
How Adam Neumann’s Over-the-Top Style Built WeWork - ericzawo
https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-is-not-the-way-everybody-behaves-how-adam-neumanns-over-the-top-style-built-wework-11568823827?mod=rsswn
======
anonweworker
Can I just point out that I called this a year ago?

BTW, I quit not long after posting this.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18018942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18018942)

> (regular HNer here, posting anonymously for obvious reasons). I work for
> WeWork, and you don't know the half of it. In mid-August WeWork had their
> "Summer Camp" event, which was a three day all-hands company meeting in
> England. About 5500 of 7000 WeWork employees were flown into Heathrow and
> shipped out to a campground in Tunbridge Wells. Everyone was required to
> sleep in a tent, generally with four or five other tent mates, on air
> mattresses on the ground with thin mattresses.

Because of the vegetarianism thing, everyone was forced to eat WeWork-provided
food, sans meat (though fish is okay!). This totally broke my ketogenic diet,
which made me quite mad. See other comments about this being a form of group
control.

For the first day and a half, we were subjected to a number of corporate
"talks" which largely revolved around the cult of personalities of Adam
Neumann and Miguel McKelvey. Adam Neumann particularly styles himself a
televangelis or Jesus-wannabe and walks out into the audience, asking people
about their deepest fears, delivering some ersatz corprorate sermon on the
mount. There is no "me", only "we".

See also the time when Rebecca Neumann commands the gathered WeWorkers to hold
hands, close their eyes, and pray.

Or the time that Deepak Chopra comes out and shows a disturbing video about
childbirth (people were like, "is this an anti-abortion video?) and talks
about how evolution and child development are intimately related, and how we
should take our shoes off to let the ions flow, and leads a meditation
session.

A fish rots from the head down, and this is one crazy fish.

~~~
mattmar96
Glad you made it out

------
vincent-toups
Can't say that this is surprising, given the startup types I have worked with
in the past.

[EDIT] I want to elaborate on this, actually. Rewards are good incentives
until they become so large that they eclipse the value of the thing one is
working on. At that point, you no longer attract people who want to accomplish
things for their own sake or who even think they know how. With a large enough
reward, what you attract are assholes who want rewards.

I hope we figure this problem out before people like this drive our whole
civilization/planet off a cliff because they want to be rich. You'd think it
would be obvious, and I think it is to many of us. But there are enough of
these reward seekers and the rewards are big enough that they dominate the
scene.

~~~
vincent-toups
Further elaboration: a financial award is a great way to tempt an innovator
out of their risk adverseness: it says, you can quit your job or whatever and
not risk much if your innovation is valuable.

The ideal startup person is someone who already has the idea and knows its
good but doesn't want to take the risk without some kind of reward to justify
it.

But if the rewards get big enough, you get reward seekers without any
fundamental idea who are just going to sit around trying to come up with them
until they find one someone is going to bite on.

These two populations of people are totally different and only one of them
actually cares about the product or making the world a better place.

~~~
tryitnow
I am actually pretty skeptical of financial rewards, I think after a certain
point they are far better at attracting the wrong type of person.

Of course, that leaves us with the question of how to attract productive
innovators. I don't know. I'd probably lean toward some combination of
restrained capitalism + massive subsidies to talented technical people +
prizes for innovation.

------
VladimirIvanov
"Both Neumanns could be impulsive at times, former executives say. Ms. Neumann
has ordered multiple employees fired after meeting them for just minutes,
telling staff she didn’t like their energy. She and Mr. Neumann have sent
maintenance and IT staff to their homes to fix various items."

This really bothers me. I know that if I was at WeWork I would probably be
fired for "bad energy" because it would be obvious that I was just working at
a job and not part of the WeWork cult.

------
tempsy
As crazy as it sounds, after having worked at a few high-profile startups/tech
cos it's not as easy as it looks to find a co where the CEO/founder is not an
eccentric billionaire or multi-millionaire.

~~~
filmgirlcw
For high-profile places, you're not wrong. And it isn't just tech (though I
think tech has its own special set of eccentricities), finance, Hollywood,
fashion, media, transportation, the restaurant industry, food and beverage --
the places that become high-profile (which is not the same thing as
successful), are usually helmed early on or during that success by someone
eccentric.

Most of the time, the person isn't even a millionaire or billionaire when the
company starts/grows -- but even at the very early stages, there is something
different and slightly batshit about them.

And speaking from personal experience as someone who has also worked at high-
profile startups (some very early stage), that's kind of part of the appeal.
An audacious leader can be charismatic and compelling. And then once you're
"in it" you start to normalize the increasingly batshit stuff you see, writing
it off as "that's just X being X" \-- which can often be unhealthy because
with no accountability, things can go from "eccentric/audacious but ultimately
helpful" to "this is insanity and is harming more than it is helping."

~~~
rlucas
I call it "weird results require weird behavior."

Two problems tend to arise from it:

1\. Ex ante, people who don't understand it think that just by being weird,
they will have exceptional (weirdly good) results. So they are libertine or
uncivil and that alone doesn't drive anything useful.

2\. Ex post, people who achieved highly attribute the success to the
weirdness, and take it as extra license to let the id flow free.

In fact, my belief is that a good bit of weirdness both causes and is the
effect of some other qualities that in turn correlate with success: obsessive
knowledge of a domain, obsessive levels of effort, single-mindedness, manic
level charisma, inordinate confidence (itself charismatic), and willingness to
be contrarian / unorthodox.

But man is it annoying when people are just assholes and wave it off blithely
as coming with the territory.

------
sharadov
Sounds like another Elizabeth Holmes to me. What's surprising is that these
snake oil sellers have made it so far? Are investors so stupid? Are they so
detached from reality? Whatever happened to due financial diligence?

~~~
simplicio
To be fair, you can actually give money to WeWork and get some office space.
They seem massively over-valued, and investors seem weirdly OK with Neumanns
using self-dealing to feather his own nest, but its, like a real company with
an actual business model, and so far as I can tell, they aren't really making
objective lies to investors to get them to hand over crazy amounts of cash.

On the other hand, no could ever actually buy an "Edison" blood test machine
from Theranos. They were purely a fraud.

I guess its sort of an interesting question about wheter it looks worse to
lose money investing in a billion dollar product that would legitimately be
worth billions but doesn't exist, or one that does exist but isn't worth
billions.

~~~
Analemma_
> and investors seem weirdly OK with Neumanns using self-dealing to feather
> his own nest

Well, sort of. The fact that this IPO has apparently attracted so little
interest that it's getting pushed back or canned entirely tells me investors
_aren 't_ OK with it. It's more like "SoftBank seems weirdly OK with it", and
this fiasco is going to cost them so much money that I have a feeling they
won't be so lenient with the next set of founders.

~~~
ToFundorNot
Even Softbank wasn't okay, they did one round, but they then reduced their
most recent round from 14b to 2b

source: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/for-softbank-no-
majority-s...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/for-softbank-no-majority-
stake-in-wework-as-it-scales-down-talks-from-a-new-16-billion-investment-
to-2-billion/)

~~~
elliekelly
I know the Vision Fund is massive but the fact that SoftBank was even
considering having _one_ fund make a $16 _billion_ investment in _one_ company
is insanity to me.

------
yalogin
Looks like this guy is the new Travis Kalanick. I don't know anything about
WeWork or the CEO but its interesting that the personality of the CEO is what
is causing grief for the company which the individual was instrumental in
building.

~~~
alephnan
Was Travis Kalanick involved in these kinds of self-dealing?

------
ArtWomb
On the off chance that some WeWorkers are reading this. My #1 request is for
24/7 hot desk availability. The 9am-6pm hours aren't working for me. Something
like one credit per six hour block would be ideal. Often I don't even get
started on deep work until after five o'clock ;)

I love the culture. And anecdotally at least, the method clearly attracts
talented designers and developers outside the pale. Concentrating creative
folks together. Fomenting spontaneous frissons at the various bagel
breakfasts. Or around the tap at quitting time. I find it a welcome antidote
to pre-packaged and polished corporatism ;)

~~~
frabbit
On the off-chance that some WeWorkers are reading this, the only way I could
be persuaded to share a space with someone who foments spontaneous frissons at
bagel breakfasts is if you also supply high-powered Nerf guns.

------
evanwarfel
> One day, he proposed, the company could “solve the problem of children
> without parents,” and from there go onto other causes such as eradicating
> world hunger.

>Mr. Neumann has told several people over the past two years that a personal
goal is to become the world’s first trillionaire.

Am I the only person to think these two ambitions may be somewhat at odds? Or
rather, they both seem to be egomaniacal in nature, and being an egomaniac
doesn't seem to lend itself to solving nearly impossibly hard problems.

Maybe after he has his exit, he'll put his money with his mouth is and start
working full time on a foundation like Bill Gates.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
Maybe he wants to grind up all the orphans in the world and tirn their blood
serum into an elixir of youth, thereby solving the problem of their existence

~~~
fanpuns
A Modest Proposal for the internet age

------
perseusprime11
"In a videoconference with the whole company Tuesday, Mr. Neumann, dressed
uncharacteristically in a gray suit and a white button-down shirt, told the
staff it has “played the private market game to perfection,” listeners said."

He is living in la-la land...

------
alephnan
> The two have committed giving $1 billion to charity over the next decade.

~~~
rchaud
Introducing "WeGive", controlled and operated by Neumann and family.

------
mrnobody_67
I want to learn more about the WeWork Summer Camps and what happened there....

~~~
anonweworker
I just re-posted my account of Summer Camp 2018 to the comments for this
article.

------
jonknee
Highlights:

> After the group landed in Israel and left the plane, the flight crew found a
> sizable chunk of the drug stuffed in a cereal box for the return flight,
> according to people familiar with the incident. The jet’s owner, upset and
> fearing repercussions of trans-border marijuana transport, recalled the
> plane, leaving Mr. Neumann to find his own way back to New York, these
> people said.

> Many former employees said they didn’t always know how seriously to take
> some of Mr. Neumann’s pronouncements. Early on, he would throw out seemingly
> random ideas, like adding a pool in the basement of the company’s
> headquarters or starting an airline.

> He told at least one person directly that his ambitions included becoming
> Israel’s prime minister. More recently, he said that if he ran for anything,
> it would be president of the world, according to another person who spoke
> with him.

> One day, he proposed, the company could “solve the problem of children
> without parents,” and from there go onto other causes such as eradicating
> world hunger.

> In a 2015 investment round, Mr. Neumann sold tens of millions of dollars of
> shares. Soon after, the company launched a buyback program offering to
> purchase employees’ shares too. But the company gave employees a different
> arrangement, giving them a payout per share worth substantially less than
> what Mr. Neumann was paid

> A few weeks after Mr. Neumann fired 7% of the staff in 2016, he somberly
> addressed the issue at an evening all-hands meeting at headquarters, telling
> attendees the move was tough but necessary to cut costs, and the company
> would be better because of it. Then employees carrying trays of plastic shot
> glasses filled with tequila came into the room, followed by toasts and
> drinks.

> Both Neumanns could be impulsive at times, former executives say. Ms.
> Neumann has ordered multiple employees fired after meeting them for just
> minutes, telling staff she didn’t like their energy.

~~~
leesec
You left out:

>He previously has instructed staff to fire 20% of employees a year, bemoaning
the number of “B” players hired amid rapid growth. Managers were unable to hit
the target even when they included attrition.

~~~
cududa
Also that when the tequila was served after the people got fired, Run DMC
popped out and started singing It’s Tricky

~~~
cpeterso
I downvoted you for making a non sequitur joke... but then I actually read the
article! (I've removed my downvote.)

~~~
mrosett
Truth that you wouldn't believe if someone made it up...

------
jonas21
Naming your company "We" sure leads to some grammatically awkward and
confusing sentences:

 _We now expects an IPO valuation far lower than the $47 billion price it got
in a January funding round._

 _We said the new structure was created in part to make it easier to expand
into new businesses beyond co-working, according to IPO filings._

 _He relishes trips in private jets. Last year, We bought one for more than
$60 million..._

~~~
52-6F-62
This is why in a lot of writing names of organizations and publications often
get contrasting style in the text. Name in italicized text is romanized, or
the opposite.

eg:

> _We_ now expects...

or

> We _now expects..._

Because... yes. It can produce some ridiculous results

~~~
perl4ever
First, click on your My Computer...

~~~
52-6F-62
You got me there. I'd put something like that in quotes!

I actually ran into that last week with a publication. Didn't have rights to a
certain font's italics. Too much deliberation with design and edit. Solution
ended up being single quotes. ex:

> click on ‘My Computer’

