
Is This the Office of the Future or a $5B Waste of Space? - kvcc01
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-05-21/wework-real-estate-empire-or-shared-office-space-for-a-new-era-
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cmsmith
>Many traditional real estate investors are perplexed by WeWork’s $5 billion
valuation. With that kind of money, you could build the world’s most expensive
skyscraper—One World Trade Center, which at 3 million square feet has roughly
the same cumulative amount of office space as WeWork—and still have $1 billion
left over.

I'm as dismissive of ridiculous startup valuations as anyone, but this seemed
like a weird way to evaluate whether their value was justified.

For reference, here are a couple of other similar statistics:

* There are about 250M Apple devices in use (100M/yr * 2.5 yr lifespan). At 750B market cap, they're worth $3000 per i____ out there, or enough to buy every one of their users an iPhone and still have $500B left over.

* There are about 200,000 active Uber drivers, and they're valued at $50B. That's $300,000 per driver, or enough to buy every one of their drivers a Tesla and still have $40B left over.

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notahacker
Isn't the point that unlike high-end manufacturing or online marketplace
technology, real estate is a commodity business with competition based on
location and fit rather than brand, and owning the assets is where the safest
profit is? ($5bn worth of real estate certainly holds its value better than
$50bn worth of latest generation Teslas.)

I'd think comparing WeWork - a mid-sized player in a highly competitive
workspace space - with the dominance of Apple and Uber is a little fanciful
too. As the article points out, Regus (and the Workspace Group, and others)
have been doing the same thing successfully on a larger scale for much longer,
actually own many of their assets and yet still have smaller market caps. I'm
not sure that beer on tap is that much of a defensible business model
differentiator for WeWork...

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Beached
I work from home... Its much nicer then that place, I dont have noisy people
running around and talking on the phones all day, unlimited food and drinks
all day, and i get to keep my stuff laying out on the desk without fear of it
getting stolen or messed with!

I never understood why people who can choose to work from anywhere, choose to
pay a monthly commitment to go to a co working space, instead of choosing to
work in a low cost area where there money can go SO much farther.

As a mobile startup, you can opt to live outside of a major city being able to
leech talent from the talent hub, and make your money go SO much farther.

~~~
krisdol
I get depressed cabin-fevery if I spend many days working from home. Going to
a cafe, outdoors, or any change of scenery generally helps. I think part of it
is that I've officially married my relaxing escape from the office with all
the bad features of the office, and that takes a mental toll after a while.

I know others that do, but salaried or not, I'm a 9-5er and I don't degrade my
hourly rate by putting in extra hours unless they're absolutely necessary for
an infrequent crunch. For me, seeing colleagues that put in 15 hour days at
soulless BigCo detracts significantly from the bigger salaries they may be
getting.

Making my home the office is no different from making the office my home, as
makes it feel like I never mentally stop working.

Plus they have better chairs and internet than I'd care to buy

~~~
Beached
"Making my home the office is no different from making the office my home, as
makes it feel like I never mentally stop working."

How quotable, I found it hard to separate work and home while working at home,
took me a year to get it right, but after 1 year of doing so, I've found a few
tricks and with a bit of discipline, I have been able to completely build a
wall between work and home even though they are the same place. I will say it
wouldn't have been possible if my boss didn't also work from home and
encourage it. If my boss expected me to keep up with emails and phone calls
after 5:30pm, I would probably hate the home office.

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mattchamb
The thing that struck me about the first picture was how uncomfortable the
chairs looked. Why would they spend so much on decorative lighting and neglect
the parts that are essential for prolonged productivity?

~~~
Cthulhu_
I'm assuming it's because whoever's sitting there only does so for relatively
short amounts of time - an hour, tops.

Then again, maybe the younger generation evolved to be able to sit
uncomfortably for a long work day, ;p

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sneak
I can't be the only one who's tired of the USA's alcohol-drenched startup
culture.

In the first four paragraphs:

keg, keg, beer, bar, tap, bar, pub, microbrews, tap, happy hour, tequila,
margaritas, "90,000 glasses of beer".

~~~
nonamemanemo
Don't worry, you aren't the only one. I long to be transported to a time or
place where humans weren't so accepting... no, seeking such blatant disrespect
to their personal dignity and craft.

It seems to be one facet of a theme of infantilization and youth glorification
in work culture and society at large. I am not sure whether it has any
relationship with the rise of the "social" plague in industry, and the
widespread infiltration of VC onto college campuses (and now elementary school
playgrounds), where the youth are increasingly primed for dependency through
the advertising and systematic denial of experiences.

Offices for adults these days are becoming more like playgrounds, and
playgrounds for kids are becoming more like jails. I can't understand all the
psychodynamics at play, but something is clearly broken with the way we treat
our youth and our narrowly defined notions of "fun".

Work culture is not about the worker or the work anymore, it is about creating
an interdependent unit of labor. But if neither the quality of work nor the
quality of life for the worker is emphasized, I am not sure what the purpose
is besides to maintain social order.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
> playgrounds for kids are becoming more like jails

The solution to this problem is to revolt. Stop taking your kids to the
playground. Get them helmets and a kickbike and go to the local skateboard
park. Go out hiking with them, even if it's just 300 yards in a park. Run on
the beach. Let them eat the sand. Give them proper rain clothing and boots so
they can jump in puddles for hours on end. Teach them that there is no bad
weather, just bad clothing. Show them how a socket wrench works. Let them
"help" whenever you're doing something, if it's cooking or cleaning or
repairing stuff or whatever. And for gods sake don't buy them a tablet.

DISCLAIMER: said activities may require physical exercise and actual
parenting.

~~~
sneak
Without a tablet, how are they going to read the schematics to meaningfully
help with projects?

~~~
semi-extrinsic
It's never too early to teach your kids about the numerous advantages of
schematics printed on dead trees.

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mc32
I think there is space for everything and they will be one of the kinds of
office solutions, but not the solution.

Neither everyone nor every job is optimized for close proximity with others.
Nor does everyone want to extend the dormitory study room culture indefinitely
into adulthood. I think this kind of space works for some job types and
industries, but definitely I do not see it as the one future for all office
spaces.

But congratulations on trying to make this popular and succeeding so far. The
more choice the better.

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tikhonj
At first, WeWork really did sound like little more than a large, consolidated
chain of coworking spaces. The way the article is laid out, you first read
that description and then read the founder's breathless claims of how they're
not just another real estate firm. But with a crazy valuation!

So you take all that with a grain of salt. Founders are always talking about
how they're doing something completely novel and groundbreaking, even if
they're not.

And then you hit some _little details_ : "…valuable benefits like access to a
group health insurance plan…". In the US that is a _big thing_. If they're
offering group health insurance, they really aren't just another real estate
company!

In fact, I'm pretty enthusiastic about the idea now. I've always thought that
many of the benefits offered by large corporations did not have to be tied to
a single monolithic entity. Nothing about well-managed office space, group
health insurance and shared infrastructure is inexorably tied to having a top
down autocratic organization, but historically it has been.

Wouldn't it be cool if somebody supplied the same infrastructure not to
business teams in a rigid hierarchy but to a loosely federated network of
startups and freelancers?

Looks like exactly what WeWork is offering.

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joslin01
I work in WeWork and love it. It's a great atmosphere and can be inspiring to
look around and feel the young, vibrant energy. That's a bad title though; it
certainly isn't a waste of space and the article never even seemed to allude
to it being a waste of space.

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varelse
I want my 8x8 cube back...

The current 5x5 feet of open office space I have has led me to mostly work
from home.

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sneak
However, I do think the small studio + co-located coworking space is a winning
concept. Bundle in things like laundry service and perhaps catering (everyone
needs food, not everyone needs alcohol) or even just Soylent/Jakeshake, and
it's starting to be a pretty useful value-add, editing out all of the generic
day to day tasks that suck up one's only nonrenewable resource.

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kvcc01
I think this was a fine article with a terrible title.

I worked out of WeWork’s SoHo office in NYC for a while and was pleased with
the details they got right to make themselves attractive to startups (no pesky
sales team, short notice to cancel, no nickel and diming on Wi-Fi, printers,
etc.).

Before WeWork, I also worked in a Regus office (their competitor mentioned in
the article) and they managed to get all the same things wrong. Perhaps they
have adapted since. I’m unaffiliated with either company but wish WeWork well.
It was a fun vibe they cultivated and everyone seemed to enjoy working there.

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petercooper
Despite being (at the time of writing) 2 hours old with 26 points, this story
has crashed from the front page to position 103? An intriguingly fast fall..

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kvcc01
I was curious about that myself (for the obvious reason :) I presume some of
the deeply nested comments tripped a flamewar detector, and the ranking
cratered thereafter. (I remember reading somewhere about the nesting level
being used as a post quality indicator.)

~~~
petercooper
Well thanks for posting it anyway, I found it an enjoyable read :)

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cyphunk
WeWank™ CoWanking™ spaces inbetween the mostly empty airbnb housing projects
that you shuffle between with uber, all coming to a city near you.

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stephengillie
Did anyone else find the article illegible? I struggled to read the white-on-
black text for several minutes. After closing the article I struggled to be
able to read HN.

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mempko
| Neumann says, while jettisoning the socialist part. “On the one hand,
community. On the other hand, you eat what you kill.”

Neumann doesn't understand what socialism is.

