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by throwoutway·3y ago·view on hn ↗
The story of WeWork is fascinating and sad to watch (for the employees). Adam got his but his employees didn't.

The financial numbers are pretty sad too.

- Market cap below $500 million.

- Lost $700 million in 6 months this year

- Lost $2.3 billion in 2022

- Roughly 3 billion in debt

- Total liquidity of only $680 million (only 1/3 is cash).

5 comments
What is crazy is that he was able to raise 350 millions from a16z for what is basically a simple property management company. After all the sh*t he did. And then you go to a16z with an idea, and they reject it because it is not innovative enough. Then VCs wonder why 80% of their investments fail to produce the expected money on average.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/16/how-a16zs-investment-into-...

Reminds me of Matt Levine's fantastic Moviepass article

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-07/moviep...

archived as https://archive.is/tX1c5
Don’t forget that the VCs backed him again on a somehow even shadier, blatantly dystopian startup idea with a metric ton of money again [1].

1. https://fortune.com/2023/07/11/adam-neumann-new-company-flow...

What in the hells?! This is absurd. How does someone that steers their company into the gutter get financed to the tune of $350M again?
Because it's who you know, rather than what you know, that drives the VC ecosystem for the most part.

They know that one day Adam Neumann is gonna sit on the other side of the table, and whoever is clearing the financing right now will take his turn in proposing his AI-crypto-{NEW TREND HERE} venture and get the money.

He's a made man, as the Mafia used to say. Once you're in the circle you can keep failing upwards.
One hopes the last 10 years have proven beyond any doubt that personal wealth & success are in no way correlated with skills or value to society.
One more number to put these in perspective:

- Adam Neumann's exit package $445 million

I had several WeWork employees in my friend groups in SF

they were gullible as hell and were educated people that couldn't understand a single word of Wall Street Journal and the investment banking community's dunking and pile-ons about WeWork

they couldn't understand the tech community's dunking and pile-ons about WeWork

everyone was saying "why are investors buying shares of this company at prices as if its a tech company"

employees were like "my first tech company omg guys I love shares and family"

just collect a paycheck, its fine, but the hopium was flat out dumb. its one thing to be at a startup that never tells you its valuation or gives you a clear answer about the strike price of your options in a way for you to model an outcome, its another thing for the financials to be presented clear as day and put blinders on.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Still $25B more in green than Uber!