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Other companies had risen, and in many cases fallen, by offering more or less the same service, which amounted to a straightforward arbitrage: lease long, rent short, and collect the margin.
it was a tech start-up, a social network, a “community company,” an organization bent on reshaping society.
“Our trajectory looks like Amazon’s,” Neumann told me, with a Magic 8 Ball resting behind him on his desk. “Except our market is larger and our growth is faster.”
WeWork would be “a capitalist kibbutz,” he said. “On the one hand, community. On the other hand, you eat what you kill.”
Adam mentioned his old idea from Baruch about building more communal living situations, and the pair spent a few months looking for a residential building to convert.
Miguel posted ads on Craigslist and started giving tours to interested tenants with nothing more than masking tape on the floor to mark where the offices would be.
What people seemed most attracted to was the flexibility of a month-to-month lease and the feeling of camaraderie.
Green Desk became a friendlier place.
living in the town that birthed Nike and seeing up close how powerful branding could be.
they told Schreiber that WeWork, which didn’t have a single location, was worth $45 million. Without asking questions or pushing back, Schreiber agreed to commit $15 million to fund the idea in exchange for a third of a company that did not yet exist. *
“The future is community.”
Adam’s focus on growth at the expense of profitability fit with an emerging business theory that it was best to acquire customers by any means necessary and then figure out how to make money later.
Space Man would handle billing, while Space Station would help community managers keep track of their locations—everything from reports about broken toilets to notes about what kind of dessert each member liked so that community managers could hand out personalized gifts.
Dimon toured a WeWork location with Neumann, he tore up a design for a new JPMorgan space in Manhattan and agreed to pay WeWork $600,000 to design a new one.
“There are only two things that matter in a company,” he told one group of employees. “Sales, and everything else.”
organizations, both of which worked to prevent tenants from being evicted from their homes in San Francisco.
“You’ve got three options: fast, right, or cheap,” Kramer said. “WeWork always picked fast and cheap.”
“I’ll just leave you with this thought,” Dunlevie said. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
WeWork’s competitive advantage, it seemed, was knowing how to put on a good show.
“Manage the Nickel.”
were getting bamboozled into forgiving the low pay and crummy benefits because the job let them drink with their friends.
The dual disclosures—layoffs on one end, curtailed revenue on the other
lapses in judgment “is the assumption that if we can just raise ‘one more round’ everything will be fine.”
Employees responsible for managing projections in markets around the world were asked to return to their models for the next five years and crank them up. “It just kept getting more and more ludicrous,”
“There was literally not enough real estate in these cities to reach these numbers,”
“In a fight, who wins?” Masa asked. “The smart guy or the crazy guy?”
In New York, a WeWork employee started showing up at locations operated by Knotel, another competitor, claiming to be the CEO of a start-up urgently seeking office space. He then took a tour and surreptitiously jotted down the names of each tenant, in order to send them all a discount for switching to WeWork.
after Silber leased a building in Brooklyn that WeWork also wanted, Adam called the landlord to say that he intended to put Bond Collective out of business.
WeWork hired a steel drum band to play outside a new TOG location, offering the same lavish discounts. Adam bragged to an investor that his efforts had slashed his rivals’ occupancy rate.
“And I can obliterate any coworking company that I want.”
The deals also made it hard for competitors to keep up.
WeWork began offering commercial real estate brokers a shocking commission: 100 percent of the first year’s rent paid by new tenants.
WeWork’s tech team had grown from half a dozen people in 2013 to more than two hundred, but the first task facing Rajaraman remained fixing Space Station and Space Man.
the experience of being inside WeWork’s labyrinth of glass walls: “It feels like you’re in a future jail.”
determine how many people were using them during the day. The result: not many, so make them smaller.
streamline the process by which it opened new locations, and a new team—real estate and development technology, or REDTech for short—was tasked with finding ways to get control of the process.
By the end of 2017, services made up just 5 percent of WeWork’s revenue.
The only truly meaningful innovation would have been to invent a human-shrinking machine, allowing the company to squeeze more rent-paying customers into tighter and tighter spaces.
proposed offering an affordable corporate day care for employees and members:
came up with the title CWeO for employees with oversight of individual regions.
The DeCiccos had met with Adam only occasionally since his initial investment in their company, Kitu Life,
The snickering resulted from the fact that the building was owned by Adam. He had purchased it for $70 million with Elie Tahari, a fashion designer he knew from the Kabbalah Centre, before leasing the space to WeWork. Adam had not publicized his stake in the building, which was ethically dubious. He was collecting rent from his own company.
Rocky Kerns led the company in a series of chants:
He cited a study showing that 87 percent of employees at big companies didn’t feel engaged and half were looking for new jobs.
“Work hard and in silence, then let success make the fucking noise.”
Miguel set about creating what he and others began referring to as CultureOS—a WeOS component by which WeWork would help
“Operationalize Love.”
it was not a surprise to any woman at WeWork that attending Summer Camp or Summit or any of the company’s parties often put female employees in uncomfortable positions.
At one point, Adam threw out the idea of buying Cushman & Wakefield, the $4 billion commercial real estate giant.
With Masa’s billions to back it up, WeWork would become the We Company.
