[freehunter]

You only hear it on businesses that have substantial future cashflow obligations, which most startups don't. That's levied against anything with capital. I've heard it used against scooter and bike rental companies, I've heard it used any time a company has its own datacenter instead of AWS, etc.

Of course Uber and Basecamp and Reddit and Dropbox and other unicorns don't have this kind of criticism, because they don't have the same amount of heavy plant capital that WeWork has.

Look at any thread about a company building/buying a datacenter and you'll see the same argument. It's a bad idea because if they shrink in the future they're stuck with capital they can't pay for and now they go out of business. Only in this case, they can't shrink any more because they're already massively unprofitable, PLUS they have ungodly amounts of debt obligations.

[shimms]

Fair call, and good distinction to draw.