The Spectacular Rise and Fall of WeWork

When a business talks about its special energy and bringing people together, run like hell.

It's not a tech company, wework is just a building rental, but people want it to have returns like internet companies that is just not possible.

"You can't run a business without an adult saying no" I LOVED that sentence. In Egypt, we have a proverb : He, who lacks an adult supervisor, must go and buy himself one.

This is the last thing the reeling real estate market needs right now, as an Air BnB investor i think due to the similar mode of operation like WeWork, we might soon be run off the market. Essentially why i'm at large for exit measures or where to allocate $1m

when someone describes their company as a "family," that's your cue to leave

Is this a "tech company" because people are sitting around using laptops? By that measure, perhaps Starbucks is a tech company....

I can't believe that the Bloomberg piece didn't mention it and I've seen a lot of the comments here don't get it either. The reason WeWork failed is because they were renters themselves . They basically didn't own any of the spaces that they were at. It had such a spectacular failure because there's no assets, no buildings, no real estate, nothing. The chart in the video comparing to IWG is completely misleading because if you were to compare the owned real estate square footage, WeWork would be zero while IWG does own some of it's buildings.

It's great to have optimists. They get people moving. But in a company, you also need the realists to stop those people from moving too far and fall off a cliff.

It was bound to fail. A real estate company being valued as if it was a silicon valley tech start up.

Running a real estate company like a tech one is stupid. Having an app doesn't make it a tech company.

"Let's make everything happen faster with more money" Ah... the classic corporate absurdity. If one woman can carry a child in 9 months, lets get 9 women in here and do it in a month!

The guy who says "I thought I'd give you a tour of where wework" and repeating the joke twice kinda sums up the whole company to me. Like people who thought something that was mediocre was really profound

Sounds like it is just a office space rental company to me, with lots of bs and exaggeration

More content like this Bloomberg. Thoroughly enjoyed this style and topic. Kinda like Vox's "explained" but with business.

This wasn’t a tech company, it was a renting space to put it simply. They got way too much cash than they knew what to do with basically.

My company still uses WeWork, which is incredible through the whole crumble and covid era. Office space is nice, pantry is always interesting. Their biggest problem is that people overvalued them as the next frontier or something.

I've really liked this simple line to sum things up "WeWork was a real estate company being valued as if it were a tech company". Expecting exponential growth with software isn't too crazy; expecting exponential growth from real estate is.

"when you don't earn your money you don't respect it" is what I hear people say.

Key lesson: there is a difference between raising money and making money.

I'm surprised that WeWork didn't just make a bid for IWG with all the cash they were getting at such a lofty valuation. They would have more than doubled their footprint overnight and acquired a profitable business. With so many bankers on the cap table I'm surprised they never thought of it.