More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Adam considered buying IWG, his longtime rival, and nearly paid $1.3 billion for BGIS, one of the largest building operation companies in the world.
The company was becoming so large, he argued, that landlords would have to play ball if money got tight—the “too big to fail” argument.
so WeWork could make the case that it was going public at a moment of strength, not desperation.
When the deal terms were finalized, some WeWork executives thought it would be prudent to publicize the lower figure, or perhaps a “blended valuation” between the two. The $47 billion number put a target on WeWork’s back, and even some of the company’s early supporters were skeptical.
After all the back-and-forth, employees working on Wingspan began to worry that the energy being directed toward branding was a distraction. Some of them started to wonder if perhaps distraction was the point.
Jamie Dimon was planning to press Adam on the governance issues before the S-1 was finalized. “He’s got to be firm,” Artie said of the need for Dimon to push Neumann.
“Our mission is to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive.”
Google was motivated to nudge companies toward buying their way out of difficult news cycles by burying bad press with paid ads. But the Google reps said the reaction to Wingspan had been so overwhelmingly critical that even SoftBank’s largesse couldn’t get WeWork out of this hole.
Wingspan was a flop.
Many people had never even heard of the company.
WeWork feel more like a family business than a public company.
The Dow dropped eight hundred points on the day Wingspan was released—its worst trading day of the year—on certain signals that the global economy was on shaky footing, and WeWork’s arbitrage model suddenly looked just as risky as everyone suspected it to be.
Jeff Bezos had instituted a culture of succinct and thoughtful memo writing as a way of forcing his company to engage with ideas rather than personalities.
ALWAYS HALF FULL,
the past decade, not a single one had been a mistake? The supposedly clean record made WeWork seem undisciplined.
“Adam was just off his game,” an executive who sat in on several of the meetings said. He was meandering, dragging meetings on much longer than they needed to go and leaving no time for questions. He came off as desperate.
Adam told the crowd that plenty of investors were still excited about WeWork, including Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom. Adam had recently met with Yuan to talk about what the conference room of the future would look like, and the companies were in talks about Zoom investing in WeWork’s IPO in exchange for WeWork pushing Zoom’s videoconferencing service on its members. As Adam pitched it to Yuan: if you become WeWork’s provider, you become the world’s.
Now, the company’s precarious position had turned Adam into WeWork’s greatest liability.
It was October, and without new funding, WeWork would run out of money before Thanksgiving.
it was a few weeks from running out of money and couldn’t afford to fund severance payments.
The company was now a humble landlord.
“These people invested, they knew the terms, they knew about the governance issues, and they told this guy, ‘Be you, but be ten times you.’ What did they expect?”
SoftBank was marking down its investment to a new low—$2.9 billion, or just 6 percent of its valuation a year earlier.
WeWork would likely be a public company, having run out of private money sometime in 2017 and listed its shares at a valuation somewhere in the teens.
Its growth would have slowed, and the buildings that were reaching maturity would have been kicking off significant revenue.
