
WeWork is set to become the No. 1 tenant of London office space - allthebest
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/a-u-s-startup-is-gobbling-up-the-old-city-of-london
======
ulfw
They have moved way past the 'we cater to startups' mantra and have gone to
catering to large corporations who want to get that 'startup feel'. I was
visiting HSBC IT folks in Hong Kong last month, the largest and most
established bank in town, maybe the most conservative one. Their digital teams
were working out of a rented floor at Wework in Causeway Bay, HK Island. With
a small cafe inside. Seemed very un-banking like and that's exactly why they
went there a year ago - [http://www.scmp.com/property/hong-kong-
china/article/2021679...](http://www.scmp.com/property/hong-kong-
china/article/2021679/hsbc-moves-300-staff-wework-hot-desking-site-causeway-
bay)

~~~
tnolet
Allianz (huge insurance company) just opened some kind of branded co-working /
barista bar / meetup space in the middle of one of Berlin’s “edgiest”
neigbourhoods. It’s frankly quite hilarious and a fantastic example of cargo
culting. The slogans on the wall, the lighting, the tables: it all feels like
a WeWork mashup with a Google office made by someone from some remote island
who just read about all this stuff. Google Allianz F200.

~~~
tannhaeuser
It's not just Allianz. I've worked with a bank founded in the 16th century who
rented office space next to their main building, plastered with agile
motivation propaganda posters of the worst kind [1]. Supposedly, they're doing
it to attract young developers, and to build up fast-moving teams so FinTech
startups don't get all the talent.

[1]: [https://www.startupvitamins.con/](https://www.startupvitamins.con/)

------
dasil003
I had no idea WeWork was growing so fast. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but there's
no surer sign of a new bubble than this kind of growth for a luxury supplier
to startups. For a new startup, it's crazy to pay WeWork's premium when your
runway is so limited and you need to hustle as hard as you can to get
traction. Once you get a little bigger, for the WeWork premium you can hire an
office manager with an interior design edge and get all the upside but
customized to your actual needs. I guess their golden goose would be big
corporate clients who want to reinvent their workplace but are too set in
their ways to drive it internally, but having raised almost $7B, over $5B this
year, I just don't see where the upside is for investors.

~~~
x0x0
WeWork is actually perfect for startups; they sell no commitment pay by the
month office space that comes with desks and internet. They're cheaper than
most sf office space and an order of magnitude easier to rent.

The sole drawback is they're an unmaintained dump and working in one is an
utterly miserable experience. I had the very very unfortunate experience of
working at 995 Market and these worthless idiots couldn't even get their
elevators to regularly work, and just plain didn't give a damn. Who doesn't
enjoy a nice 15 minute break while you wait for an elevator (both ways)? The
offices are tiny and LOUD. Some other idiot decided to make the floors
hardwood; a single person in heels walking down the long shared corridors goes
CLACK CLACK CLACK. The walls are transparent glass so you are distracted by
every bit of movement. There's no sound insulation so you get to listen to the
office 3 doors down discuss their thanksgiving plans. I really can't say
enough bad things about it.

But hey, there's lemon water in the kitchen! (In a leaky carafe that makes a
puddle on the counter every day. Naturally.)

~~~
hkmurakami
I also get the impression that they're lifted by these small teams in
transition periods. No one plans to stay in wework for long if they can help
it.

There's a reason why landlords like long term leases and I can't imagine
wework is immune to the pressures of a down market.

~~~
x0x0
Wework is definitely eating a bunch of risk. I imagine we'll get to see how
good they are at modeling it soon enough...

------
pat2man
While WeWork is a little expensive, the fact that you can get a decent office
without a multi year lease is amazing for small businesses. Its really hard to
plan that far out when you are growing.

------
gnclmorais
I’ve been in a WeWork co-working space in London and, from my experience,
don’t move there if you want to do deep work. It was quite noisy and mostly
geared towards sales-y people, with events at 3-4PM (way too early) for
“networking”.

------
OJFord
HN title has been modified incorrectly from the original: the City of London
is a strict and small subset of London.

~~~
dmurray
The title is correct: the article, and the previous article it refers to [0],
are about Wework's presence of 17 buildings all across London, not just in the
City.

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/wework-
be...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/wework-bets-london-
s-costly-offices-won-t-be-bitten-by-brexit)

~~~
OJFord
Then why are so many words dedicated to the City? It's ambiguous at best, but
I really don't think that HSBC, Deutsch Bank, and JPM each own 1.7% of all
London's office space, which is the leading comparison.

~~~
dmurray
It says 1.7 million square feet each, not percent.

------
mstaoru
I've been all three here in Shanghai: rented a desk, rented an office and
actually worked for Wework.

For a non-tech freelancer, it's a good place to be: comparably high-level
people, decent free coffee and beers. For a tech freelancer "community area"
tends to be extremely noisy, with annoying pop music playing loud enough to
distract, dogs barking, cleaning ladies "chatting" to each other (in China
chatting is usually a 90 dB+ affair). During lunch, everything turns into
eating surfaces as people here are accustomed to getting food delivered. Some
food is extremely smelly, which can be very distracting if you need to finish
something and didn't eat yet.

Offices are quieter, but they're really tiny, basic and dark, and very
expensive compared to other market offers, at least in China. Shanghai has
many managed offices, together with coffees, printers and set-up Wifi.

Speaking of Wifi, all Wework locations in China I've been to have awful
speeds, during workdays, it's sometimes a 30-50 KBps crawl, in evenings a bit
better. Of course, you need to bring your own VPN to access anything outside
China.

------
ianstormtaylor
What are HN's impressions of WeWork? I haven't rented one myself, but everyone
I talk to seems to say think that they're expensive, that the environment
creates a super distracting workplace, and that they only make sense for tiny
teams or freelancers who want to meet people.

~~~
christianklotz
The open plan spaces are very noisy, personally I wouldn't be able to get
anything done. If you can, get a separate unit and make sure to put a carpet
on the floor, e.g. DEKOWE that can be made to measure, to dampen the echo
cause by the glass walls and wooden floors.

~~~
ufo
Everyone in this comment thread seems to hate the glass walls. Why does WeWork
use them everywhere if they are so unliked?

~~~
hkon
It's probably because it looks better and they sell more of it that way.

------
nikon
WeWorks are great to hang out in. The offices themselves are tiny glass boxes
that grind you down over time. The building I was in was basically full of
suits (recruiters, intrapreneurs etc). Glad to have left after 9 months in
one!

They were also pushing for 6-9 month commitments from tenants.

------
exogeny
WW isn't just renting office space; they're selling a dream that YOU, yes YOU,
are the next Mark Zuckerberg. They're a byproduct of the extreme fetishization
of entrepreneurship that has happened over the past decade.

And the effect? Just about every WeWork I've ever been in is exactly the same:
full of wantrepreneurs with extreme delusions of grandeur. Only problem is
that the talent, work ethic, and product vision don't match. Walk through one
at 7:30, 8:00p, the same hours that you'd expect a hungry founder to be
grinding it out and it's dead empty. Maybe it's because the free cucumber
water is gone.

Or, to put it another, perhaps more callous way: WeWork is what happens when
everyone listens to Gary Vaynerchuk. And all the while WeWork trades at an
absurd multiple over just about every other realty holding company.

~~~
benjaminwootton
Quite a cynical world view.

Its awesome that more people are even dreaming of changing the world, starting
businesses and have a support infrastructure and culture to do it.

Would you rather we aspired to cube farms instead?

~~~
exogeny
I agree!

But that doesn't make it factually untrue that WeWork disingenuously leverages
those dreams to feed its growth. There's a reason why Simon Cowell was as
compelling as he was: he was the only one who was actually honest with people
when he told them that they were wasting their time pursuing their dreams of
stardom. Everyone I've ever met associated with WeWork, comparably speaking,
is Paula Abdul.

It's unsustainable - because a lot of the companies that are there, frankly,
are losers and will churn out quickly - and they need to constantly refill the
supply at the bottom of that pyramid. That supply is not infinite, and most
certainly not at the rate they're expanding.

And again, the ultimate salient point here is that they've got orders of
magnitude less property under management and yet they're trading at higher
multiples than just about every other realty holding company.

It's bubblicious, bro. All the feel-good bullshit about wanting to disrupt the
world doesn't change that.

------
_jn
Obligatory grammar/style comment:

What’s with the British English-style conjugation in the byline—I thought
Bloomberg was US-based?

(Also, City of London != London.)

~~~
ewi_
Bloomberg's second largest office is in London, with a very large news team on
site.

