Member-only story
Saving WeWork.
WeWork in case you’ve missed it has quickly become the poster child for everything that is wrong with capitalism, trying to recap everything that went wrong is a story probably best told by others ( can’t wait for the movie), but we can try and summarize for those out of the loop :
Like many I was introduced to this fascinating case by Scott Galloway : WeWTF🎥 Here’s an excellent short video overview if you prefer: https://youtu.be/Cb4CGn4a1Y0Also,also, this is pure Tuesday Morning Quarterbacking,we probably know very little of what happens behind closed doors and speculative solutions are just that...speculative.
- WeWork started as an ecofriendly coworking space in Brooklyn, became successful, was sold and later reincarnated with those proceeds as a
designey-chick-milenial-aspirational-community coworking space. - Investors liked the pitch, so it soon found itself awash in capital and valued in the billions, justified in part by the narrative of future profits and value added services… it grew like crazy and burned the capital like crazy to fuel this growth, fast forward a few years…
- The party stopped when WeWork tried to go public, thanks to a now infamous S1 Filing, it was realized that WeWork had no value added services, no present profit and no path to future profits , yet high obligations, whats more, the high valuation was at least 10x bigger than a very similar coworking company ( IWG ), there are of course the founders antics which didn't help.
- As of this writing the IPO is off, the founder has been partially removed, and there’s questions of how long WeWork will remain in business, with a high burn rate and sunk costs in the billions WeWork might be dying soon…
And here’s where we jump in, and just to be clear, WeWork seems to have at least 2 big problems, economic/culture/management ones, and then there’s product, I will be focusing on the product side of things, since that’s where I have more experience, for completion sake let me try to save the business side which does look like a mission impossible…
💣 Your mission if you decide to accept it is to turn profitable a real estate…
