
The WeWork story is so bizarre we can’t even get outraged about it - elorant
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-wework-story-is-so-bizarre-we-cant-even-get-outraged-about-it/2019/10/25/85774d58-f743-11e9-ad8b-85e2aa00b5ce_story.html
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Traster
Ok, I'm done talking about WeWork from a business perspective. Let's move on
to something more interesting. One of the things that I think we need to start
thinking about is the concept of implied preference.

Until now, co-working spaces have been open-plan, with large amounts of glass
and no sound-deadening. All of these features are things that we all assumed
were a revolution. WeWork had all these things, WeWork was hugely successful,
so we had our revealed preference. No matter what you might say, it turns out
you want to work in a noisy office with no privacy and free craft beer.

I've heard no end of people who _personally_ dislike that, yet it's the
standard that every 'successful' coworking space has. I'd like to consider the
idea that all of these things are actually (contrary to popular opinion)
_terrible_ and the reason people were putting up with them was because WeWork
was selling office space for 50 cents on the dollar.

The result we've seen in the market, is obviously you and I can't go out and
sell office space for 50 cents on the dollar. So instead we follow the
signalling- we all start companies renting out glass offices with no sound-
deadening and craft beer. We're optimising for the wrong thing. We're looking
at WeWork thinking they revolutionized the experience, but actually they
didn't.

So what does this all mean? Well what if the companies that are trying to
compete with WeWork catch on to the truth behind this. Start breaking up the
spaces for more privacy, more quiet space, less craft beer and more
productivity. If people take the right lesson from this we could end up with
spaces that are actually optimized to what office workers want, rather than
forcing everyone to work in the equivalent of a busy starbucks simply because
that's what we learned from WeWork.

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api
I can't wrap my head around beer at work. Zero productivity for the most part,
though I have rarely experienced the Ballmer peak in the domain of bug fixing.

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matthewmacleod
One of my previous employers was based in a WeWork for a bit. The beer was
something we took advantage of once every couple of weeks, having a pint or
two after work. It was nice to have easily available beer and a bit of free
space without the effort of having to plan or organise anything more formal,
particularly in a city where every pub is absolutely rammed in the evening. No
productivity compromise whatsoever.

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code4tee
Setting aside the dumpster fire that was WeWork’s business model, the product
was just fundamentally not that good. In cities where competitors popped up
WeWorks were often the bottom of the market in terms of places one actually
wanted to work.

Sure the places looked hipper and more modern than previous iterations of
coworking, but it was just generally an unpleasant place to work. It was very
difficult to get any actual work done.

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valenciarose
The intersection of the sunk cost fallacy and super-voting shares are the root
of this ridiculousness. There's nothing unique about Neumann. Charlatans like
him are everywhere.

What's interesting about this case is that both labor and capital were screwed
by the willingness of an investor to accept the existence super-voting share
with an extreme ratio.

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perl4ever
I think Matt Levine made a good point, whether or not he was being serious -
regardless of what you think of Neumann ethically, he, like an effective
short-seller, provided valuable information to the market in the process of
profiting for himself. The outcome seems to be that (a) WeWork is no longer
going to waste money like it was, and (b) other investors and businesses may
be deterred from following in their footsteps. The loss in purported market
value is just the difference between the dreams of mania and their deflation.

As they say, if you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a terrible
warning.

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ncmncm
I wonder what the CEO knows, that it took that much money to keep him quiet.

~~~
omosubi
I think he knew it was a dumpster fire, but regardless, SoftBank had to pay
him to give up his shares if they wanted control of the company

