
Runaway Story or Meltdown in Motion? The Unraveling of the WeWork IPO - kgwgk
http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2019/09/runaway-story-or-meltdown-in-motion.html?m=1
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JohnJamesRambo
>It is worth noting that the WeWork business model has been tried in real
estate before, with calamitous results. As Sam Zell, a billionaire with deep
roots in real estate, noted on CNBC, on September 4, 2019, not only did he
lose money investing in a business model like this one in 1956, but every
company in the office space subletting space that existed then went out of
business.

I love reading things like this that always drive the point home that very
little to nothing is new under the sun. The only new things are new dumb money
investors that haven’t seen it before.

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ollerac
You're promoting a logical fallacy that's especially dangerous to people with
entrepreneurial drive. You're assuming that things done once will always be
done that way — that some things are always destined to have the same outcome
no matter the context or time they arise in — and that the world, at its base,
is distinctly resistant to change.

This is strongly related to the the Hindsight bias [1], which "refers to the
common tendency for people to perceive events that have already occurred as
having been more predictable than they actually were before the events took
place."

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias)

~~~
magna7
A perfect example of this is Facebook. There were several social media
platforms before Facebook, but they succeeded where others didn't because of a
few distinctive features. They also benefited from improved internet
infrastructure, and increased user adoption of the internet. So it was really
just a matter of right place, right time.

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cityzen
And a willingness to sell out users at all costs...

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kmlx
how much money you are paying facebook for using their services?

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cityzen
i don’t use Facebook

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paggle
WeWork is a successful company worth a lot of money. Is it worth $47b? Likely
not. But all except the last investors are likely to do well, and deservedly
so.

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fencepost
The question really comes down to "is it a successful _company_ or is it a
successful _illusion_ of a successful company?"

~~~
paggle
It provides a valuable service. It gives property owners a hands off way of
renting out their space to short term tenants. That’s going to make money.

~~~
fencepost
Whether it provides a valuable service is orthogonal to whether it's
successful. There have been options to sublet to sort term tenants for a long
time, but We seems to have a lot of other baggage.

