture capitalists’ contributions to portfolio companies. Admittedly, these contributions can be difficult to

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investing partner between 1999 and 2002. Boyer, interview by the author, March 7, 2020. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68 Between Alibaba’s 2014 IPO and WeWork’s failure to go public in 2019, Son was arguably the world’s most influential technology investor. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69 The average VC

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on course to be the second most profitable deal in Benchmark’s twenty-five-year history. (Dunlevie, email to the author, Feb. 4, 2020.) On WeWork, Benchmark reportedly generated a multiple of about 15x, having been able to sell some shares before the valuation collapsed. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73 CHAPTER

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, “Zenefits Touts New Software in Turnaround Effort,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 18, 2016. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Wondery, “WeCrashed: The Rise and Fall of WeWork | Episode 1: In the Beginning There Was Adam,” Jan. 30, 2020, YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=pJSgJpcx1JE. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Dunlevie recalled, “We

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don’t do real estate, but we did WeWork because we thought the entrepreneur was so special.” Dunlevie, interviews by the author, May 15, 2019, and Oct. 12, 2020. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

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David Benoit, Maureen Farrell, and Eliot Brown, “WeWork Is a Mess for JPMorgan. Jamie Dimon Is Cleaning It Up,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 24, 2019. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Benoit, Farrell, and

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-class shares. See Alfred Lee, “Inside Private Tech Voting Structures,” Information, Oct. 29, 2015. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13 JPMorgan owned a larger stake in WeWork than the other investment banks. Benchmark owned almost twice as many shares as JPMorgan. But with Neumann himself as the largest shareholder, Benchmark could not

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by New Enterprise Associates. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23 Michael Moritz, email to Sequoia leaders, Sept. 17, 2017. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24 Steven Bertoni, “WeWork’s $20 Billion Office Party: The Crazy Bet That Could Change How the World Does Business,” Forbes, Oct. 24, 2017. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

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Bertoni, “WeWork’s $20 Billion Office Party.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26 Amy Chozick, “Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up,” New York Times, Nov. 2

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, 2019. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27 Farrell and Brown, “Money Men Who Enabled Adam Neumann and the WeWork Debacle.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28 The value of this downside protection soon became evident. In the spring of 2020, SoftBank’s earnings report indicated

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that WeWork’s value had collapsed from a peak of $47 billion to $2.9 billion. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29 Randall Stross, eBoys: The First Inside

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Fund backs a third defense contractor, Anduril. 2018 Benchmark and its allies oust Travis Kalanick, Uber’s founder, demonstrating the limits to “founder friendliness.” 2019 WeWork’s failed IPO demonstrates the dangers of hands-off venture tourists who neglect corporate governance. 2020 The coronavirus pandemic turbocharges the value of VC-backed

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1-800-Flowers.com, 172 OpenTable, 350–53, 358 Red Hat, 170 Uber, 172, 349–56, 358–71, 372, 380, 440n, 458n, 459n Webvan, 178 WeWork, 172, 342–49, 353, 371–72, 457n Bentinck, Alice, 221 Berners-Lee, Tim, 19–20 Beyond Meat, 263 Bezos, Jeff. See also Amazon Google, 179

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ARD investment, 28–29, 31, 36–37, 45, 419n, 420n Digital Sky Technologies (DST) Facebook, 276–77, 452n Tiger Global and, 276–77, 287, 452n WeWork, 373 Zynga, 288–89, 298 Dimon, Jamie, 343–44 diversification, 40, 46, 172, 334 diversity deficit, 14–15, 384–85, 412, 461n DJI Technology, 393

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, 214, 240, 323 Dunlevie, Bruce eBay investment, 165–66, 167, 169, 171–72 founding of Benchmark, 161–62 offering advice, 162–63, 165–66, 440n WeWork investment, 342–43, 344, 360, 371–72 du Pont, Lammot, 418n Duquesne University, 256 Durant, Kevin, 302 Dutch auctions, 442n Dylan, Bob, 375 Dynabook Technologies

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–5, 312, 438n Parker and Thiel, 197, 199, 443n retirement of, 312, 454n Rock and, 429n, 438n Son and, 171, 439n Stripe investment, 319–20 WeWork investment, 347 X.com investment, 201–7 Yahoo investment, 150–54, 156, 157–58, 160–61, 206, 292, 313, 438n Morris, Robert, 218 Mosaic, 142

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network effects, 36, 164, 167, 345, 349, 350, 364 networks, 29, 81–82, 90–91, 95–97 Neumann, Adam, 342–49, 372–73. See also WeWork New Enterprise Associates (NEA), 92 Netscape investment, 142, 144, 145 3Com investment, 100, 103 UUNET investment, 138–39 News Corp, 159 New Yorker, 25, 64

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-3Com alliance, 106, 107 Stripe, 317–20 success formula of, 304–6, 307, 312–16, 377–78 team building, 307–8 Uber, 352 Webvan, 178 WeWork, 347–48 WhatsApp, 314 X.com, 201–7 Yahoo, 150–54, 155–56, 160–61, 170, 173 Sequoia Capital Global Equities, 331–33 Sequoia China

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, 330 Snow-Job, 69 social impact, 14–15 social networks. See networks SoftBank, 154–60, 171, 334 Alibaba, 229–31 Uber, 370–71 Webvan, 178 WeWork, 346–49, 370–73 Yahoo, 155–60 “software is eating the world,” 296, 309 Sohu, 226, 233, 279–82 Son, Masayoshi, 154–60, 171, 439n

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, 438n blitzscaling and, 387–88 “crazier, faster, bigger,” 348, 373, 385 Rieschel and, 222, 446n Uber investment, 370–71 Vision Fund, 155, 346–47, 459n WeWork investment, 346–49, 370–73 Yahoo investment, 155–60, 175, 277, 348, 439n Sony, 94 Soros, George, 199, 212–13, 283, 445n Soviet Union, 41

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-Bass, 107–8, 113, 129, 203, 432n unicorns, 13–14, 289, 296, 303, 304, 372, 414 Gurley’s critique of, 361–63, 373, 458–59n WeWork, 342, 343, 346–47 Union Street Railway, 24 Unity, 309, 313 university endowments, 62, 416n Sequoia’s Heritage funds, 321, 333–36 University of California

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, 20 Welch, Jack, 364 Wellfleet Communications, 112, 118 West, Donda, 235 West, Kanye, 235 WestBridge Capital, 321 Western Association of Venture Capitalists, 27, 51, 419n WeWork, 342–49, 371–73, 457n Benchmark Capital’s investment, 172, 342–49, 353, 371–72, 457n governance and corruption issues, 343, 344–45, 359 IPO

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receive food stamps. As tech firms delayed IPOs, they achieved “unicorn” status: their valuations shot past the $1 billion mark, even as they remained private. WeWork’s Adam Neumann (left) and Uber’s Travis Kalanick (middle) became the poster children for the risks in this state of affairs: as passive growth

Gambling Man

by Lionel Barber  · 3 Oct 2024  · 424pp  · 123,730 words

Salman (MBS), Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Lex Greensill, former Queensland melon farmer turned founder of Greensill, fintech company Adam Neumann, CEO and founder of WeWork Prologue On a chilly Wednesday evening, 2 February 2000, more than 2,000 people crammed into a dimly lit discotheque called Velfarre,fn1 Tokyo’s

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into a wonder product; and financed the biggest boom Silicon Valley has seen, one that super-sized hundreds of start-ups including fiascos such as WeWork, and made the dot-com boom look trivial in the process. Along the way the superlatives have kept piling up: Masa has been both the

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his meeting with president-elect Trump loomed large. The planned two-hour HQ tour turned into a 12-minute walk-about. Unabashed, Masa invited WeWork’s founder Adam Neumann to join him in the backseat of his SUV for a ride to Trump Tower, thirty-eight blocks north.1 Neumann

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partnership, with Neumann’s scrawled signature in blue ink beside Masa’s in red upper case. The SoftBank investment implied a valuation of $20bn for WeWork, the same as Hilton Hotels. Only Uber and Airbnb, the new hot shots on the US start-up stage, had done better. At 38

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investor who’d just left SoftBank. ‘Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, all rolled into one.’5 Masa’s multi-billion dollar pledge to WeWork fitted a pattern of seemingly irrational decisions to invest mind-blowing amounts of money on founders he’d barely spoken to. At one level, Masa

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’s investment in WeWork marked a ‘transformational moment’, a display of unshakeable confidence in his own judgement and the founder’s potential. Such moments are the stuff of venture

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missile shield was unfeasible. But Reagan refused to listen. In Reagan’s mind, seeing was believing. Masa applied the same yardstick to megalomaniacal founders like WeWork’s Neumann. No matter that they might be charlatans or spendthrifts, the key was that they dared to dream, and they aimed high. In the

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charging for flexible leases, cool design and the provision of services such as the internet, reception and mailroom.6 To those who wondered what made WeWork different from any other real-estate company, Neumann had a one-word answer: culture. He sold Wall Street a fantasy of joyous communal living like

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SoftBank’s $4.4bn investment and divvy up the proceeds: some $3.1bn for global expansion, with SoftBank using the balance ($1.3bn) to acquire WeWork stock. For all Neumann’s talk about profit with purpose, he stood to gain several hundred million dollars, one of the most lucrative sales of

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a small fortune while a Berkeley student on a visit to Las Vegas.9 In the case of Adam Neumann, Masa’s goading encouraged the WeWork founder’s worst instincts. It was like feeding a monkey alcohol, says one leading Vision Fund investor at SoftBank. And yet, almost until the

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Musk’s demands on Tesla going private, though his opposition to being diluted was ironic given that this was precisely what would happen with his WeWork investment, with catastrophic consequences. In April 2018, after his ‘smart-crazy’ session in Tokyo, Masa ordered all SoftBank Vision Fund companies to gather in

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got wind of the incipient insurrection, he informed Neumann that he would have to wait a minimum of six hours for the Crown Prince. The WeWork boss disappeared in a puff of smoke. Neumann was always looking for more money from Masa, but he was infuriatingly elusive when it came

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to oversight. Rajeev Misra in London, as well as Ron Fisher and Mark Schwartz in the US, found him impossible. Both were on the WeWork board, but Neumann had the voting power and he was a crafty operator. ‘Adam played the observant Jew card,’ said a SoftBank adviser, noting

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strictly observed the Sabbath, which left all parties incommunicado from Friday evening to Saturday evening. In mid 2018, thanks to SoftBank’s $4.4bn investment, WeWork was enjoying explosive growth in revenues, albeit matched by eye-watering losses.fn1 On a lightning visit to Tokyo, Neumann pitched Masa on a plan

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to dominate the entire real-estate market from apartment space to brokerages. WeWork would become the go-to space provider for office space around the world. Intrigued, Masa asked for more work to be done. And so

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ink, he scribbled ‘$10 T’, and underlined it twice. The value of the entire US stock market was about $30 trillion. In Masa’s imagination, WeWork would be worth $10 trillion by 2028. Back in Tokyo, Masa’s top executives were stupefied. These were ‘fake numbers’, one complained, only to realize

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settled on a plan. SoftBank Group would buy out all of Neumann’s existing investors for about $10 billion and put another $10 billion into WeWork, giving SoftBank ownership of most of the company. Neumann would remain as the sole largest shareholder outstanding. The deal amounted to the largest ever US

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senior SoftBank colleague. ‘I am looking at Alibaba and only he [Adam Neumann] looks like Alibaba today.’ As the top echelons of SoftBank fretted about WeWork and its crazy valuation, the mood inside Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund turned hostile. Executives had long complained about blurred lines between SoftBank and

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the Vision Fund. Both entities had put money into WeWork, but if things went wrong, the Saudis, as lead investors, were exposed. What would happen then? Inside the Desert Kingdom, the Crown Prince had

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responsibility, the CIA later found him to be complicit in the grisly murder. SoftBank’s main financial backer was compromised. Coming on top of the WeWork debacle, some members of SoftBank’s board found SoftBank’s Saudi connection repulsive, more evidence that Masa would do business with anybody. ‘He mixed clean

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a compromise was reached: Masa went to Saudi Arabia but stayed away from the PIF event. During this tumultuous period, Masa’s biggest challenge was WeWork and the $47bn valuation which he had rashly put on the company. If something went wrong, it could send SoftBank’s share price into a

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disappointing 14.5 per cent from the offer price. SoftBank’s chief financial officer Yoshimitsu Goto warned Masa that shareholders would revolt further if the WeWork deal went ahead. The buy-out had to be called off. On Christmas Eve 2018, Adam Neumann was in Hawaii, surfing, readying for the

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but this time Masa was immune to sweet-talk. Instead, he offered Neumann a consolation prize: a $1 billion investment, at a $47 billion valuation. WeWork would have to opt for a public offering on the stock market. This was the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. Going public would expose

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Masa was still trying to drum up interest in a second Vision Fund. Nobody was listening. All they could talk about was the crisis at WeWork and the whereabouts of Adam Neumann. Masa had given Neumann star billing but the wild-haired real-estate broker had failed to show up. In

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of it, $4bn was not a huge deal in the context of a $98.6bn fund, and something was sure to be salvaged should WeWork go bankrupt. But the precedent of SoftBank itself intervening to rescue a Vision Fund portfolio company broke every rule in venture capital. The whole point

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Crown Prince, he cut a helpless figure. He was out of his depth. All at sea. 27. The Great Escape In mid October 2019, WeWork blew up. Its valuation was cut from $47bn to barely $8bn, Adam Neumann forced out and the IPO delayed indefinitely as SoftBank took control of

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pledged further financial support. All of SoftBank’s family of companies would contribute to the city’s high-tech ecosystem: ARM, Grab, even a revived WeWork providing office space. When asked where the funds would come from, Masa pointed to Lex Greensill, the Australian supply-chain finance entrepreneur backed by the

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a high-level government steering committee to bolster investor confidence in Nusantara. But Masa’s interest was waning as financial pressures on SoftBank grew. The WeWork bail-out had to date cost SoftBank shareholders $9.5bn, excluding Masa’s generous offer to make the Saudi Public Investment Fund whole to cover

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strong stomach could make a pile of money. Elliott began buying bite-sized chunks of SoftBank stock. Buying accelerated after the aborted listing of WeWork in late 2019 and the subsequent multi-billion dollar bail-out. Soon the New York fund had built an equity stake of 3 per cent

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powered by low-orbit satellites. Shortly afterwards, OneWeb went into bankruptcy. SoftBank also walked away from a previously agreed $3bn deal to buy shares from WeWork investors, including Adam Neumann and Benchmark Capital. Late on Sunday night, New York time, as the final wording of Elliott’s statement of support was

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Everyone wanted to meet him; no one could afford to turn down his money. Then, in the blink of an eye, came the collapse of WeWork, the coronavirus pandemic and SoftBank’s brush with corporate death. Twelve months on, Masa was desperate to mount yet another comeback. His plan was to

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appeared in Bloomberg, which brought a dressing-down from Misra. He was too conniving by half. That said, Naheta was right about Adam Neumann and WeWork’s flawed growth model. He was right to spot the potential of ARM, the UK chip designer languishing in the SoftBank portfolio. And he was

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going to do. Masa was non-committal. ‘I understand. Thank you.’ From this moment Elliott began to quietly sell down its position.fn3 The WeWork debacle was bad enough; the Nasdaq whale episode was confirmation that Masa was never going to change. He was a one-man show, and the

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was still aggrieved. His achievements – pulling off the grand telecoms merger, placing post-merger a record amount of T-Mobile stock in the market, stabilizing WeWork by cutting costs and installing a new chief executive, managing the SoftBank portfolio companies – were real. In his view, Misra’s Vision Fund was an

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touted Katerra as the future of the building industry, earning it a place alongside favoured members of the SoftBank family such as OYO Hotels and WeWork. Both SoftBank and Greensill had poured money into Katerra, which at its peak employed 8,000 workers. Masa brushed off these failures. He thought

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in Woodside, California, bought for $117m and, like other properties, a place to impress. It was later used as collateral to raise money after the WeWork debacle. 27. Nikesh Arora, the ex-Google rainmaker. Son hired Arora in a $320m deal in 2014 and lined him up as a potential successor

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conference in Sun Valley, 2018 – a financial magician and schemer who was considered bulletproof inside SoftBank. 42. The charismatic Adam Neumann, boss and founder of WeWork. Neumann bewitched Son but the partnership ended in financial disaster. 43. Son bought his local baseball team in Fukuoka in 2005 and turned the rebranded

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SoftBank Hawks into championship winners. 44. Down: Son after suffering heavy losses following the WeWork fiasco and a downturn in financial markets. 45. And up again: Son at the SoftBank World Event in 2023, extolling the artificial generative intelligence revolution

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sources speaking off the record confirm the exchange between Gou and Masa 25. Crazy Guy 1 Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion, Penguin Random House, 2021, pp. 166–7 2 Ibid. 3 Reeves Wiedeman, Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise

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and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork, Hodder & Stoughton, 2020, pp. 16–17 4 Sunil Bharti Mittal, interview with author, 8 September 2022 5 Jordan Levy, interview with author, 28 April

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Everything Blueprint: Processing Power, Politics and the Microchip Design that Conquered the World, Hodder & Stoughton, 2023 Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell: The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann and the Great Start-up Delusion, Harper Collins, 2021 Duncan Clark: The House that Jack Ma Built, Harper Collins, 2016 John W Dower

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Vogel: Japan as Number One, Harvard University Press, 1979 Reeves Wiedmann: Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and the Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork, Hodder & Stoughton, 2020 Kōichi Yoshida: Naibu Kokuhatsu: SoftBank Yuganda Keiei, Yell Shuppansha, 1997. Tsukasa Yoshida: Son Masayoshi wa Taorenai, Asahi Shimbun Sha, 2001 Tosu

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spending, 181–2; and Naheta, 304, 306, 308, 309–10; and Northstar, 311, 312–13; and Vodafone Japan purchase, 182–3, 184–5, 231; and WeWork, 276, 278, 326* Mitchell, Edson, 183 Mitsubishi, 98, 101 Mittal, Sunil Bharti, 182, 223–5, 266, 271 Miyamoto, Musashi, 168 Miyauchi, Ken, 77, 218

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289, 316–17; ‘conglomerate discount’, 295, 296, 308; core banks list, 98; corporate logo, 202*; credit rating, 110, 158, 164, 166, 184–5; crisis at WeWork, 290–91, 293, 294, 296, 303, 308, 313; culture becomes more cut-throat, 237; Dai-Ichi Kangyo loan, 55, 61; Dolotta represents in USA, 74

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4; use of securitization, 181, 185, 187, 194; venture capital fund in China, 142–3; Vodafone Japan acquisition, 179–81, 182–8, 189, 191, 245; WeWork bail-out, 293, 294, 296, 301; whistleblower email on Northstar, 310–11; whistleblowers (1997), 122–4, 126–7, 131; Yanai joins board, 163–4 see

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145–6, 158 Valentine, Don, 105 Velfarre (Tokyo discotheque), 1–3, 148 venture capital (VC): ‘carry’ performance fee, 287; ‘collar’ strategy, 304; and crisis at WeWork, 291, 293, 294, 296; funding for tech start-ups in US, 3, 5; Masa’s first steps in (SoftBank Venture Capital), 84; Masa’s investment

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single-digit returns from, 329; ‘spray and pay’ approach to investing, 295; Vision Fund 2 plan, 276, 289–90, 291–2, 316, 320, 328, 329; WeWork investment, 270–73, 276–80, 290–91, 329 Vodafone, 172, 179–81, 182–8, 189, 191, 245 Vogel, Ezra, 48 ‘vulture capitalists’, 295–8, 299

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time, the book became a bestseller after the 2011 disaster. 22. Two Indians are Better Than One fn1 In 2020, under pressure from a creaking WeWork, Masa secured a $92m loan using the Woodside property as collateral (Financial Times, 14 January 2024). fn2 Masa says he was introduced to DRC by

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in their portfolios. 24. Project Crystal Ball fn1 The Saudi delegation was 500-strong and arrived in 13 planes. 25. Crazy Guy fn1 In 2017, WeWork had lost $883m, despite having some $886m in revenue. In 2018, the company managed to lose $1.9bn on some $1.8bn of revenue.

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loans as an alternative mechanism to reward executives. All of the transactions were approved by the Board of Directors of SoftBank. fn4 In November 2023, WeWork, whose office-leasing business model was crushed by the Covid lockdown, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. fn5 UBS acquired Credit Suisse for a meagre $3

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley

by Atsuo Inoue  · 18 Nov 2021  · 295pp  · 89,441 words

2020 came to pass just as he had foreseen. Having successfully resurrected Sprint, the next lost cause Son parachuted Marcelo Claure in to rescue was WeWork. WeWork was originally founded in 2010 as a co-working space by Adam Neumann, with SoftBank making its first investments in the company in 2017. At

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the start of 2019 an additional investment was made in the order of $2 billion and plans were afoot for WeWork to go public, but after a number of major issues with Neumann the company was plunged into a crisis. Claure comments on his brief from

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Son when everything started to kick off with Neumann. ‘Masa gave me the task of basically making sure that a new WeWork was to be formed with the right capital structure, with the right shareholders, and with the right management.’ Neumann may have had the right vision

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in place for WeWork but the practical implementation of that vision posed serious problems for the company. The business model in place is a winning one and the sector

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himself on the line to Claure, history repeating itself. ‘Masa said: “I have a good idea. Why don’t you become the new CEO of WeWork?”’ Once again, Claure rejected the idea outright, once again Claure told Son he was mad as a hatter for suggesting it – he knew nothing about

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real estate, after all. Son told him not to worry about it; everyone at the time thought WeWork was going to go under. The picture Claure paints, however, is considerably tempered: ‘Next year [2021] we should break-even, and a year after [2022

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], WeWork makes money.’ Possibly the most critical point of rehabilitating WeWork is restoring its reputation: within the investment industry the phrases ‘before WeWork and after WeWork’ have even been coined, although this has only served to strengthen Claure’s resolve

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that on top of that it is important to prove wrong those people who have written off WeWork. It was the exact same thing as happened with Sprint. Would it help then to view WeWork as a key platform? There are two kinds of networks – the digital type and the physical – but

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WeWork is an actual physical platform. One of the major parts of working is having a physical space where

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businesses in terms of high-quality office space that can be accessed any time day or night – except for WeWork. Booking can be easily done online as well. The first step towards WeWork’s rehabilitation was cutting expenses and that in practical terms translated to trimming the workforce, from 16,000 people

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rate had risen from 85% to 90%, and with expenses kept low this resulted in a profit of $1.5 billion. The ‘1.5’ in WeWork 1.5 refers to the current ‘access’ phase of its reboot, with contracts available for use on an hourly basis and flexible terms; with the

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All Access membership model, you have unlimited access to any WeWork in the world. WeWork 2.0 refers to the phase where the brand becomes a business solutions provider, offering marketing, accounting and insurance services to companies, providing

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users with an environment where all they have to do is focus on their core business. WeWork continues to evolve, with 70 per cent of the world’s largest companies – such as ByteDance, Google, Facebook and Goldman Sachs – having accessed its services

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Covid-19 pandemic and social-distancing requirements companies have been forced into a rethink of population density within the workplace, with some concluding agreements with WeWork to accommodate their employees. It also presents a solution in terms of new trends in reducing the distance between the workplace and employees’ places of

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residence, such as with Facebook telling its employees they can work from any WeWork they please. Furthermore, a large number of companies have adopted a hub-and-spoke model approach to business, with a head office and then a

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number of satellite offices, including WeWork spaces. Son certainly took a large gamble when he asked Marcelo Claure to take over at Sprint, given the latter knew nothing about the technology

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precious time, Claure told Son he wanted Sandeep Mathrani – an experienced hand in the real estate business – to come in to act as CEO of WeWork whilst he spearheaded the rebuilding project as chairman of the board. Mathrani was well-versed in the property market and Claure was adept at dealing

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with consumers and the more business-oriented end of things. Claure comments further on the division of labour at the top of WeWork. ‘Because I also do all the Latin-American investments and other businesses, I dedicate one-third of my time to

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Sandeep Mathrani dedicates 100%. It’s my evolution of working with leaders to help them turn around business.’ WeWork operates spaces in 650 buildings in 150 cities in 38 countries and is developing office spaces to meet the needs of customers supporting larger companies

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such as Amazon as well as SMEs, within both urban and rural areas. Why is WeWork so appealing to these segments? Small business owners may for example contemplate opening an office in Manhattan but find the number of good-quality, nice

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-looking buildings quite limited as these are usually the preserve of larger companies. WeWork becomes an option then, giving them an office with an appealing address (location is everything for a new business). Furthermore, anyone looking to lease office

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done. The timespan between concluding the agreement for the space and actually being able to use it would most likely take a year, whereas with WeWork a space would be available for use immediately. Ten years may also be too much of a commitment for companies, so whilst

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WeWork are perfectly capable of accommodating this type of customer, they also provide hourly agreements: either way is fine. If the company expands it can always

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move to a larger WeWork space and if it shrinks it can move to a smaller one as well, with a minimum of fuss and no bickering with estate agents

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. The whole process is geared towards enabling businesspeople to focus on their business and none of the peripheral matters. In other words, WeWork’s value proposition is incredibly strong and robust from a flexibility standpoint and this will be the reason the company should pull through any temporary

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advise on growth and expansion, and without the bother of having to go out and buy a coffee. The possibilities in this sense are tremendous. WeWork currently provide three types of services: ‘on demand’, or hourly rentals; ‘all access’ (which includes membership and passport services) allows use of

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WeWork facilities anywhere in the world; and ‘dedicated space’, which is more akin to traditional property letting services but more flexible. Due to the Covid-19

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lack of company culture and a feeling amongst respondents that it would be harder to get ahead in their career. Claure views WeWork’s situation as one of simple mathematics. WeWork have currently got $4 billion to work with in cash. The current occupancy rate is 50 per cent and if things

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, so it has basically become a waiting game; because of its simplicity, the WeWork business model is fool-proof in terms of its stability and soundness. Claure is convinced that WeWork will a profitable company with a surplus. WeWork is changing the way people work and Claure wants the company to be the

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flexible spaces, just like they would do for FedEx for next-day delivery or Google for online searches. Son speaks about Claure’s approach with WeWork. ‘The pandemic has made it so people can’t turn up to their habitual place of work – they’ve been told or incentivised not to

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. Meaning people no longer need an office and in turn WeWork’s occupancy rates have also fallen. That being said, however, they’ve already developed vaccines and within six months to a year of everyone getting

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go back to the office but with your family around it’s hard to be productive sometimes. That’s where WeWork comes in, where you can hold Zoom meetings from the nearest WeWork office or even call face-to-face meetings with a select number of colleagues. I think it’s giving

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rise to a new way of working as well as creating new communities. WeWork represents the dawning of something new – something outside of a fixed office and desk, something more efficient, more community-based. In that sense I think

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, and 95% of the time that works and 5% of the time it doesn’t work. WeWork was the situation that where it was one of the 5%, but I think the business model of WeWork will be proven to be right. I think that, especially in the COVID environment, where COVID

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everybody in the same building, every day of a week. This flexible way of working is going to be part of our business life and WeWork allows the enterprises to create these flexible working arrangements, so in the long term, Masa is going to be right.’ Son has his own thoughts

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children are making noise, that’s tough. You have to have Zoom meetings so often, too. In this sense, the new sharing-economy, such as WeWork, shared offices, shared cars, shared travel, or gig-workers, food delivery, Zoom as well, brings about a new lifestyle and work style, and the pandemic

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anyone else, spending the entire day in Zoom meetings. Once the New York City lockdown was lifted, I was ready to get back to turning WeWork’s fortunes around’. When asked whether he wants to go back to how he was working in Aspen or whether he had any desire to

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a lot of hiking and biking but I’m back in New York City now, knuckling under along with everyone else busy trying to revive WeWork’. In Claure’s life, a good balance between work and family is important. A quote, written on a yellow board in his office, captures his

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explains this further. ‘When I was at Sprint, the CFO was Michel Combes. He had more telecom qualities that me. When I’m getting in WeWork, the CEO that I put in is Sandeep Mathrani. Sandeep knew real-estate much, much better than me. He had 20 years of experience in

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markets worsened, affecting the fair value of SoftBank Vision Fund recipient companies, with things like the announcement of WeWork withdrawing its planned IPO causing sudden drops in valuation. In the specific case of WeWork both the SoftBank Group and the SoftBank Vision Fund had committed to investment, posting non-operating losses of

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-19’. During the 2020 second-quarter financial results briefing, Son repeated the phrase ‘I am searching my conscience as to what to do about the WeWork situation’ close to 20 times and the fact he referred to himself as an ‘information revolutionary’ and ‘venture investor’ was similarly telling. Commenting on the

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

by Grace Blakeley  · 11 Mar 2024  · 371pp  · 137,268 words

that they determine which companies will receive the “judgement of the market,” as Schumpeter put it.1 Adam Neumann, the founder and former CEO of WeWork, is someone intimately familiar with the ability of financial institutions to act as masters of time in capitalist economies. Once hailed as one of Silicon

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He managed to find funding for the latter and launched Egg Baby in 2006, which still exists.3 Soon after, he developed the idea for WeWork: a company that would rent out unused office space to fast-growing startups. The company forged close links with rapidly scaling tech startups that used

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WeWork for flexible office space, which allowed its founder to market the company as something like a technology company itself. In the wake of a financial

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many financial and real estate giants alongside the dramatic rise of “big tech,” this perception allowed WeWork to attract large amounts of cash, facilitating its expansion to multiple American and eventually European cities. By 2016, WeWork was worth $10 billion and featured on Fortune’s list of “unicorns”—private companies worth more

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after losing $70 billion during the dot-com crash.8 One of those bets was made in 2017 when, taken in by the image of WeWork as a fast-growing start-up, Son invested $4.4 billion in the company, then valued at more than $20 billion.9 Son’s investment

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.12 The Wall Street Journal wrote that some of Neumann’s modest aims for life included becoming the world’s first trillionaire and building a WeWork on Mars.13 But when Neumann and Son sought to take the company public, things started to unravel. In the summer of 2019, after another

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cash injection from Son, WeWork was valued at $47 billion.14 If the company had gone public at that valuation it would have been the second-largest IPO of 2019

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meant giving investors, journalists, and regulators a look into the inner workings of Neumann’s empire, and what they found wasn’t pretty. The paperwork WeWork filed ahead of the IPO showed that Neumann was, according to Forbes, “burning through cash” and had “some of the worst corporate governance practices” the

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company was taking massive losses, and Neumann was getting personally rich on the back of the chaos. First, he had bought several of the buildings WeWork was leasing, meaning the company was paying him a significant personal rental income.16 Second, Neumann had taken several personal loans from the company at

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Street Journal reported he planned to sell $700 million of his company stock before going public.19 Investors took one look under the hood of WeWork and balked. The company’s valuation dropped from $47 billion to under $15 billion almost overnight, and it was forced to pull its IPO.20

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to apologize for the debacle to his own investors, SoftBank reneged on the deal with Neumann and in 2021 agreed to a settlement that left WeWork’s former CEO with close to $450 million.22 As readers may have noticed from walking around city centers

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, WeWork still exists. After investors forced management to dramatically cut costs, lay off at least 20 percent of the workforce, sell the G6, and completely transform

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to working from home, but the company benefited from the postpandemic transition away from permanent office space toward more flexible, and fun, workspaces. In 2021, WeWork finally went public—this time via a special purpose acquisitions company (SPAC)—at a $9 billion valuation.24 In the time between

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public and the time of this writing in August 2023, it had lost 98 percent of its value. The most significant factor explaining WeWork’s ability to avoid complete collapse was the bailout from SoftBank, which ended up losing about 90 percent of its initial investment after write-downs.

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25 There was a viable business at the core of WeWork, but in almost any other scenario the staggering corruption and mismanagement that took place under Neumann would have forced the company into insolvency, allowing a

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better-run competitor to buy up its assets. Masayoshi Son bought WeWork time, and this is what allowed it to restructure itself into a viable (and much smaller) corporation. Though doubts still remain as to the company

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future end up shaping that future itself? What if the banks’ decisions about which companies to lend to actually influence which become the most profitable? WeWork is one example of the power of people’s expectations. Had financial institutions like SoftBank not stepped in to prop up

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WeWork based on a prediction the company would grow, it would likely have failed much faster than it did. Yet those expectations allowed the company to

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-markets-socialism-planning. 2. Gabriel Sherman, “ ‘You Don’t Bring Bad News to the Cult Leader’: Inside the Fall of WeWork,” Vanity Fair, November 21, 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/inside-the-fall-of-wework. 3. Britney Nguyen, “The Career Rise, Fall, and Return of Adam Neumann, the Controversial

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WeWork Cofounder Who Is Back with Another Real-Estate Startup,” Insider, August 16, 2022, https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-ceo-adam-neumann-bio-life-career-2019-8?r

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=US&IR=T. 4. “The Unicorn List: 13: WeWork,” Fortune, accessed July 9, 2023, https://fortune.com

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/ranking/unicorns/2016/wework/. 5. Sheryl Wudunn, “MEDIA; An Entrepreneurial Exception Rides the Internet in Japan,” New York Times, July 26, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999

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Human History?,” The Spectator, November 19, 2022, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/who-has-lost-the-most-money-in-human-history/. 9. Alex Konrad, “WeWork Confirms Massive $4.4 Billion Investment From SoftBank and Its Vision Fund,” Forbes, August 24, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2017/08/24

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/wework-confirms-massive-4-4-billion-investment-from-softbank-and-its-vision-fund/. 10. Amy Chozick, “Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up,” New York

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Times, November 2, 2019, updated May 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/02/business/adam-neumann-wework-exit-package.html. 11. Ibid. 12. Julie Bort and Meghan Morris, “Former Employees from WeWork Share Stories about Adam Neumann Running around Barefoot, Yelling at Employees, and Demanding Cases of Tequila,” Insider, September

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30, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-employees-share-stories-about-barefoot-adam-neumann-2019-9?r=US&IR=T

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. 13. Taylor Telford, “Adam Neumann’s Chaotic Energy Built WeWork. Now It Might Cost Him His Job as CEO,” Washington Post, September 23, 2019

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, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/09/23/adam-neumanns-chaotic-energy-built-wework-now-it-might-cost-him-his-job-ceo/. 14. Nguyen, “The

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Career Rise, Fall, and Return of Adam Neumann, the Controversial WeWork Cofounder Who Is Back with Another Real-Estate Startup.” 15. David Trainer

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, “WeWork Is the Most Ridiculous IPO of 2019,” Forbes, August 27, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/08

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/27/wework-is-the-most-ridiculous-ipo-of-2019/?sh=294fb4111ad6. 16. Chozick, “Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up

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.” 17. Ellen Huet, “WeWork Gave Founder Loans as It Paid Him Rent, IPO Filing Shows,” Bloomberg, August 14

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, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-14/wework-gave-founder-loans-as-it-paid-him-rent-ipo-filing-shows. 18. Chozick, “Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up.” 19. Eliot Brown, Maureen

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Farrell, and Anupreeta Das, “WeWork Co-Founder Has Cashed Out at Least $700 Million Via Sales, Loans,” Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles

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/wework-co-founder-has-cashed-out-at-least-700-million-from-the-company-11563481395. 20. Peter Eavis and Michael J. de la Merced, “WeWork I.P.O. Is Withdrawn as Investors Grow Wary,” New York Times, October 1

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, 2019, updated October 21, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/business/wework-ipo.html. 21. Eric Platt, “Adam Neumann’s $1.6bn

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WeWork Exit Package Could Get Sweeter,” Financial Times, December 24, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/eecf1f22-2332-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b

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. 22. George Hammond and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, “SoftBank and WeWork Co-Founder Adam Neumann Agree Divorce Deal,” Financial Times, May 27, 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/b0c047d0-6e7e-42c1-89c8-ee5f96d01a12. 23. Sergei Klebnikov

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, “WeWork Lays Off 2,400 Employees in Latest Round of Cost-Cutting,” Forbes, November 21, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2019/11/21/wework-lays-off-2400-employees-in-latest-round-of-cost-cutting/?sh=7bf6550c6b3b. 24

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. Ortenca Aliaj and George Hammond, “WeWork to Make Belated Arrival on Stock Market after Spac Merger,” Financial Times, October 19, 2021, https

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://www.ft.com/content/258121b8-299e-4993-91d9-cb2a18d387f4. 25. Pavel Alpeyev, “SoftBank’s Vision Fund Loses $17.7 Billion on WeWork, Uber,” Bloomberg, May 18, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/softbank-vision-fund-books-17-7-billion-loss-on

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-wework-uber. 26. Hyman P. Minsky, Induced Investment and Business Cycles (New York: Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, 2004); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The

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and, 153–54 surveillance programs, 57–58, 98–99 UK responses to, 45–46, 53–61, 155–57, 162–63 US responses to, 41–45 WeWork business model and, 112 worker loss of income and poverty, 60, 63, 98–99 zoonotic disease and, 68 creative destruction (Schumpeter), 86, 95, 96 Credit

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and, see taxes and taxation time lords of capitalism and, 109, 113–14 US dollar and, 178, 209–10 Washington Consensus policies, 200–201, 210 WeWork/SoftBank relationship, 109–13, 117 World Bank in, 176–77, 198–99, 206–8 International Labour Organization (ILO, UK), 60 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 53

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, 97, 98 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 145 Weber, Isabella, 65 Welch, Jack, 4 Wengrow, David, 224–25 We Own It (UK think tank), 254 WeWork, 109–13, 117 William III (King of England), 124–25 Williams, Roger, 42 Wood, Leonard, 174–75 worker ownership Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson program, 236–37

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global

by Rebecca Fannin  · 2 Sep 2019  · 269pp  · 70,543 words

US Companies Crack the China Code It’s the rare American internet company that has succeeded behind the Great Wall of China, but Starbucks, Airbnb, WeWork, and LinkedIn keep trying harder with digitally savvy strategies borrowed from China and localized teams. PART TWO China’s Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists A core

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China and can’t access Google. Few American tech companies have succeeded in China—the casualties include eBay, Groupon, Google, Facebook, and Pinterest. But Tesla, WeWork, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Starbucks, and others continue to push into the Middle Kingdom, with mixed success. IP Theft and Counterfeiting What could go wrong and derail

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US COMPANIES CRACK THE CHINA CODE It’s the rare American internet company that has succeeded behind the Great Wall of China, but Starbucks, Airbnb, WeWork, and LinkedIn keep trying harder with digitally savvy strategies borrowed from China and localized teams. In China’s large cities, Starbucks customers skip the line

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frontiers like Starbucks has is a formula that is working for a few other American tech standouts that have entered the Middle Kingdom: LinkedIn, Airbnb, WeWork, and Evernote. Many US tech companies have stumbled in China: Uber, eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon, Groupon, and the list goes on. The most prominent fumble was

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cluttered environment. •Be prepared for sudden rule changes in China. •Keep the long-term vision and perspective; don’t expect to go public tomorrow. WeWork and Naked Hub New York–based WeWork arrived in China in 2016 and jumped right into China’s booming office-share market, forming a stand-alone entity

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, WeWork China. What has worked exceedingly well for WeWork China is well-plotted acquisitions and steady, calculated expansion supported by megafunding. Within two years of plunging into

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the foreign market, WeWork bought Chinese coworking startup Naked Hub from Shanghai-based luxury resort

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operator Naked Group for a cool $400 million, a move that gave WeWork an immediate lift

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. WeWork scooped up 25 Naked Hub locations in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong to add to its own 13 spots in China. It didn’t take

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long for WeWork CEO Adam Neumann to take a lesson from Naked Hub’s operation in trendy Xintiandi, which was making bundles of money from renting office space

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on a flexible, come-as-you-like basis, with no monthly contract. WeWork quickly launched the feature as WeWork Go, which lets China-based customers check for open desks by mobile app, go to the location, and register by QR code. From

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there, the clock starts ticking—15 yuan per hour ($2.50) and double that rate for premium locations. WeWork China reportedly picked up 50,000 registered users in Shanghai after a three-month pilot of the hourly rate that compares with a monthly rental

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charge of $270. Founder Neumann is rolling out this pay-as-you-go feature in the United States, initially in Manhattan. WeWork has rebranded Naked Hubs in China, but it may be a while before the funky hip decor that’s popular with the locals is redone

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into WeWork’s trademark industrial black and white glass design. A Naked Hub location that I checked out in central Beijing even sports a swimming pool. My

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group, Silicon Dragon, has held tech venture events in both WeWork and Naked Hub locations in Shanghai—no complaints over the spacious and upbeat spaces but there were some surprises. A flagship location of

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WeWork at Weihai Lu, where we staged a program, is a former opium factory totally transformed into a stunning light-filled atrium surrounded by several levels

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control costs have recently vanished. One of the larger operators, Kr Space in Beijing, owned by China tech news site 36Kr, was racing to beat WeWork but has recently cut staff and scaled back ambitious expansion plans. Fresh funding is the difference between survival and closure. Deep-pocketed

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WeWork and its China subsidiary are loaded with new capital: WeWork China pulled in $500 million in 2018 led by SoftBank, a huge $4.4 billion investor in WeWork itself, on top of $500 million the year before. WeWork has covered China with 60 locations across a

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dozen megacities, adding to its global presence in 23 countries worldwide. WeWork’s recent rebranding as We Company signifies its new direction into social lifestyles and even residential rentals, an elementary school, and a coding academy, and

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this concept could be brought to China. But WeWork has its work cut out for it in China battling interlopers with big visions. WeWork sued a Chinese competitor, Beijing-based coworking outfit URWork, for trademark infringement, in a case settled in 2018

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his own company’s evolution from a typical coworking space into a technology platform. With its recently introduced UBazaar mobile app, which is similar to WeWork’s mobile app and Services Store, members can book desks and conference rooms, access content, e-commerce, financial advisory, and ads, plus get help with

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tech team to test a conceptual space in Beijing that Mao says will integrate these technologies and can operate without any management present. Like Starbucks, WeWork may find it tough to outmaneuver a clever Chinese challenger that is smartly integrating technology tools. Not Home Alone: Airbnb in China This being China

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.com/What-happened-to-Ushi-com-Ushi-cn-Does-it-still-exist. 9. “China’s Co-working King Ucommune Leverages Smart Tech to Compete with WeWork,” Silicon Dragon on YouTube, November 18, 2018; youtube.com/watch?v=yJj1DHZQOOo. 10. Chenyu Zheng, “Six Jaw-Dropping Airbnb Homes to Experience China,” Medium, September

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, 82, 168, 197 Weiner, Jeff, 105–106 Weixin, 41 Wei-Ying Ma, 89 Wei Zhou, 121, 134 WeLab, 170–171 WeReach, 170 WeWork, 15, 104, 111 WeWork China, 108–111 WeWork Go, 109 WhatsApp, 1, 43, 51 Whitman, Meg, 85 William Li, 200, 206 Williams, David, 52 Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati (WSGR

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following

by Gabrielle Bluestone  · 5 Apr 2021  · 329pp  · 100,162 words

short of a time period as possible. In that way, Billy was not unlike other start-up founders such as Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes or WeWork CEO Adam Neumann, both of whom also rode waves of hype to become rich and famous at the expense of their investors. But McFarland was

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, and drank tequila.” Incredibly, this line referred to neither McFarland nor Musk, who’s been trying to launch an alcohol line called “Teslaquila.” (It was WeWork’s Adam Neumann.) But back to Musk. He’s considered a genius because he made a bunch of money on PayPal and once shot a

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seems to mean is that there are no facts anymore—only gut feelings. “It is endemic, whether it’s Theranos or billion-dollar whales or WeWork or JetSmarter or Canadian cannabis or vegan influencers or Tesla or music or the rest,” sighed Wells on a recent phone call from his golf

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let me tell you something: I don’t think that’s true.” After waiting for the applause to die out, Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, continued his speech. “We will not stand by, and we will not lend our power to presidents, CEOs, ministers, or anybody—any leader—that does

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direction, that lies to us, that does not take care of us. No one is above the law,” Neumann said. Less than three years later, WeWork would be so broke that planned cost-saving layoffs actually had to be postponed because the company couldn’t afford to pay out the severance

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lifestyle brand,74 partied his way to fame and fortune, and sailed off into the sunset under a billion-dollar golden parachute while his precious WeWork burned behind him. Like McFarland and Musk, Neumann hadn’t always been that way. Raised on a kibbutz, Neumann had tried his hand at respectable

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his equity partners and the guy that was fronting the building,” Wells said. “He sold that company, exited, took that cash, and then individually restarted WeWork the next day. And then he owned 100 percent of the cap table. And then just can fly around the world on a G650 espousing

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platitudes without really doing anything and creating anything.” Neumann’s real business was convincing the world that WeWork was a game-changing idea. Tall, affable, and celebrity-adjacent (his wife happens to be Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin), Neumann could have been Billy McFarland

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people working for him heard a revolution. And because he framed his business as a tech company, with planned housing developments, schools, and even a WeWork on Mars (where Musk plans on landing by 2026), his valuations soared. And his devoted employees probably would have followed him there too. After closing

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safety gear, and dared them all to drink out of an old beer bottle he’d found on the ground. Two out of the three WeWork employees took sips, the third told the New York Times.76 But perhaps Neumann’s greatest trick of all was his preternatural ability to profit

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personally from WeWork. Using his own private funds, he’d buy buildings and then lease them to his company. In 2019, he personally trademarked the word We and

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then sold it to WeWork for almost $6 million, although he later returned the money after a public outcry.77 He didn’t even try to pretend any of the

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money was linked to WeWork’s proprietary tech or real-estate holdings, which were intentionally slim—most of WeWork’s branded properties were actually just subleases, an untenable business plan. Instead, he explained in 2017

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, WeWork’s “valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.” “That business never

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tech element to it, and he owned none of his real estate and somehow was going to make money subleasing all this stuff.” In fact, WeWork’s valuation and size were almost entirely due to a different man entirely: the Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank who also happens

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he did, and of course he was trying to go raise the second Vision Fund off of the strength of the markup and valuations at WeWork that he was providing in order for a justification to go raise another fund. It was never going to work.” The coronavirus ultimately gave Son

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disarray.”86 By then, the company had relocated to a new clubhouse at the Hotel on Rivington, with office space for employees at a nearby WeWork. And McFarland had all but checked out for his new venture, Fyre. “[Billy] was rarely in the Magnises office at all, but the general feeling

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fighting to hold on to their slice of the industry. And the ghost-kitchen business is so lucrative that there’s even a sort of WeWork for ghost chefs now—Creating Culinary Communities—which matches the virtual brands with vacant spaces. But you don’t need venture capital to make innocent

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Kansas, on the other hand, weren’t pleased at all to see how easily their restaurant popped up on DoorDash, another start-up funded by WeWork’s main benefactor, SoftBank. AJ’s, which didn’t offer delivery, was initially confused by a series of calls from customers complaining about cold orders

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the monthly agency fees, artist payments, and production invoices Fyre was now paying out, Fyre Media’s team in New York had moved from a WeWork to a flashy $30,000-per-month, three-story office space on Lispenard Street in Tribeca. “They had an office in Tribeca that they paid

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-Sol when he’s not serving as the CEO of Goldman Sachs—a company infamous for pumping and dumping investments with businesses like Uber and WeWork—and betting against his own clients. And to promote the concert, FuckJerry tapped Danielle Bernstein (also a JAJA investor) as spokesperson. But when it came

…

Court, Southern District of New York, 17-CR-00600-NRB and 18-CR-00446-JMF," letter submitted to court, August 20, 2018. 74. Alex Sherman, "WeWork’s $47 Billion Valuation Was Always a Fiction Created by SoftBank," CNBC, October 22, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/22

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/wework-47-billion-valuation-softbank-fiction.html. 75. Adam Neumann, Baruch College Commencement 2017. Speech, Baruch College, New York, NY, June 12, 2017. 76. Kevin Roose, "

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and Unbroke My Brain," New York Times, February 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/business/cell-phone-addiction.html. 77. Ben Gilbert, "WeWork Paid Its Own CEO $5.9 Million to Use the Name ‘We,’ But Now He’s Giving It Back After the Deal was Criticized," Business

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Insider, September 4, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-ceo-gives-back-millions-from-we-trademark-after-criticism-2019-9. 78. Amy Chozick, "Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up," New York Times

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, November 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/02/business/adam-neumann-wework-exit-package.html. Chapter 2: Fake It Till You Make It 79. Jennifer Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, Fyre Fraud (Santa Monica, CA: Hulu, 2019

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future

by Noreena Hertz  · 13 May 2020  · 506pp  · 133,134 words

. I’m referring here to the rise in commercial co-working spaces, companies with names like CommonGrounds, Work.Life, Convene, Second Home and, of course, WeWork, which at its peak had over 280 locations spread across eighty-six cities, and over 4 million square metres in real estate.45 Alongside their

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venues, ping-pong tables, free-flowing ales on tap and micro-roasted coffee, these businesses wield the promise of community like a sword. Indeed, in WeWork’s failed IPO prospectus (the filing a disaster not because of its core premise but because of revelations of profligate spending, erratic decision-making and

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can of toxic pesticide? To date the picture has been mixed. For some, they do seem to be making life less lonely. ‘I would consider WeWork and co-working spaces the best thing to ever happen to my social life,’ reported a freelance web developer. When he worked from home, he

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himself feeling tired and getting sick more often – exactly what we’d expect, given what we know about physical health and loneliness.52 But at WeWork, he says he ‘went from a rather introverted person to being quite extroverted and growing emotionally’.53 Others have had similar experiences. Daniel, a software

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engineer and expat who worked at a WeWork in Paris for a year and a half, credits his co-working experience with sparking a number of real-life, non-work friendships. ‘When you

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-economy worker who combines being a virtual personal assistant with social media management, recounted how alone she felt on a typical day in WeWork Barcelona: ‘I walk into the WeWork and there’s around six people spread across the floor, sitting as far away as possible from one another with headphones on

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paths with them at the coffee machine trying to figure out how the damn thing works.’ Amber’s experience reminded me of when I visited WeWork’s flagship space in Tel Aviv and saw a line of people queuing up for free malabi, a rosewater milk pudding common in the Middle

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with Eloise’, and ‘Drawn Together’ where one volunteer at a time is the sitter, posing in front of their webcam whilst everyone else draws. At WeWork, a senior executive proudly detailed all the attention that’s put into maximising interaction, even down to the layout of the staircases and corridors which

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community would be stronger? Part of the problem, too, is how a number of these companies define community. Take NomadWorks, the also supposedly ‘community-centric’ WeWork competitor – it explicitly lists ‘networking events’ among its membership amenities.65 And when I asked a senior executive at

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WeWork how they knew they were delivering when it comes to community, his ‘proof’, tellingly, was how many successful ‘transactions’ members had completed with one another.

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Specifically, he told me, they measured how many WeWork members had bought something from another member at least once as a proxy for how strong the community was. Those renting space there have noticed

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the inherent contradiction in this decidedly neoliberal framing. James, who worked in WeWork’s London Moorgate building, a glass-windowed behemoth whose loos have ‘Hustle Harder’ stencilled on the wall, described his experience there as such: ‘people are

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’s annual turnover rate is, for example, 50%.68 And whilst turnover at co-working spaces is harder to calculate – after all, a membership at WeWork buys you access to offices all over the world – any place with a majority of hot desks will inevitably be ‘an environment whose most defining

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you are in your community, the less likely you are to participate in it. By actively selling flexibility and fluidity as part of the offering, WeWork and other such spaces lower the odds of members and residents seeing the community as theirs and actively investing in it. Indeed, if one thinks

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date has been such that it’s typically only high-earning white-collar professionals who can afford them. At the beginning of 2020, for example, WeWork’s lowest-tier hot-desk membership cost between £200 and £600 a month in London and up to $600 a month in San Francisco. That

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://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2017/02/13/blogs/the-worlds-best-photo/s/13-lens-WPress-slide-JSQ0.html. 45 Keiko Morris and Elliot Brown, ‘WeWork Surpasses JPMorgan as Biggest Occupier of Manhattan Office Space,’ Wall Street Journal, September 18 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles

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/wework-surpasses-jpmorgan-as-biggest-occupier-of-manhattan-office-space-1537268401; ‘WeWork Locations,’ archived November 2017, https://www.wework.com/locations. 46 ‘The We Company’, United States Securities and Exchange Commission, 14 August 2019, https://www

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, https://thehappycity.com/resources/happy-homes/doing-things-together-principle/. 68 Oliver Smith, ‘Exclusive: Britain’s Co-living King Has Raised $400m To Take On WeWork In America’, Forbes, 27 March 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliversmith/2018/03/27/exclusive-britains-co-living-king-has-raised-400m-to-take

…

-on-wework-in-america/. 69 Brad Eisenberg, ‘Why is WeWork so popular?’, Medium, 15 July 2017, https://medium.com/@eisen.brad/why-is-wework-so-popular-934b07736cae. 70 Hannah Foulds, ‘Co-Living Spaces: Modern Utopia Or Over-Organised Hell

…

Washington D.C. here, here Washington Post here Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) here wellbeing measurements here Westbourne Place complex here Westlund, Jacqueline Kory here WeWork here, here Wikihow here Wilders, Geert here Wordsworth, Dora here work see also economics changes in as cause of loneliness here prevalence of loneliness at

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader

by Colin Lancaster  · 3 May 2021  · 245pp  · 75,397 words

are sitting at our normal table in the restaurant, waiting for the food to arrive. A headline has just hit on WeWork, and all of us are checking our phones. WeWork is run by a guy named Adam Neumann, and its largest shareholder is a company called SoftBank, run by Masayoshi Son

…

$70 billion, the most money lost in stock market history, during the dotcom bust. He’s back at it again and swinging for the fences. WeWork is his new crown jewel and is considered one of the unicorns. Unicorns are high-flying growth companies with valuations in excess of $1 billion

…

that don’t actually make any money. No shit. They have no earnings. You see stuff like that in a ten-year bull market. But WeWork is a special case. They got greedy. They tried to monetize too quickly and wanted to do an IPO and go public. This forced them

…

to provide transparency in their business records and their problems, all for the world to see, in massive footnotes in tiny font. Unfortunately for WeWork, when a company wants to go public, there are analysts whose sole focus and pay depends on doing a deep dive into these records and

…

show. Jerry has been obsessed with Neumann. He stalks the guy over the Internet. “Hey, Boss, you think Masa Son is going to bail out WeWork?” Jerry doesn’t understand how a company raises $14 billion over nine years and rents more office space in Manhattan than anyone else, but still

…

empty, because I was too distracted by my phone. “It’s a shitty business model. They’ve never made money.” He’s right on this. WeWork lost ninety million bucks in Q1 of 2016 and has continued to lose money ever since. When the Rabbi is talking, everyone is pin-drop

…

also blown a great opportunity. Besides winning a World Cup, they haven’t done much, except, of course, default on their debt. The Argentines make WeWork look prudent. They’re defaulting machines, eight fucking times in total, almost nine. It’s really bad when you’re defaulting in a ten-year

…

, but stuff like airlines and hotels will really get killed.” He goes on: “Shit, I’m beating a dead horse here, but think about SoftBank. WeWork and Oyo will both be dead.” I begin to push the team harder. “Are markets over-reacting? Are we over-reacting?” I stand up for

…

nibbling at growth: trade wars, Chinese deleveraging, the European debt crisis … Fuck, how about all of the other signs: inverted yield curves, the repo markets, WeWork, and all the other bubble indicators? Maybe this is the one that finally tips us over. This might be the big one. And the Fed

…

bias is beginning to pay off. We need to keep pushing. Killer instinct. Take maximum advantage of our position. “Mayo San pulled the plug on WeWork.” This pops up on my chat from Elias. “News?” I type. He calls. “They backed out of the share purchase. That means that SoftBank can

…

walk from the $1.1 billion in debt financing.” “Ouch. Sounds like lights out.” “Yeah, total shit show.” I look at the news story. WeWork posted a $1.25 billion loss for the quarter—and that was before the coronavirus hit. * I’m writing an email to the organizer of

…

time to get really greedy. The Rabbi pings me on Zoom. The chat comes through in rapid-fire succession. “You there?” “Want to buy some WeWork bonds?” “They’re yielding just under 40%.” “Trading at 35 cents on the dollar.” “The market expects them to default soon.” “Dealers have supply.” “Someone

…

’s talking about more layoffs. SoftBank reports and announces its worst annual performance in its history. It had an $8.4 billion loss, led by WeWork. Retail sales hits. Down almost 9%, the largest decline ever, a superlative statement that will undoubtedly be bludgeoned to death as this cycle of economic

…

recent fiscal year, triggering the worst loss ever for the Japanese company. SoftBank had to write down the valuations of the big unicorns it owned. WeWork’s value has fallen by 95% this year. Masa Son concedes he’s unlikely to draw outside investors for another Vision Fund, an initiative he

…

something to be proud of,” he says. “If the results are bad, you can’t raise money from investors. Things aren’t good.” Neumann, the WeWork CEO whom Jerry liked to stalk, will be keeping busy with his lawsuit against SoftBank. He sued the bank for scrapping the bailout, which had

…

included a plan to buy $3 billion worth of stock from Neumann and other shareholders. But the bank scrapped the deal, claiming WeWork hadn’t met the conditions of the contract and citing legal inquiries by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the SEC. According to The

…

Guardian newspaper, reporting on this latest lawsuit, “Mr. Neumann put his trust in [SoftBank and SoftBank’s Vision Fund] to be stewards of WeWork, which he and thousands of others had worked so hard to build,” only to be met with “brazen” abuses. It just goes to show that

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