Photo: Joe Darrow; Filippo Bacci; Michael Kovac/Getty Images; Getty Images/Getty Images In early January, employees of the We Company, formerly known as WeWork, gathered in Los Angeles for its annual summit. As with many of the company’s events, it was more tent revival than corporate off-site. The Red Hot Chili Peppers performed. Jaden Smith and Adam Rippon spoke. Diddy and Ashton Kutcher announced the winners of the annual Creator Awards.
Inside the company, however, employees and executives describe an environment that can be marked by the chaos, churn, and misbehavior that have come to characterize hypergrowth start-up life, not to mention questions about its business: WeWork lost $1.9 billion last year. But WeWork has already reshaped the commercial real-estate world, and it has its eyes on the rest of our lives.
The original space, Green Desk, was an instant hit, and the landlord wanted to expand it into his other Brooklyn properties. But McKelvey and Neumann decided to sell their share of the business and go off on their own. They opened the first WeWork in 2010 on the corner of Grand and Lafayette Streets. It had exposed brick and exposed wiring, which McKelvey installed himself, and was modeled less on a traditional office than a boutique hotel.
But disrupting the deeply entrenched world of commercial real estate required capital, and Neumann excelled at pitching his company to investors. Neumann has raised more than $12 billion in venture-capital funding, and early investors talk as much about buying into his energy and ambition as they did WeWork’s bottom line. “WeWork Mars is in our pipeline,” Neumann declared in 2015. Early on, Neumann told friends he was building a $100 billion business.
In 2017, the event was moved to a park outside London; employees were flown in from around the world. One told me that he and his colleagues would simply walk up to the bar and ask for two bottles of wine each. “They would give you two bottles of rosé, and we’d drink them like Edward Forty-Fucking-Hands” — it’s a drinking game — “while we’re watching Florence + the Machine,” he said.
The company’s valuation has also been based on the notion that it is, if not quite a tech company, at least a technologically forward-thinking one. Even WeWork’s rivals admit that its vertically integrated system for opening spaces up has helped it expand at a remarkable speed while keeping its increasing costs in check, relatively speaking.
WeWork has also accused several of its co-working competitors of trademark infringement, including UrWork, WE Labs, and Hi Work. In a 2017 lawsuit against UrWork, the company said it did not claim “exclusive rights to the ordinary word ‘Work,’ ” but objected to “the combination of a two-letter pronoun followed immediately by the word ‘Work.
Building community is what WeWork has always promised, and its pitch to large corporations is not just hip design and flexible leasing terms but what WeWork calls its “WeOS,” referring to its expertise in helping companies optimize both space and overall culture. Employees and executives say much of the culture stems from Neumann, whose rule by fiat could be frustrating. Last summer, he announced at the end of a companywide meeting that WeWork employees would no longer be permitted to expense meals that included meat. Several senior members of the company had no idea the announcement was coming or what it even meant.
Rebekah has held various titles at the company; she is currently the chief impact officer and the head of WeGrow, a school on the third floor of WeWork’s Chelsea headquarters, opened in 2017 as a “conscious, entrepreneurial school committed to unleashing every child’s superpowers.” When I met Neumann in his office, a framed poster on the floor showed what looked to be terraformed cities with the year 2048 written in large type. “I should hide that,” Neumann said, smiling. He couldn’t talk about it right now, but the one thing he could say was that, whatever it was, it was actually going to happen by 2028.
Lots of blow and Barnums sucker every minute bout explains it.
Boggles the mind. Good at snookering....
When is the 30 minute comedy series coming out on netflix based on this
There are hundreds of co-working companies around the world, but what had distinguished WeWork was Adam Neumann’s insistence that his was something bigger
reeveswiedeman
reeveswiedeman Burning money...it´s not too far to burst.
reeveswiedeman Kabbalah ! That’s what I heard anyway !⚫️🎎🖍
reeveswiedeman Burning money and lying...
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